oceans development k - endi 14

8/10/2019 Oceans Development K - EnDI 14

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Ocean Development Kritik

1NC ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Development Link ................................................................................................................... 8Leadership/Hegemony Link .................................................................................................. 11

Wind Links ............................................................................................................................ 15

Climate Change Links ........................................................................................................... 20

Alternative - Ext .................................................................................................................... 27

2NC – K Prior – Aff Suspect ................................................................................................. 31

2NC – Turns Case (Energy/Climate)..................................................................................... 34

2NC Impact – Structural Violence ........................................................................................ 36

2NC Impact – Energy Technocracy ...................................................................................... 40

AT: Climate O/W .................................................................................................................. 43

AT: Renewables Better than FF ............................................................................................ 45

AT: Perm ............................................................................................................................... 47

AT: Enviro-Pragmatism ........................................................................................................ 51

AT: Prioritize Scientific Method ........................................................................................... 54



1NC

The discourse of ocean development requires a system of ecological and

economic destruction. The aff‘s framing of ocean policy is unsustainable.

Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‗6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.3-6

Respected ecological philosopher Andrew Dobson provides a helpful discussion of theaccompanying asymmetry to this expansion when he considers how globalization has changedcitizenship. Dobson uses Castells for context: In a global approach, there has been, over the pastthree decades, increasing inequality and polarization in the di stribution of wealth .... The poorest20 percent of the world's people have seen their share of global income decline from 2.3 percentto I .4 percent .... Meanwhile, the share of the richest 20 percent has risen from 70 percent to 85 percent." (Castells in Dobson 2003, I 9) Thus, globalization is not an even process of economicexpansion and opportunity where everyone is connected and everyone becon1es an equal part of awondrous network of global invisible hands. Instead, while there are some opportunities for poorcountries and their civic groups, globalization moves mostly in one direction. Global activistVandana Shiva elaborates that "Through its global reach, the North exists in the South, but theSouth exists only within itself, since it has no global reach" (Shiva in Dobson I 7). T his does notmean that globalization is inherently "bad" and localization "good"; it means that historically,globalization has occurred to the privilege of some and at the expense of others. Nonsustainabletrends are embedded in inequitable power relationships; thus, global material equity is necessary for curbing maldistribution and exploitation of resources. Dobson rejects the morecosmopolitan belief that there is a reciprocal obligation of everyone to one another in favor of adistributional responsibility such as from North to South based on the materials produced andreproduced through asymmetrical globalization. This is a more sophisticated iteration of thematerial equity included in the Borgese Test described below. I take Dobson's (and Shiva' s) pointthat globalization enables this connectivity through and within ecological spaces and budgets, andthat sustainability requires benefits to be redistributed throughout transnational communities(Dobson 2003). It is worthwhile to reflect on the question "How much has changed for themajority of poor countries in the last fifty years, and in particular the last twenty years, in the faceof Western 'help'?" and then to simultaneously ask, "What is the direction of ecology in this samelast 50 years?" Minus a few exceptions, the promise and dream of "development" 2 for the globalSouth has actually "produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment,untold exploitation and oppression" (Escobar I994, 4) at the same time ecology has seen"structural" decline-that is, a decline of the frame and foundation of ocean ecology. Structure isimportant economically and socially as well and implies the same meaning of the larger frameand construction of a system where constituent agents and decisions are made, but which do not

fundamentally alter the larger design. As a political scientist, I cannot count this situation as anaccident, but instead a purposeful result that can come about only through disproportionate and

asymmetrical structural arrangements of power-but from where? While localities cannot escapesome responsibility, poor localities have unquestionably been marginalized, and their ability tochange their situation has been fraught with obstructions that originate from the colonial period.Much of this power has cone from development discourses and projects which embody theideals of what progress should be (through modernity), and this has then framed the reality that poor countries find themselves in when needing stabilization loans or making tradingarrangements (Escobar I 995). This follows the various ghosts of modernity, now supported, re-created, and defended most by the ideology of " neoliberalism." Liberalism is the central Western



political theory, ideology, and political economy preferring a least restricted market, pluralisticcompeting political groups such as NGOs, various strong civil freedoms for individual citizens (e.g., of speech, religion, etc.), and a neutral State which affords procedural equity (procedures ofthe state treat everyone the same, e.g., in a courtroom) to all citizens and most agendas. Neoliberalism is a reformed liberalism that places much more focus on the market aspect ofliberalism and much less focus on civil liberties. Neoliberal policies focus on privatizing formerly

public enterprises and industry; lowering social expenditures of the state (particularly those whichtend to redistribute wealth); reducing or eliminating tariffs toward other countries; and creating atax and physical infrastructure that favors industrial production and trickles down to lower classesto create economic growth and employment and reduce poverty (Fri edman I 962). Neoliberal policies are not concerned with creating a social safety net, leaving this up to a robust economicgrowth, nor do they like regulatory environmental policies, which they prefer to leave up to the pricing of goods. This ideology is exported through trade and loan arrangements to othercountries from the Western power elite, such as World Bank, the OECD, or individually throughthe United States, Britain, and some other European countries that have majority voting power inthe World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Neoliberalism changed its focusfrom simple capital accumulation models to include the development of institutions. Evans(2004) sees these institutions imposed, such as through international finance institutions, which

are AngloAmerican generated models. These institutional designs are all the same; he calls them"institutional monocropping," where the "best response to bad governance is less governance" (35). This arrangement is a fundamental problem with neo liberalism because it creates fewerlimits on exploitation of people and natural resources, and places the profit motive of firms in a privileged position without any sense of citizenship mentioned above. In contrast, Evans proposes, along with scholars Dani Roderick and Amartya Sen, that the building of institutionsshould center around more direct and participatory deliberative democratic institutions whereminority voices have more influence to stem exploitation. Ironically, the Anglo-American set ofinstitutions and countries never strictly employed neoliberalism themselves. It is well known thatstate involvement and guarantees (to differing degrees) of some civil rights and social welfarehave been key elements in the building of stable industrialized affluent countries (H ettne, Inotai,and Sunkel 2001). The United States and the European Union (EU) consistently use state

subsidies and protections, such as for agriculture-the primary area in which industrializingcountries have a competitive advantage (Kutting 2004). For ocean politics, the Northern subsidiesof fishing fleets are a source of overfishing and a prime example of a non-neoliberal policy,which is now being negotiated in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, Anglo-American countries demand lightning-fast change toward free markets and liberal democracy,without some level of democratic guarantees and social welfare. Evidence indicates that this canand has led to instability, violence, and ethnic genocide because these rapid changes createunequal market and political controls among factious rival groups (Chua 2003). This is notoccurring only at the national level. The Third World cannot compete against Northern subsidies.This problem was symbolized by a South Korean farmer, Lee Kyoung Hae, who committedsuicide outside the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, Mex ico, as a protest to WTO rules that allowagricultural protections from the free market (Vidal 2003). Protesters at this n1eeting numbered

over ten thousand and hailed from more than thirty countries; they presented some recurrentdemands, which " included protection from big business, abandonment of genetically modifiedcrops in developing states, and no privatization of water, forests and land" (Vidal 2003). Now, theworld economy is growing at about 5 percent per year-the fastest in almost thirry years(International Monetary Fund 2004). This global economy is based on flows of energy, material,and capital. This flow is called throughput, and is used to sustain (and impoverish) groups withinthe population greater than six billion people. These energy flows start and end within naturalsystems. More throughput means more withdrawals and additions from and into natural systems.Therefore, the basis for connecting economic globalization to ecological decline is that current



globalization expands the scale and intensity of throughput; this kind of growth is viewed asessential to progress and development within neoliberalism. The inherent disconnect betweenresource decline and global economic expansion is hidden structurally by distancing, or"distanciation" (Kutting 2004). Capitalism in general, but in particular petroleum-basedcapitalism, creates expedited pathways for export and trade that become separated, or distanced,from their local meaning so that "Time-space separation disconnects social activity from its

particular social context" (Kutting 2004, 33). This is related to what ecological economists havedescribed in terms of ecological burdens remaining outside the pricing system as externalitieswhich ecology and third parties eventually pay. Current globalization allows affluent populationsto shift environmental costs through a global economy, and these populations are structurally permitted to live off of the carrying capacity of others (Kutting 2004; Muradian andMartinezAlier 200Ia, 200Ib; Martinez-Alier 1995; Bunker 1985). When one fishery is depleted,the world economy can move on to the next fishery, structurally obscuring the problem becauseconsumers are not dependent on local ecological budgets. Changes do not affect affluentconsumers because these customers are not forced to care about the first depleted fishery, and inthis way human-ocean relations have fundamentally changed with economic globalization.

Development discourse defines the range of ocean problems and solutions.

Displacing development is a pre-requisite to policies not defined byexploitation.

Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‗1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 32-35

Representations of ocean-space: discourse The third pillar of the territorial political economy perspective is representation, the process by which social meaning (including the social meaningof spaces) is transmitted among individuals through literary creations, visual images, and othermedia. The history that follows makes frequent reference to representations in art, law,cartography, literature, public policy, and advertising. Each of these media is generated in a socialcontext and serves as a means by which ideas are communicated and diffused throughout thegeneral public, inscribed into the images and assumptions that guide the everyday thoughts and

behaviors of individuals. The significance of representation lies in its role in the perpetuation andcontestation of discourses, "frameworks ... [that] constitute the limits within which ideas and practices are considered to be natural; that is, [that] set the bounds on what questions areconsidered relevant or even intelligent" (Barnes and Duncan 1992: 8). Mobilized by policymakers, discourses are used to establish "common-sense" parameters for problems and solutions(Roe 1994). ;: While discourses are utilized by policy makers, their reach is deeper than policy-making elites, and their truth-claims are more resilient than that of elite-generated ideologies.Unlike an ideology, a discourse does not misrepresent the power relations underlying materialreality. Rather, discourses enable, reproduce, and, perhaps most importantly, diffuse theserelations throughout society. By reproducing the hegemonic discourse - something thatindividuals do unwittingly as they act, speak, and think within existing social conventions,definitions, and categories - individuals reproduce their own domination. Conversely, the

conscious creation of alternative discourses can play a central role in the imagination, promotion,and implementation of strategies for social change (Foucault 1977; Marcuse 1969). > Because thesea so often is referred to in literary and artistic creations, there is a substantial literature onmarine representation and its meaning within broader social discourse (see, for instance, Connery1996). Interpretations of modernity's obsession with the sea have ranged from its being theembodiment of the desire of "Modern Man" to return to the womb, to His desire to deny Hiscorporeality, to His search for new material conquests. To look at these (and other) marinerepresentations within their social contexts, this book focuses on the emergence of marine



representations within three discourses: development, geopolitics, and law. The discourse of

development is built around an absolute definition of progress, an assumption that the moredeveloped can lead the less developed along this path to progress, and the belief that this progresscan be achieved by applying scientific rationality to development "problems" (Sachs 1992; Watts1993). The development discourse is rooted in Enlightenment concepts of science and reason:The world is knowable and individuals can shape it to serve themselves if only they utilize

science to find the proper formula. It follows that both society and space are amenable todevelopment. Space is perceived as an abstract field in which individuals can embed andredistribute social relations and structures in an attempt to better their lives. By establishing a grid(graphically expressed in the system of latitude and longitude lines), the location of every spacein relation to every other space is made generalizable, a key prerequisite for scientific inquiry andthe formation of scientific laws. An abstract element susceptible to manipulation (or, to useSack's terminology, "emptying" and "filling"), space is represented as a canvas on which plannersand engineers may test and apply their insights and work toward human progress (Harvey 1989;Lefebvre 1991; Smith 1990). < The modern construction of ocean-space is in some senses theantithesis of this land-space territorial construction. The sea largely has been constructed as a"non-territory," an untamable space that resists "filling" or "development." And yet, thisconstruction of oceanspace as a "non-territory" or "other" in which rational planning cannot

prevail also lies within the development discourse of scientific rationality and space-oriented planning. This discursive construction is possible only as a counterpoint to the paradigmaticmodern construction of land-space as amenable to rational planning, and, as Said (1993) notes,antithetical counterpoints play a crucial role in producing discourses. A second discoursefrequently informing (and being reproduced by) the construction of ocean-space is the discourseof geopolitics, by which "intellectuals of statecraft 'spatialize' international politics in such a wayas to present it as a 'world' characterized by particular places, peoples, and dramas" (6 Tuathailand Agnew 1992: 192; see also 6 Tuathail 1996~n the modern era's geopolitical discourse, as inthe era's development discourse, ocean-space typically is represented as a "special" space thatlacks the paradigmatic attributes of "regular" space. For the development discourse, the keyspatial unit is the manageable block of land that can be "filled" and "developed," and the oceantherefore is unique and an "other" because it is "undevelopable.( For the geopolitical discourse,

the key unit is the territorially defined state that interacts with the world's other states. As spaceoutside state territory, the ocean is constructed within the geopolitical discourse as an empty"force-field" within which and across which states exercise their relative power over theircompetitors. This geopolitical counterpoint, like that of the development discourse, lies firmlywithin dominant ways of thinking: It reproduces the representation of space as a landscape of(developable and governable) terrestrial nation-states separated by an (undevelopable andanarchic) marine void. A third discourse referred to here is that of law. Legal discourse theoristschallenge the accepted perception of law as an autonomous set of rules and reasoning systemslying outside the structures and power relations of social life: Legal critics ... insist that law ... isnot only deeply embedded in the messy and politicized contingencies of social life but [is]actually constitutive of social and political relations. (Blomley 1994: 7- 8) Like the otherdiscourses discussed here, the legal discourse does more than operationalize and legitimize social

relations. When one appeals to the legal discourse, one represents relations in a particular mannerthat serves to "naturalize" material reality as well as the autonomy of a seemingly distinct sphereof legal reasoning. Critical legal geographers demonstrate how this scripting of social relationswithin a legal discourse serves to define places, their hierarchical order, and the scale and boundaries of social organization. The legal discourse historically has served both to reflect andconstruct social conceptions of space. Ideas about property and the relative mobility of privatelyheld goods within the realm of one sovereign and among the realms of multiple sovereigns are atthe foundation of legal thinking.qhe legal discourse plays a crucial role in reproducing the ideal ofmutually exclusive sovereign nation-state territories that, taken as a whole and mapped next to



each other serially across the surface of the earth, represent the rule of law and the space ofsociety. As with the other discourses, the legal discourse implies that the sea is a "lawless,"antithetical "other" lying outside the rational organization of the world, an external space to befeared, used, crossed, or conquered, but not a space of society.

Criticizing ocean development discourse reframes ocean policy towards

sustainability and environmental justice.

Deborah KENNEDY PhD Philosophy & Research Associate Curtin University SustainabilityPolicy Institute ‗7 Ocean Views: An investigation into human-ocean relations (Dissertation) p. 4-6

In this dissertation I chart several meanings attributed to oceans in modern Western societies thatare highly influential in shaping human-ocean relations and highlight ethical and political issuesto which we should respond. In so doing, the examination of conceptions of oceans I carry outthroughout this dissertation does not provide a complete narrative of the historical developmentof meanings attributed to oceans in Western societies. Rather, this dissertation plots a particularcourse through the great, though insufficiently explored, expanses of Western conceptions of

oceans. My approach examines meanings attributed to oceans that are anchored in the Westerndiscourses of law, science and aesthetics.5 I seek out these three discourses of law, aesthetics andscience because they are productive dimensions for illuminating human-ocean relations inWestern societies. Moreover, as these three discourses are complex, I deal with only a fraction oftheir possible scope. But to limit is sometimes to reveal and thus I hope the limited scope of myengagement has resulted in a purposive analysis of the way certain Western discourses have produced particular norms that influence the way the Western subject relates to the oceans. Isuggest that the contemporary discourses of oceanic lives I am concerned with have beentotalising, leaving little room for diversity. They have also been colonising, leaving little roomfor non-human flourishing. I argue that totalising and colonising practices in relation to oceansneed to be resisted in order to facilitate just existences for oceans. My focus on the facilitation of just existences for oceans will beelaborated upon further in this dissertation. But to briefly

indicate here how just existences for oceans may be facilitated, I argue for inclusive knowledge production and decision-making processes in which there is a capacity for a diversity of views toinfluence outcomes. Part of my task in valuing and vouching for just ocean existences in thisway — for humans and non-humans — leads me to argue in this dissertation that some conceptionsof oceans are better than others. I concur with Haraway when she writes: We exist in a sea of powerful stories: They are the condition of finite rationality and personal and collective lifehistories. There is no way out of stories; but no matter what the One-Eyed Father says, there aremany possible structures, not to mention contents, of narration. Changing the stories, in bothmaterial and semiotic senses, is a modest intervention worth making. (1997, 45) Accordingly, mythesis is that particular conceptions of oceans developed and perpetuated in the Westerndiscourses of law, aesthetics and science are highly influential in structuring contemporaryhuman-ocean relations. Moreover, the conceptions that I discuss unnecessarily constrain

possibilities for imagining and understanding human-ocean relations in Western societies.Consequently, just ocean existences are being hindered for identifiable reasons. Improving the prospects of just ocean existences can be achieved through the use of politically generatedknowledges about oceans to shift policy towards a set of social-environmental goals that are notwidely imagined by the Western mind. As will become clear in the course of my discussion, thescope of my thesis does not provide for sustained engagement with specific marine environmentaldisputes or policy initiatives. My concern is with the discourses that frame debates andpolicymaking more generally, and then with a model in which specific disputes and policymaking activities can take place. In arguing my thesis, I take on board and travel with a



number of philosophical, social and political theories. Principally, the insights of feminist andecological feminist thinkers into forms of oppression and social and environmental justice havestirred the analysis I carry out. The conceptual analysis and theoretical insights of avariety ofthinkers across a range of disciplines assist me to develop a critique targeted toward the socialand cultural dimensions of human exploitation and degradation of oceans. I also go beyondcritique to explore ways of acknowledging non-human agency that work toward addressing the

abuse. It is important to add that in going beyond critique I advocate for a view in which policydebates and outcomes are driven, at least in part, with forms of political epistemology that de-centres the experts — scientists in particular. Political epistemology is a term I use to conceptualisedemocratic ―reciprocal knowledge making‖ (Fawcett 2000, 136). I also advocate for ocean policy that centres both the non-human realm (which is often backgrounded) and our activeconstruction of reality (which is often overlooked). A theme in my interventions in this

dissertation is to advocate for understandings of oceans that acknowledge ―both our activeconstruction of reality and nature‘s role in these negotiations‖ (Cheney 1994, 175). Politicalepistemology that is inclusive of a diversity of perspectives and roles — human and non-human — and takes seriously the possibilities of a democratic process is, for me, the basis of ethical

politics. My concern with democratic political epistemology is discussed in detail in my finalChapter. However, the central themes in my dissertation of democratic process and ethical

politics bear further elaboration prior to introducing the contents of each chapter. The following preamble establishes the background against which much of my discussion of the Westerndiscourses of law, aesthetics and science can be read. That is to say, much of what is consideredthe ‗reality‘ of oceans through these discourses is a social construction wherein rarely, if ever, dothese discourses take seriously the possibility that oceans have agency.



Development Link

Ocean development discourse empowers imperialist politics and resource

exploitation. Rationalizing ocean extraction increases hierarchical

concentration of power in the global North.


Critical Theory: Deconstructing the World and Putting it Back Together Again? Critical theory ismore interested in deconstructing meamng, power, and connections than it is in building them;nonetheless, I describe here how critical theory might be used to understand global phenontena aswell as some thoughts about global "nature" from a critical theory perspective. While "criticaltheory" has been understood by the so-called Frankfurt School of German Western Marxism.through the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and Lukacs, I refer tocritical theory more as a systematic critique of modernity. Escobar (2003) clarifies: I understand

modernity as a particular form of social organisation that emerged with the Conquest of Americaand that crystallised initially in Northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century. Socially,modernity is characterized by institutions such as the nation-state and the bureaucratisation ofdaily life based on expert knowledge; culturally, by orientations such as the belief in continual progress, the rationalisation of culture, and the principles of individuation and universalisation;and eco nomically, by its links to various forms of capitalism, including state socialism as a formof modernity. ( I 58) Modernity has been the foundation for "development" politics from the beginning of the first wave of globalization. Escobar sees development and modernity as spatial-cultural projects that require continuous conquest of territories, people, and ecology to sustain it.Further, this project is now carried through the modern global capitalist economy, led by animperial United States, "which seems more inhumane than ever," bent on exploitation particularlyof the Third World (Escobar 2004, 208). As such, counterhegemonic movements which are

locally based but transnational in effort are important for the preservation of people and ecologyslated for violent displacement. This last point is one reason why, to preserve the World Ocean, Ilook to regional civil-society efforts that may be transnational and even globalizing. Instrumentalreason and scientific justifications for the manipulation of a mechanistic nature are compatiblewith the "development" of natural resources, which requires labor and its exploitation. This is notwithout political impact. Allan Schnaiberg ( I980) describes the concentration of power thatcomes from ever-growing intensified withdrawals from and additions to the natural world as aresult of intensifying and expanding capital-described as the "treadmills of production." Thiscycle then expands outward, with global extensity. However, science, as the systematic pursuit ofknowledge, cannot be blamed en masse. Specifically, Enlightenment science which is science based in modernity that pursues and promo tes single notions of Truth and a pure objectivitythrough a separation of object/ subject justifies the global exploitation of nature (Marcuse I 964 );it is likely that current interdisciplinary science does not allow for exploitation in the same way because power in knowledge is more dispersed. Also, work in conservation biology, marinesciences, atmospheric sciences, and other important areas provides several reference points thatlegitimize resistance against expanding imperialism through the impacts of this economicexpansion upon hum.an ecology and vice versa. This assumes that interdisciplinary knowledgeclaims work against the concentration of power because authority is negotiated acrossepistemological conunitments, instead of being self-reproducing within them (Daly and Cobb1989). I take several points from critical theory about globalizing changes. One is that the protection of human social diversity, and in particular the differences provided by the subaltern (



antimodern, oppressed resistant groups), is important. Also, that knowledge serves certaininterests; and scientific knowledge especially does so, given its credibility, which ironicallycomes from the improper assumption that it is objective and without ideology. Caveats andsuspicions about science need to be kept alive so that the power in knowledge is not concentratedin any one purpose, interest, or part of the world. This is a theoretical reason to remain skepticalabout, for example, fishery knowledge or methods that come from "globalizing" nations and

attempts to replace other fishery knowledge, such as traditional artisanal fisher knowledge. It isalso a reason to have more faith in the reverse because the orientation of power throughmodernity is organized against artisanal fishers. Finally, that agents of modernity seek to convertnatural resources on large scales also homogenizes cultural values toward instrumental reasonsince instrumental reason pacifies resistance in the name of Mother Earth or othernoninstrumental relationships with the natural world (Ridgeway 1996). Critical theory provides aframework for viewing specific structural economic conditions and pressures through its neo-Marxist founding in conjunction with its critique of Western science and hegemonic culture.Consequently, critical theory is a balance against romanticizing the human "we" (even though I believe it is still a reasonable orientation) by looking at the power found in structures created to promote a globalizing interest. As Held and others ( 1999) note, all globalization studies need toconfront modernity in some way; using critical theory as a theoretical framework is my way to do

this.

Constructing the oceans as underdeveloped drives the systematic disfunction

of capitalist development.


A second group of theorists who influence the understanding of capitalist spatiality that informsthe territorial political economy perspective are those who argue that Third World societies arecharacterized by transitional social formations with "articulated" modes of production. Ascapitalism has expanded into new areas it has constructed social formations that are characterizedonly partially by capitalist relations of production, and in which many of the social reproduction

functions remain less than fully commodified. These partially incorporated, semicapitalist areasserve global capitalism well; workers can be paid subsubsistence wages while the goods they produce enter the global trade system that is dominated by capitalist countries. The transitionalsocial formations of the Third World are creations of capitalism and they participate in thecapitalist-dominated world trade network, but they are not sensu stricto capitalist (Brenner 1977;Foster-Carter 1978; Laclau 1971; Luxemburg 1964; Meillasoux 1981; Wolpe 1980). Articulationtheory informs this study of the social construction of ocean-space in two ways, one general andone more specific. Like worldsystems theorists, articulation theorists suggest that the spatiality ofthe modern world, far from being contingent to fundamental capitalist processes, is a necessarycomponent of capitalism. Locations of partial incorporation play an essential role in reproducingcapitalism. While this theory does not directly address ocean-space, it raises the possibility thatocean-space, as another area that lacks definitive capitalist processes but serves a crucial role in

the global economy, is in some manner a necessary and unique "place" within the capitalist-dominated world economy. More specifically, articulationists show how First World capitalistsenter a non-capitalist region and selectively buttress elements of the non-capitalist socialformation so that the region, when integrated into the global trading system, is of exceptionalservice to the capitalists who dominate the world econom~ven as capitalists transform a ThirdWorld region so as to be compatible with First World interests, selective non-capitalistcharacteristics of the region are emphasized both in reality and in representation. This selectiveemphasizing of non-capitalist, "non-First World" characteristics both serves to facilitatedomination and to justify it.("~ the narrative presented here, an analogous process is revealed:



First World capitalists have constructed the ocean in a manner that selectively reproduces andemphasizes its existence as a space apart from land-based capitalist society. This constructionhas been adjusted over time to serve specific stages of capitalism, much as the techniques ofimperialism have shifted over time from plantations and trading posts to colonies to post-colonialdomination. Yet through all the different definitions and social constructions of ocean-space, theocean consistently has been a creation of capitalism even as it has lacked some of capitalism's

essential characteristics, just as the Third World continually has been (re)constructed to servecapitalism even as it has remained immune from the labor system that is paradigmatic of thecapitalist mode of production. Indeed, in both the Third World and the ocean, the designation ofthese spaces as "incomplete" (or "less developed") justifies further intervention andmanipulation. .> A third theory of capitalist spatiality that informs the territorial politicaleconomy perspective employed here is spatial dialectics theory. According to spatial dialecticstheorists, the cycles of investment and disinvestment that characterize modern political economyare driven by the interplay of two contradictory tendencies of capital. On the one hand, capitalcharacteristically is mobile as it seeks out new markets, low-cost inputs, and undervaluedinvestment sites. Thus, there is a tendency toward diffusion of investment across space,eventually tending toward geographical equalization. On the other hand, productive investmentsand their supportive physical and social infrastructure frequently are immobile, and so there is

also a tendency toward capital concentration as investors attempt to maximize their return oninvestments. This tendency toward capital concentration suggests that investments and value will be distributed highly unequally over space (Harvey 1982; Smith 1990). Like world-systems andarticulation theories, spatial dialectics theory holds that the spatial patterning of the world is notmerely incidental to capitalist expansion; it is a result of and a necessary condition forfoundational capitalist processes. The very existence of an "underdeveloped" Third World is due both to the capitalist drive toward mobility and expansion (hence the incorporation of the ThirdWorld into the capitalist-dominated trading and investment system) and the capitalist tendencytoward fixity (hence the lack of comprehensive investments in the Third World that might spurWestern-style "development"). Thus, the conflict between capital's two spatial tendencies isdialectical, and one result of this conflict is a third, long-run tendency toward systemicdysfunction: Uneven development (which results from the tendency toward capital fixity)

encourages mobility which encourages equalization which, in the long-run, stymies theunevenness and mobility necessary for the continuation of capital investment and valorization.Among spatial dialectics theorists, Manuel Castells (1996) is particularly germane because of hiswork on how contemporary society is being impacted by a qualitative transformation in thistension between the "spaces of flows" within which social processes of movement occur and thelived spaces of production and reproduction. Although Cas tells' assertion of a fundamental shiftin this tension is questioned (see Chapters 5 and 6), this book is fully in accord with his argumentthat in order to understand the evolving spatiality of capitalism (and its social ramifications), onemust study dialectical change in the spaces of flows as well as the spaces of fixity.



Leadership/Hegemony Link

US Ocean leadership and forward presence relies on unsustainable

exploitation. The pursuit of hegemonic power creates the insecurity it

attempts to solve.


Regarding the major ecological changes around the world, the United States is a leading force inthe cruise ship industry, supplying a bulk of the passengers and a majority of the consumers forthe drug trade that plagues the Caribbean. The United States is also the world's leading emitter ofcarbon, the most important human-related climate change driver. T his is literally killing coralreefs in large percentages, and is an act which has direct impacts on fish nurseries and coastalstorm and sea level rise protections for people who typically do not contribute to global carbonemissions in commensurable ways. The fact that the United States is also the primary aquarium-

fish consumer is also a major factor in the loss of coral reefs. Further, the United States is one ofthe top two consumers of shrimp. The other is Japan, another important global center, and this is afactor in unsustainable coastal development, social policy, and commons management. All ofthese factors also have local counterpart agents, but there is no doubt that the United States isamong the more powerful agents in ocean matters- it is, for example, the only globally forwarddeployed navy (Jacques and Smith 2003)-and it is mostly driving ecological conditions towardundesirable and potentially irreversible changes. Through complex systems theory, the UnitedStates can be seen as an attractor of information and structure through its own matrix ofcommerce and material power, which then is significant in creating the system itself. In order tochange the global capitalist system, the relationships with the United States and the rest of theworld will have to change. CST demands that ultimately, if the United States is in part creating astable system, the system will become more complex because more and more nodes will be

allowed to gain a foothold. Globalization of commerce is increasing the diversity of members inthe global market, though there is a measurable concentration of firms at the top, even if thequality of these relations is suspect. However, when we connect the commercial system to theecological one, a more complex biological world is not apparent. Therefore, if we define theEarth system as being the sum of the commercial/ economic, social, and all ecological systemstogether, the loss of diversity in the latter two indicates an unstable larger system. In other words,the United States may be stabilizing the global economic subsystem, but this effort isundermining other parts of the Earth that will ultimately disrupt these very efforts. This wouldalso mean that changes are likely on the way for the role of the United States in the largersociopolitical world. The United States cannot be expected to continue to maintain its position ofrelative hegemony if this very unipolar position destabilizes vast social and ecological patterns around it; this structure has already begun to unravel in Southeast Asia (Beeson 2004 ). From ahermeneutic perspective, the role of the United States and its hegemonic power is one thatinterferes with the messages from other agents and the ecological world. The United States itselfhas the power to consume other countries' and regions' resources while distancing itself fromlocal consequences. Also, given its use of instrumental reason and ethics in relation to nature, theUnited States has undoubtedly created numerous intermediary relations with nature so that thedirect signs from nature, and its limits, are hidden. I assume that this kind of communication block is another way that limits the viability of U.S. hegemony and its future security. Similarly,from a critical theory perspective, such as according to Wallerstein's ( 1989) "world systemtheory," where the hegemonic powers order a coherent and single capitalist system, this power



historically operates in phases where hegemons overextend themselves so much that they devourtheir own power base and create their own disintegration, opening up the way for a new hegemon.Indeed, as much as this perspective is informed by the concept of historical material dialectic, thecreation of a hegemonic order creates and embeds its own antithesis, and the role of civil societyand other nations and forces will be to undermine this material power in the world over timethrough counterhegemonic resistance. Thus, through all of these theories, it is possible to see that

singular agents of unsustainable systems create their own means of insecurity in the same waythat they create insecurity for others. Pragmatic ramifications of this loss are the changes thatare occurring in fisheries, and therefore in food security for the world. Overfishing has beenshown to affect fisheries in nonlinear ways, indicating that the lessons from complex systemstheory may be important. For example, if the Atlantic cod is any indication, fisheries can sustainthemselves in the face of mounting pressures until they approach some "cliff" of permanentdecline and perhaps decimation. Given that about three-quarters of the world's fisheries are facingsuch pressures, we should view this potential with the utmost gravity. The language of the oceancontinues to tell us through fairly clear signs that this limit is real-fish are becoming harder andharder to catch, and the kinds of fish caught are increasingly found lower on the food chain. Theworld's poor, even when their commons are not being enclosed for private interests, are going tofeel the first human burden because they depend on this fish for more basic survival than affluent

consumers who have other choices. That fish is simply becoming more expensive and harder toattain is one example of how our depletion of fisheries will further threaten the security (overallwell-being) of the most vulnerable people. Ecological and social diversity is becoming simplifiedat the same time, and should not be seen as accidental, but rather as a function of structural pressures creating global patterns, demonstrated by loss of higher trophic levels of fish, the lossof coral reef around the world through climate changes and unsustainable coastal development,and the loss of mangroves and coastal forest and grasslands in addition to the losses of indigenouscultures, languages, and lifestyles that have pers isted for eons (which in itself says somethingabout their sustainability ). Complex systems theory sees this as unsustainable in relation to thefuture options systems can take; hermeneutics sees this as unsustainable because it is a sign of asincere loss of meaning in the world; and critical theory sees this loss of social and ecologicaldiversity as an unsustainable concentration of power that enables abuse and exploitation of nature

and nonhuman nature. In all cases, humanity is diminished by such losses because we are a partof these threatened spheres of the World Ocean. Between the three perspectives, then, oceancommunities are reducing their options for future pathways, losing depth and meaning in additionto the relative power to resist such trends. Gender inequality pervades each of the regions withonly a little variation, apparently found mostly on the local level. Women are disempowered ineach of the regions, and this has important implications for sustainability according to each of thethree theories. In CST, the suppression of nodes in the system will again have a negative effect onavailable options in future syst ems. In hermeneutics, a reading of the whole social system seesthat welfare is not improving, and key conditions indicate that over 50 percent of the world's population experience a disproportionate share of violence, poverty, and ecological problems intheir labor in the household and in the workforce. Sustainability is implausible for only onegender, and these conditions indicate that the meaning of sustainability very often overlooks the

condition of women in society. Even as I make this note, I admit that the conditions of womenhave not been the focus of this study and I can see that this area requires more research andtheorizing. From what little attention I have paid this issue, it is clear that information andknowledge are organized without a gender component, leaving the lives of women unaddressedand mostly silent, a state that is a prerequisite for the institutionalization of social hierarchies(Enloe I 990). So long as current power relations and governance structures in and out of civilsociety remain the same and rely on the continued silent work and suppression of women, none ofthe improvements in sustainability will matter much, and half of the world's lifestyles will berelying on the other half's work. In the end, this is representative of the different levels of



hierarchy that are experienced in civil society and in the organization of government that Gandhiand Borgese warn against. So long as society looks more like a pyramid with the apex resting onthe conditions of the base, the World Ocean communities will not be sustainable.

Power projection discourse frames the Ocean as an anarchic space to be

controlled. Nation-state competition over ocean resources is neither naturalnor inevitable.


In modern times a third variation on the military construction of ocean-space has emerged. Saidnotes that in modern Britain, France, and the United States, the idea of projecting power acrossvast expanses of ocean-space to distant lands has played an important role in discourses of

empire: The idea of overseas rule - jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands- hasa privileged status in these three cultures. This idea has a lot to do with projections, whether infiction or geography or art, and it acquires a continuous presence through actual expansion,administration, investment, and commitment. (Said 1993: xxiii) The ideological significance ofthe projection of military power across and in ocean-space is revealed in one of the classictwentieth-century works promoting United States overseas expansion: Maritime mobility is the basis for a new type of geopolitical structure, the overseas empire. Formerly, history had given usthe pattern of great land powers based on the control of contiguous land masses such as theRoman, Chinese, and Russian empires. Now the sea has become a great artery of communicationand we have been given a new structure of great power and enormous extent. The British, French,and Japanese empires and the sea power of the United States have all contributed to thedevelopment of a modern world which is a single field for the interplay of political forces. It issea power which has made it possible to conceive of the Eurasian Continent as a unit and it is sea power which governs the relationships between the Old and the New Worlds. (Spykman 1944:35) In fact, most modern-era advocates of sea power, from Sir Walter Raleigh to Alfred Mahanand Nicholas Spykman, have combined this new, ideological value of sea power with the two

more traditional uses, stressing the key role of a strong "blue-water" fleet in troop mobility, navalwarfare, and domination of distant lands. < Much like the "transport-surface" construction ofocean-space, the construction of the ocean as a "force-field"10 is dependent upon an idealizationof the sea as an unmanaged and unmanageable surface, an idealization that resonates with thespatial assumptions that permeate realist theories of international politics. According to realists,individual societies, as embodied by spatially defined nation-states, are the repositories of order,while international relations are characterized by anarchic competition (Grieco 1990; Morgenthauand Thompson 1985). As unclaimed and unclaimable "international" space, the world-oceanlends itself to being constructed as the space of anarchic competition par excellence, whereontologically pre-existent and essentially equivalent nation-states do battle in unbridledcompetition for global spoils. In realist geopolitics (a subset of realist international relationstheory), control of specific loca tions on the earth's surface is considered crucial in the

competition for global power (Cohen 1973; Mackinder 1904; Parker 1985). Within this group ofgeopolitical realists, certain theorists have put a premium on control of portions or the entirety ofthe world-ocean (Mahan 1890; Raleigh 1829; Spykman 1944). Leaving aside for the moment anyfurther critique of the realist conception of either the state or international relations (both ofwhich are taken up again later in this chapter), it is argued here that the military history perspective is deficient for much the same reason as the commercial history perspective: Both perspectives are premised upon a denial of the ocean's long history as a space that continuouslyhas been regulated and managed. Even those who study the history of sea power from an



explicitly social angle- such as Modelski and Thompson (1988), who trace the rise and fall ofmaritime powers as indicators of world-systemic long cycles and the shifting fortunes ofindividual countries - fail to investigate the ocean itself as a space within which the social contestis played olf'l\ Rather than being a neutral surface across and within which states have vied for power and moved troops, the sea, like the nation-states themselves, has been socially constructedthroughout history. Although in the modern era the sea has been constructed outside the territory

of individual states, it has been constructed as a space amenable to a degree of governance withinthe state system. Indeed, as Thomson (1994) has shown, this construction of the sea has played animportant role in the construction of modern norms of international relations. As was the casewith Harlow's definition of the sea as unregulatable transport space, the very act of defining thesea as a space of anarchic military competition both reflects and creates specific socialconstructions of both ocean-space and land-space.



Wind Links

Wind energy promotion supports overconsumption. The ideology of

production-first solutions guarantees environmental exploitation.

Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ‘12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets ofClean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 55-60

Their response was telling. They made it apparent that even though the report claims to contain―influential scientific information,‖ its analyses might not be recognized as such by the greaterscientific community.40 One of the report‘s lead editors told me, ―The 20% Wind work wascarried out to develop a picture of a future in which 20 percent of the nation‘s electricity is provided from the wind, and to assess the feasibility of that picture. The work was based on theassumption that reasonable orderly advancement of the technology would continue, and that keyissues needing resolution would be addressed and favorably resolved. Hence the work used inputinformation and assumptions that were forward-looking rather than constrained by recenthistory.‖41 Indeed, the authors did not allow recent history to stand in their way. In fact, somemight argue that their answer echoes the rhetoric used to defend the fabrication of data for whichno historical justification or cultural context exists. Energy players employed such lines ofreasoning to suggest that by the 1960s, nuclear energy would produce abundant clean energy forall, that by the 1970s, fusion power would be too cheap to meter, and that solar cells would befueling the world‘s economies by 1986.42 With the advantage of hindsight, historians of scienceromp in the particulars of how such declarations rose to prominence. They show how genuineinquiry was often pushed aside to make room for the interests of industrial elites in their attemptsto pry open taxpayer coffers for subsidies. Will future historians judge the 20% Wind Energy by2030 report similarly? Yes, reasons Nicolas Boccard, author of two academic papers recently published in Energy Policy.43 In his opinion, the kind of tomfoolery going on at the doe isnothing particularly shocking. Boccard, who studies the phenomenon of capacity factorexaggerations in Europe, found that when solid data do not exist, wind proponents are all toowilling to make ―unsubstantiated guesses.‖ They get away with it because the public, politicians,

journalists, and even many energy experts don‘t understand how capacity factors are involved ininfluencing prospects for wind power development. Or, perhaps caught up in the excitementsurrounding wind energy, proponents may simply not care, due to a psychological phenomenoncalled selection bias, whereby people tend to overvalue information that reinforces their ideologyand undervalue that which contradicts it. Boccard insists, ―We cannot fail to observe thatacademic outlets geared at renewable energy sources naturally attract the authors themselvessupportive of renewable energy sources, as their writing style clearly indicates. As a consequence,this community has (unconsciously) turned a blind eye to the capacity factor issue.‖ He comparedwind farm data across many European countries, where wind power penetration is many timeshigher than in the United States. He uncovered a worrisome gap between the anticipated andrealized output of wind turbines. In fact, Boccard maintains, the difference was so large that wind

power ended up being on average 67 percent more expensive and 40 percent less effective thanresearchers had predicted. As a rule of thumb, he maintains that any country-level assumptions ofcapacity factors exceeding 30 percent should be regarded as ―mere leaps of faith.‖44 It mightseem counterproductive for wind firms to risk overinflating expectations, but only if we assumethat real-life turbine performance will impact their profit potential. It won‘t. Consulting firmssuch as Black and Veatch stand to lock in profits during the study and design phase, long beforethe turbines are even brought online. The awea manufacturers stand to gain from the sale of windturbines, regardless of the side effects they produce or the limitations they encounter during



operation. And by placing bets on both sides of the line, with both wind turbines and natural gas,Pickens was positioned to gain regardless of the wind‘s motivations. If the turbines don‘t return

on the promise, it‘s no big deal for those in the money. The real trick is convincing thegovernment, and ultimately taxpayers, into flipping for as much of the bill as possible. And oneof the best tools for achieving that objective? A report that can be summarized in a sound bitestruts with an air of authority, and can glide off the president‘s tongue with ease. 20% Wind

Energy by 2030. It may be tempting to characterize this whole charade as some sort of cover-up.But the Department of Energy officials I interviewed were certainly open (if nervous) to myquestions; anyone with an Internet connection can access the report and its suspectmethodologies; and the doe regularly publishes its field measurements in a report called theAnnual Energy Outlook. There‘s no secret. Energy corporations develop ―forward-looking‖datasets favorable to their cause, government employees slide those datasets into formal reports,the Department of Energy stamps its seal on the reports, and the Government Printing Office publishes them. Then legislators hold up the reports to argue for legislation, the legislation guidesthe money, and the money gets translated into actions — usually actions with productivistleanings. It isn‘t a cover -up. It‘s standard operating procedure. This may be good or bad,depending on your political persuasion. This well-oiled system has operated for years, with allactors performing their assigned duties. As a result, Americans enjoy access to ample and

inexpensive energy services and we have a high standard of living to show for it. But this processnevertheless leads to a certain type of policy development — one that is intrinsically predisposedto favor energy production over energy reduction. As we shall see, this sort of policy bent — whilemagnificently efficient at creating wealth for those involved — does not so clearly lead to long-term wellbeing for everyone else. Step Away from the Pom-Poms When Big Oil leveragesquestionable science to their benefit, environmentalists fight back en masse. As they should. Butwhen it comes to the mesmerizing power of wind, they acquiesce. No op-eds. No investigativereports. No magazine covers. Nothing. If environmentalists suspected anything funny about the20% Wind Energy by 2030 repor t, they didn‘t say anything about it in public. Instead, fiftyenvironmental groups and research institutes, including the Natural Resources Defense Council,Sierra Club, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory opted to double-down their windy bets by formally backing the study. When the nation‘s smartest and most dedicated research scientists,

physicists, and environmentalists roll over to look up googlyeyed at any corporate energy production report, it‘s worthy of our attention. This love affair, however, is harmful to theenvironmentalists‘ cause for a number of reasons. First, fetishizing overly optimistic expectationsfor wind power takes attention away from another grave concern of environmental groups — reducing dirty coal use. Even if the United States could attain 20 percent wind energy by 2030,the achievement alone might not remove a single fossil-fuel plant from the grid. There is acommon misconception that building additional alternative energy capacity will displace fossil-fuel use; however, over past years, this hasn‘t been the case. Producing more energy simplyincreases supply, lowers cost, and stimulates additional energy consumption. Incidentally,some analysts argue that the mass deployment of wind turbines in Europe has not decreased theregion‘s carbon footprint by even a single gram. They point to Spain, which prided itself on beinga solar and wind power leader over the last two decades only to see its greenhouse gas emissions

rise 40 percent over the same period. Second, the pomp and circumstance around wind divertsattention from competing solutions that possess promising social and ecological value. In a cash-strapped economy, we have to consider the trade-offs. As journalist Anselm Waldermann pointsout, ―when it comes to climate change, investments in wind and solar energy are not veryefficient. Preventing one ton of co2 emissions requires a relatively large amount of money. Othermeasures, especially building renovations, cost much less —and have the same effect.‖45 Thethird problem is the problem with all myths. When they don‘t come true, people grow cynical.Inflated projections today endanger the very legitimacy of the environmental movementtomorrow. Every energy-production technology carries its own yoke of drawbacks and



limitations. However, the allure of a magical silver bullet can bring harms one step closer.Illusory diversions act to prop up and stabilize a system of extreme energy consumption andwaste. Hype surrounding wind energy might even shield the fossil-fuel establishment — if cleanand abundant energy is just over the horizon, then there is less motivation to clean up existingenergy production or use energy more wisely. It doesn‘t help when the government maintains twoledgers of incompatible expectations. One set, based on fieldwork and historical trends, is used

internally by people in the know. The second set, crafted from industry speculation and―unconstrained‖ by history, is disseminated via press releases, websites, and even by the presidenthimself to an unwitting public. It may be time for mainstream environmental organizations totake note of this incongruence, put away the clean energy pom-poms, and get back to workspeaking up for global ecosystems, which are hurt, not helped, by additional energy production.Because as we shall see, the United States doesn‘t have an energy crisis. It has a consumptioncrisis. Flashy diversions created through the disingenuous grandstanding of alternative energymechanisms act to obscure this simple reality.

Big wind supports an alienated consumerist energy regime.

John BYRNE Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy & Public Policy @Delaware AND Noah TOLY Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy ‗6 in Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, & Glover p. 14-17

Catching the Wind To date, the greatest success in 'real' green energy development is the spreadof wind power. From a miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than 4 7,317 MW in 2005, wind power has come of age. Especially noteworthy is the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35 percent per year since 1997), Spain (30 percent per year since 1997), and Germany (anastonishing 68 percent per year since 2000), where policies have caused this source to threatenthe hegemony of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wind now generates more than 20 percent ofDenmark's electricity and the country is the world leader in turbine manufacture. And as theDanes have demonstrated, offshore wind has the potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts

that have sometimes beset renewable energy alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore windalone might produce all of Europe's residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National energystrategists and environmental movements in and beyond Europe have recognized theachievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and Germans with initiatives designed to imitate theirsuccess. What are the characteristics of this success? One envied feature is the remarkable declinein the price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWhtoday (Sawin, 2004), very close to conventionally-fueled utility generating costs in manycountries, even before environmental impacts are included. Jubilant over wind's winning market performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ecologically much greenerand, yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes thatwind satisfies seemingly equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, andeconomic efficiency: Wind is ... clean. Wind energy does not produce sulfur dioxide emissions or

nitrous oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury thatcome from coal-fired power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams are polluted, and thereare no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the earth's climate ... [l]t isinexhaustible ... [and] cheap. This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism. lt isalso consistent with the ideology of modern consumerism. Its politics bestow sovereignty onconsumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality, a situation in which additionalconsumption of a good or service is warranted until it cannot improve the circumstance of one person (or group) without decreasing the welfare of another person (or group).17 How would oneknow "better off' from "worse off' in the wind-rich sustainable energy era? Interestingly,



proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of "better" and "worse" devoid of explicitcontent. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiastsappear willing to set wind to the task of making "whatever"-whether that is the manufacture oflow-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all of theseapplications potentially make some in society "better off' (if one accepts that economic growthand higher incomes are signs of improvement). Possible detrimental side effects or externalities

(an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by the possession of more purchasing power, which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste andmake affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in theabstraction of consumption and production. Consumption of-what, ·by-whom, and -for-what- purpose, and, relatedly, production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues. Theconstruct altogether ignores the possibility that "more-is-better" consumption production relationsmay actually reinforce middle class ideology and capitalist political economy, as well ascontribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming marketvictory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not readilydistinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of the conventional energyregime. Wind enthusiasts also appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward larger and largerturbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results, and the advancing

complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about these sorts of trends in themodern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Noris a critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raiseis whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicated-namely, a "technologicalmystique" (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumenand searches for fulfillment in the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marc use,1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005). This prospect is not a distant one, as a popularmagazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking "After Oil," NationalGeographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, theStatue of Liberty, and noted that the new machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol(Parfit, 2005: 15- 16). It was not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of Big Wind'sliberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological

marvels, repeating the theme that, with its elevation in height and complexity lending thetechnology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers(Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder ofelectricity generated by an artificial tornado in which wind is technologically spun to highvelocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity.Indeed, wind is being contemplated as a rival able to serve society by the sheer technical prowessthat bas often been a defining characteristic of modern energy systems. Obviously, wind energyhas a long way to go before it can claim to have dethroned conventional energy's "technologicalcathedrals" (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant other spectacularmethods of generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise express noqualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical grounds. In fact, Big Windappears to seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent

alliance of the American Wind Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry tochampion national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver green-and-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big Wind to plug into Giant Power's hardware and,correspondingly, its ideology (see American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting"Transmission Infrastructure Modernization"). The transformative features of such a politics areunclear. Indeed, wind power-if it can continue to be harvested by ever larger machines-may penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will diffuse, without perceptibledisruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be dulynoted: science will have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources that a



wealthy life has grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve sustainability may actually beunnecessary by this political view of things, as middle-class existence is assured via clean, low-cost and easy-to-plug-in wind power.



Climate Change Links

The 1AC uses climate change as an empty signifier that supports the

exploitative energy regime.

Chris METHMANN Research Associate @ Poli Sci Inst. Hamburg ‘10 ―‗Climate Protection‘ asEmpty Signifier: A Discourse Theoretical Perspective on Climate Mainstreaming in WorldPolitics‖ Millennium 39 (2) p. 352-357

In order to delimit a discursive space and temporarily fix a hegemonic discursive formation, it isnecessary to establish empty signifiers: discursive elements that have been emptied of their actual

content and provide for the unity of the discourse .38 According to Laclau and Mouffe,

establishing a discourse is ‗to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences,to construct a centre. We will call these privileged discursive points of this partial fixation ―nodal

points‖.‘39 But since discourses are purely relational and differential systems of significationwithout any underlying ground that would provide for such nodal points, these have to root in the

discourses themselves. Discourses allow for two basic operations: elements can be articulatedaccording to either a logic of equivalence or a logic of difference.40 Difference constitutesmeaning as a relational system of differences, stressing the autonomy and dissimilarity ofdiscursive elements without detaching them completely (father is adiscrete unit in a family butexists only in relation to mother and child). But because every signifier enters into a differentialrelation with every other signifier, a logic of difference alone cannot constitute society; social lifewould be a uniform dispersion of differences without any structure. In order to allow for stablediscursive formations, it is necessary to exclude certain elements. But the construction of boundaries is impossible to achieve through logics of difference, since every item outside thelimits then just becomes another difference and – since discourses are systems of differences – isagain part of the discourse. Thus, it is necessary to interrupt the flow of differences and constructa radical otherness, an absolute outside. This is accomplished through the introduction of a logic

of equivalence among the elements of a discursive formation that stresses the similarity of itselements. However, this is not possible with reference to their inherent properties (since signs arerelational and not essential), so that it is necessary to construct a chain of equivalence withanother signifier. This master-signifier- or nodal-point-to-be has to be equivalent to the wholediscursive formation but initially also is in differential relation to all other elements. Therefore,these differential relations have to be cancelled out.41 And as difference is nothing other thanmeaning, as a result this master signifier is ‗discharged‘ of any content. It becomes more equalthan equal, an ‗empty signifier‘ that only represents ‗the pure being of the system‘ and the non- being of those elements that are not part of the system.42 Therefore, for a discourse to becomehegemonic it is necessary to construct an empty signifier that stabilises the discursive formation – a constructed and fragile stability that is rather ‗a horizon and not a ground‘.43 The constructionof an empty signifier as nodal point is what Laclau and Mouffe have termed hegemony. Analysis,

then, has to explore by what discursive strategies empty signifiers create relations of equivalenceamong elements of a discourse and relations of opposition towards excluded elements. Such ahegemonic closure of discourses always gives rise to social antagonism and power relations. Theconstruction of a hegemonic discourse presupposes the exclusion of certain elements, which areconstructed as a radical other. Power is inherent to all discursive formations.44 On the other hand,as unity is fragile and contingent, the power relations always impend to break open and give riseto social antagonism. Hegemony comes at the cost of the constant threat of its own subversion.Antagonism, in this sense, means that ‗we are faced with a ―constitutive outside‖. It is an

―outside‖ which blocks the identity of the ―inside‖ and is nonetheless the prerequisite for its



constitution at the same time.‘45 A situation in which there is an invasion of the outside into thediscourse is termed dislocation. It occurs when disruptive events cannot be explained orrepresented in the existing discursive order. They threaten the stability of existing socialstructures, which become subject to political contestation again. Therefore, dislocation appears inthe form of a ‗structural or organic crisis, in which there is a proliferation of floatingsignifiers‘.46 Dislocation is followed by a hegemonic struggle over the integration of those

floating signifiers into the dominant discourse. It might result in a ‗passive revolution‘47 wherebyhegemonic forces succeed in resettling social structures. Or it is followed by social changeinitiated by counter-hegemonic actors. However, because it is necessary to make new decisionson a ‗terrain of undecidability‘,48 either way dislocation gives rise to indeterminate humanaction. The subject is ‗nothing but the distance between the undecidable structure and thedecision‘.49 These considerations clarify why Laclau states that discourse theory introduces a

‗primacy of the political‘ into the analysis of hegemony.50 He distinguishes between two layersof society. The social represents the sedimented structures of a given social setting that are takenfor granted. On the contrary, the political refers to those areas of social life where thisimplicitness has dissolved through dislocation. This sphere is marked by contestation andinstability. Unlike the whole tradition of critical theory which articulates the two in a more or lesshierarchical way, deriving the political superstructure from the social structure,51 poststructuralist

discourse theory rejects such an essentialist economism. It acknowledges the fact that all socialstructures have primarily been established by political acts of hegemonic closure. Hegemonicdiscourses, hence, may not be derived from capitalist relations but represent the very terrain onwhich these are constructed and defended. In sum, the various concepts that centre around thenotion of discourse make up the toolbox for analysing change and continuity in discourse. If agovernmentality perspective highlights how government is interweaved with discourses,discourse theory can trace the mutations of these discourses: how they emerge, spread, transform, become hegemonic and decline.52 Through climate mainstreaming, from this perspective,

climate protection turns into an empty signifier and so succeeds in transforming demands for

climate protection into the hegemonic order via a passive revolution. Such a perspective will be

introduced in the remainder of this article. Dislocation and the Global Governmentality of

Climate Protection Against the background of this theoretical framework, the history of climatechange can be read as a history of growing discursive dislocation. Global warming appears as anever aggravating and still not sufficiently tackled problem with potentially catastrophicconsequences for human civilisation.53 Thus, it represents the discursive ‗outside‘ that tends torupture the existing hegemonic order and reactivates various other signifiers that seemed to bedeeply sedimented. This is especially the case for the basic social structures of the worldeconomy: climate change undermines the genuine modern narrative of infinite progress andgrowth. It is located within the wider discursive field of environmental destruction that since the1970s systematically linked pollution and resource depletion to capitalist patterns of productionand consumption and put issues such as limits to growth and renouncement of consumption on

the agenda. It relates continued ecological destruction to the ‗ treadmill of production‘ .54 The

need to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions is a particular challenge to ‗carboniferous

capitalism‘55 – the model of fossil-fuel-based growth that still overwhelmingly dominates theworld economy. This is not to say that climate change actually stops these economic logics fromworking – at least not in its present stage. What it does do, however, is to stop them from workingas taken-for-granted institutions and undermines their social acceptance. In this sense, it can besaid that climate change dislocates the legitimacy of global capitalism – that is, its hegemonic position. Attempts to deal with the dislocatory character of climate change gave rise to the politics of sustainable development. This hegemonic discourse can be seen as a passive revolutionin the sense introduced above. Its primary aim was to remedy the dislocatory effects of climate



allow organisations to become part of the climate protection discourse without significantlyaltering their behaviour. Climate protection works as an empty signifier that links together arange of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory practices into a unified discourse but prevents fundamental social changes. The following sections discuss in detail how globalism,scientism, growth ethics and efficiency serve as discursive strategies to construct climate changeas such an empty signifier. Subsequently, subordinate discursive patterns are presented which

contest the climate protection discourse but were only rarely found in the sample.65

Apocalyptic climate discourse erases social, economic, and political

differences and empowers a global managerial elite. Tipping point

depoliticizes the response to climate change.

Chris METHMANN Research Associate Poli Sci Inst. @ Hamburg AND Delf ROTHE IR PhDCandidate @ Hamburg ‘12 ―Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse in globalclimate politics‖ Security Dialogue 43 p. 327-330

Climate change and the logic of apocalypse As was shown in the previous section, therelationship between risk and security cannot be theoretically determined in advance but resultsfrom the empirical articulation of antagonism. In the remainder of this article, we highlight one particular form through which antagonism can be created: a form best captured by the termapocalypse. In the case of climate change, the logic of apocalypse constitutes antagonism in such

a radical and existential way that, paradoxically, it does not result in exceptional measures, but

rather in the micro- and routine practices of risk management. In accordance with the concept ofdiscourse advocated by Laclau and Mouffe, we have focused not on authoritative speech acts, buton the constitution of antagonisms in discourses of climate change in general. The first step of ourempirical analysis involves an investigation of how climate change is expressed metaphorically.The bottom line of this analysis in all three of the cases we examine – mitigation, adaptation andthe UN Security Council – is that climate change is featured as a kind of external enemy. One of

the terms most commonly associated with ‗climate change‘ throughout our sample, for example,is the word ‗dangerous‘. The usage of this term may not be so surprising given that it is used inthe text of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992. Inthat particular context, the objective of policy is said to be the ‗stabilization of greenhouse gasconcentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenicinterference with the climate system‘.7 In subsequent discussions and documents, however, thisformulation turned virtually ubiquitously into ‗dangerous climate change‘ (see, for example,UNDP, 2007: 3; Steiner, 2009: 9; World Resources Institute, 2007: 7). Semantically, theUNFCCC formulation seeks to qualify the degree of human interaction with the climate system asdangerous, whereas the latter expression attaches this label to climate change itself. The nature of

the initial activity that causes climate change – human interference – is accordingly concealed

through use of the statement that climate change itself would be dangerous. Climate change

mutates from a process rooted in human activity to a dangerous Other. This externalization ofclimate change is particularly mirrored by two very salient metaphors. For example, it is evident

within the anticipation of ‗ climate shocks ‘ (see, for example, Up in Smoke Coalition, 2004: 29;

UNDP, 2007: 88; World Bank, 2010: 14). Shocks are generally external to those they affect; theyare caused by sudden changes from the outside. Similar reasoning applies in the case of the verycommon depiction of climate change as a ‗threat‘ or as ‗threatening‘ something (see, for example,World Resources Institute, 2008: 40; UNEP, 2009a: 7; World Trade Organization and UNEP,2009: v). Climate change is understood as an external and independent thing. Very obviously, this



discursive articulation, which is dominant in all three cases, represents the exceptional rhetoric ofthe logic of security; or, in terms of hegemony theory, it articulates an antagonism. In line withour theoretical argument, however, the nature of this antagonism needs to be further specified.Important in this regard is the notion of catastrophe. A striking example is the perception thatclimate change poses an imminent risk of ‗catastrophic events‘/‗catastrophic outcomes‘ (see, forexample, Up in Smoke Coalition, 2004: 8; UNDP, 2007: 7; Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009:

ii). These include the possibility of ‗unpredictable and non-linear events that could open the doorto ecological catastrophes‘ (UNDP, 2007: 2). What does the notion of catastrophe tell us aboutthe nature of antagonism? A very useful approach to the political implications of this term isoffered by Aradau and Van Munster (2011), whose ‗genealogy of the unknown‘ traces differentforms of knowledge and practices for dealing with an unknown future in Cold War security policy. They distinguish between dispositifs of security centring on crisis, on disaster, and oncatastrophe, while showing how these subsequently strengthened each other. The dispositif of

catastrophe deals with low-probability, high-impact risks. These are characterized by their

disruptive and transformative impact and involve a ‗ tipping point‘ – the point of no return

between a relatively linear and steady development and a radically contingent and potentiallychaotic future. The crucial point for the argument of this article is that catastrophe merges the

logic of security with that of risk. We argue that the securitization of climate change draws on thecentral characteristics of catastrophe but advances it towards a new stage in this series ofdispositifs of security: the logic of apocalypse.8 First, while catastrophic risks often affect a particular delimited political community (such as the West threatened by terrorism), a logic of

apocalypse inherently invokes an encompassing and universal threat. Climate change, for

example, is very often articulated as a global ‗war‘ (Sorcar , in UN Security Council, 2007b: 10)

or even as comparable to ‗the two world wars‘ (UNDP, 2007: 2). This war metaphor definitelyimplies an agglomeration of various catastrophes. In line with this, climate is defined as a ‗threatmultiplier‘, so that ‗climate change threatens markets, economies and development gains. It candeplete food and water supplies, provoke conflict and migration, destabilize fragile societies andeven topple governments‘ (Ban Ki-moon, 2009: 6). In this sense, it takes the form of a master-threat that is not simply a catastrophe: ‗climate change is a security issue, but it is not a matter of

narrow national security. It has a new dimension. It is about our collective security in a fragileand increasingly interdependent world‘ (Becket in UN Security Council, 2007a: 19). In line withthe approach of Buzan and Wæver (2009), the discursive strategy at play here could be called a‗macro-securitization‘ at the global level. As Figure 2 illustrates for the case of the SecurityCouncil, it creates a chain of equivalence combining a broad range of phenomena that areincreased or induced by climate change into the master-threat of dangerous climate change. Onthe other hand, however, it simultaneously invokes humanity as the one collective victim andopponent of dangerous climate change. Hence Kofi Annan‘s statement at the beginning of the

15th Convention of the Parties to the UNFCCC: ‗Climate change threatens the entire humanfamily. Yet it also provides an opportunity to come together and forge a collective response to aglobal problem‘ (Annan, 2006). Hence ‗the battle against dangerous climate change is part of the

fight for humanity‘ (UNDP, 2007: 6); and hence, ‗there are no sides in the fight for climate

justice‘ (Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009: iv). The hegemonic discourse of climate change

eradicates differences across the globe and presents humanity as a universal sufferer

(Swyngedouw, 2010). In this sense, across the three cases, the climate-change discoursearticulates global warming as an external antagonism that coincides with the limits of humanityand so constitutes the latter as a homogeneous social space that can be governed according to thelogic of risk – a point to which we will return below. Second, the temporality displayed by thelogic of apocalypse differs from that of the catastrophe. While the catastrophe represents theinterruption of a linear development by an unknowable event, the apocalypse represents the



(sometimes even teleological) endpoint of an accelerating development. Thus, time is notinterrupted by but directed at a certain event. For example, in the Security Council debate in

2007, this is expressed in the paradigmatic statement that ‗everyone‘s future is at stake now‘(Aboud in UN Security Council, 2007a: 35). The World Bank (2010: 100) equally indicates aradical break in time, because ‗in a changing climate the past is no longer prologue‘. For security politics in general, Dillon (2011: 782) has diagnosed a ‗political eschatology‘ that is ‗concerned

with the end of things‘ and gives rise to a modern politics of security that ‗derives from the positive exigencies of government and rule that arise in restricting that end‘. This is mirrored inthe securitization of climate change. What is at stake is the very end of time itself, which has to

be deferred through political interventions: ‗We are confronted with a chemical war of immense proportions. It is not a struggle against anyone; rather it is a fight against time and for the benefitof humanity‘ (Weisleder in U N Security Council, 2007b: 32, emphasis added). Climate change

not only is external to ‗humanity‘ as a spatial category (each and every inhabitant of the planet), but also constitutes a sort of a temporal limit to society – radicalizing the antagonism evenfurther. The last quotation also points to the third apocalyptic characteristic of the securitizationof climate change: it is organized around biblical/religious master-signifiers and metaphors. Onthe one hand, many of the consequences of climate change that are invoked throughout thediscourse bear close resemblance to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, death, disease and

famine (see Appendix) – for example, the ‗consequences of flooding, disease and famine – and,from that, migration on an unprecedented scale‘ (Beckett in UN Security Council, 2007a: 18).This migration is cast as an ‗exodus of entire populations‘ (Craxi in UN Security Council, 2007a:4, emphasis added). On the other hand, the solution of the climate crisis is often thought of as a

sort of universal salvation : ‗The silver – indeed gilt-edged – lining to the climate change cloud

is that many solutions already exist or are in the pipeline. … These are not some whimsical Nirvana but real opportunities to deliver a Green Economy‘ (UNEP, 2008: 3). Climate changemarks the crossroads between apocalyptic doom and universal salvation. This religious dimensionexaggerates the antagonism at the limits of humanity even further, to such an extent that climatechange becomes the radical opposite of humanity as such (UNDP, 2007: 1). The religiousdimension expressed in these apocalyptic metaphors is all the more important in that it presents afirst bridge to the logic of risk – which is based on ‗pastoral power‘ (Foucault, 2007: 123– 4; on

Foucault‘s analysis of Christianity, see Macmillan, 2011). Foucault disregarded, or at leastdownplayed, the fact that Christianity and/or its oriental ancestors not only gave birth to the pastorate but also were the first apocalyptic religions (for the notion of apocalypse, seeSwyngedouw, 2010: 218 – 9). We could thus say that the ideological background of pastoral power is a narrative that takes the twofold form of a promise and a warning. On the one hand itforetells the end of the world; on the other it promises an absolute fullness-to-come if the subjects behave properly in the eyes of God. The subject‘s fear and its perceived lack of identity can beregarded as the primary governmental resource behind the pastoral power. Judgment Day could be tomorrow. The pastoral power is only effective because the Last Judgment must be feared atany moment. The confession thus not only deploys ongoing micro-practices of self-optimizationand spiritual guidance, but at the same time serves the function of recalling the millenariancontext of human life. In this sense, the Christian ‗conduct of conduct‘ draws inherently on the

idea of living in the end times. In sum, we argue that the pastoral power – in its modern form ofgovernment – is still grounded upon and legitimized through similar narratives. In these modernforms of pastoral power, God has disappeared and been replaced by different concepts – such as anature out of control or the poor that have become dangerous. Macro-securitizations likedangerous climate change, then, spread a pastoral responsibility at the international level – forexample, by constructing humanity as a political subject confronted with an external antagonismlike dangerous climate change, which is to be governed by a logic of risk following from pastoral power. Lastly, the logic of apocalypse is marked by a certain anti-epistemology – the



impossibility of knowing. While the dispositif of catastrophe in general is characterized by eagerattempts to make the future present, the apocalypse is marked by systematic ignorance. In thefield of climate change, this might be a surprising argument given the fact that climate policy – maybe like no other policy – is characterized by the will to know the future (see, for example,Anderson, 2010). We absolutely agree with that, yet still we would argue that there are large partsof the global climate polity that are governed through technologies that creatively exploit the

impossibility of knowing. In our sample, climate-change threats are depicted as ‗unprecedented‘,‗unpredictable‘, ‗uncontrollable‘ or even ‗unthinkable‘ (see Figure 2). Yet, and this is decisive, itis also not necessary that these threats can be known by the subject. For example, EricSwyngedouw (2010) has argued that it is the vagueness of dangerous climate change that enables

it to function as an empty signifier to be shared by everyone. And, below, we will argue that it

is the systematic lack of knowledge in the face of the apocalypse that enables particulardispositifs of risk. As a first conclusion, we argue that the antagonism constitutive of climatediscourses takes the form of an apocalypse, a form that even exaggerates the notion of ‗macro-securitization‘ or ‗catastrophe‘ by invoking climate change as a total threat to the entire planet,radically undermining the temporal organization of existing societies, drawing on religiousmetaphors and a specific antiepistemology. The remainder of this article seeks to flesh out howexactly apocalypse articulates the logic of security with different dispositifs of risk andaccordingly does not result in exceptional measures but instead invokes micro-practices ofgovernmental management.



Alternative - Ext

Changing our relationship with ocean policy from a development frame to a

sufficiency frame is a pre-requisite for sustainability.


The Borgese Test Most simply, sustainability is the convergence of improving social, political,economic, and ecological conditions (Goodland I995). In what I am calling the "Borgese Test," Ispecify what this means for the ocean. Borgese was a political scientist and international-lawscholar at Dalhousie University in Canada, as well as a strident advocate for the ocean and hunun justice. Moreover, along with her colleague and Maltese delegate, Arvid Pardoe, she was asincere advocate for the "common heritage of humankind" (chapter 3) provision within the Lawof the Sea, which intends to distribute resources from the high sea soil to the poor and the causeof international development. Borgese wrote several important documents, but The OceanicCircle (published in I 998) was among her most important contributions. The Oceanic Circledescribes sustainable ocean governance, and she uses Gandhian thought to make her case forsaving the seas and people who are dependent on them. Nonhierarchical and nonviolent socialrelations should inform local management of resources with global cosmopolitan consciousness(knowing that what one locality does affects and has a responsibility to others). This is what shemeant by making "oceanic circles," which she believed reflected the actual organization of theocean itself. Her plea is for radical democracy, nonviolence, and material equity, which areessential to nonhierarchical relations. Importantly, global equity means that no one is deprived of basic needs. It does not imply equal shares of goods or wealth. Further, she argues that this socialchange can occur as societies develop a deepening relationship with the global ocean. Thisrequires grassroots empowerment to make global governance accountable; nonviolence;knowledge of interdisciplinarity; and global North-South equity, some of which is articulated byGandhi in his poem "Oceanic Circles" (Borgese I998). Resources should be comanaged throughdecentralized democratic authority, with the aim of using and improving ecological productivityand function, coordinated with national, regional, and global governance (part of"comanagen1ent"). North-South equity implies that material conditions of the industrializedcountries should not impoverish poor countries. Interdisciplinary science is used to avoidhierarchical knowledge-based power to approach complex environmental problematiques with"solutiques," or holistic global solutions. I impose on this definition the expectation thatsustainability is a set of long-term processes, instead of an ideal which can easily become a formof authoritarian design from above; I believe Borgese would find this acceptable (see Lee I993;Capra 2002). In sum, sustainability is the evolution of nonviolent governance accountable tomultiple levels of human organization ensuring global human material equity and productiveecologies through interdisciplinary knowledge. I will refer to this definition of sustainability asthe "Borgese Test." One region cannot live unsustainably without endangering the livelihoods of

the rest. This is captured in Borgese' s ideas of North-South equity. If the North lives off of andundermines Southern ecology while the South lives in squalor, social and ecologicalsustainability is endangered, to varying degrees, around the world. Also note that sustainabilitycould be defined as simple stocks and flows of energy and material, but I use Borgese' s ideal because it includes the politics of justice that determine human use of stocks and flows. Steepsocial hierarchy, often empowered through violence, allows for ecological resources to becomeconcentrated and overexploited, reinforcing the hierarchy and flow of resources and potentiallytriggering scarcity and more violence, ad infinitum until the system reaches impenetrable limits



forcing rearrangement. Thus, distributive and nonviolent justice is fundamental to a sustainableworld. We are not building Borgese' s hopeful oceanic circles, and global ocean sustainability is,if anything, slipping farther and farther away. Neoliberal globalization has increased hierarchiesat the coastal level, and I show that along with increased economic globalization comes increasedarmed conflict. Violence and neoliberal economics seem to be globalized together (Chua 2003).

Alternative – changing social construction of ocean space.


Thus, there is an intensifying dialectic in capitalism's marine spatial order. On the one hand,capital is drawn toward constructing oceanspace as a great void across which ships, commodities,labor, and capital travel with exceeding ease, a "hyperspace of pure circulation." On the otherhand, capital is drawn toward constructing ocean-space as a series of potential "places" in thecapitalist sense of the word: locations where value can be created by placing or removingimmobile capital investment and where a high degree of territorial control is needed. Indeed, the progress of the first half of this dialectic supports the progress of the second, even as it increasesthe intensity of the conflict. As capital represents ocean-space as annihilated, it diminishes the

identity of the ocean as res extra commercium, an "other" that plays a distinct role as a specialspace of movement within society. Thus, it becomes easier to conceive of the ocean as res nullius,space that is so devoid of any social content that it is available for appropriation anddevelopment, even though the appropriation of the sea necessarily conflicts with the "great void"idealization that makes this appropriation possibl~Finally, each of these tendencies, besidesconflicting with each other, intensifies the speed with which the ocean is transformed to obtainvalue. As a result, a third tendency- the mandate for rational management so as to extend theocean's resource value- emerges amidst (and in contradiction to) the other two. As in earlier erasof capitalism, the ocean-space construction of postmodern capitalism is rooted in the spatiality ofthe era's dominant political-economic processes. As the contradictions within postmoderncapitalism's social institutions are more intense than in previous eras, so are the contradictionswithin the postmodern ocean-space construction. The manner in which these contradictions will

resolve themselves will be intertwined with the manner in which other social contradictions will be resolved, and that is a topic beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, this history of theuses, regulations, and representations of ocean-space and the manner in which its construction has been embedded in social processes suggest a few options, and these are considered in Chapter 6.Beyond postmodern capitalism, beyond ocean-space Social change in the marine heterotopia Ascapital pursues its mutually reinforcing but ultimately contradictory trajectories in ocean-space,one can expect a broad range of social constructions to be considered in the future. smallvariations on the current set of management priorities will not, in the long run, diminish theconflicts within contemporary capitalist uses of ocean-space. As was demonstrated by the saga ofthe manganese nodule mining regime, contradictions within the social construction areincreasingly intense, and, in an attempt to support their particular interests, fractions of capitalmay be expected to favor uncharacteristic regimes and to make unusual alliance Some of these

proposals may buttress the general organization of society, but some (perhaps inadvertently) mayopen cracks in its foundation. At first glance one might question the likelihood that a marginalspace, apparently on the fringe of social structures and institutions, would be a fertile location forimagining and actually constructing significant social change. Marxists might protest thatrelatively little value-added production occurs in ocean-space and little surplus labor is extractedthere, so it is not likely to be a significant space of social transformation. Feminists similarlymight protest that little of the social reproduction that characterizes everyday life transpires at sea.Here, these protests are met with two responses./The first response derives from the postmodernist assertion that any attempt to define a "center" to political (or social) economy



inadvertently reinforces this center, even if the stated aim is to transform it (Gibson-Graham1996). Although one's first instinct may be to direct efforts at social change toward processes(and spaces) that are central to existing power structures, postmodern theorists suggest thatmargins - where the "fit" of systemic practices is problematic- also may be fruitful locuses forsocial contestation. It is at the margins that actors struggle over individual, social, and spatialconstructions that are both inside and outside the system. As zones of partial incorporation,

margins provide fertile ground both for imagining and constructing alternative social futures(hooks 1984). ..J The second response derives from the insight of Henri Lefebvre (1991), whoviews all spaces as sites of contention. As Peet notes in his summary of Lefebvre: Every society,every mode of production, produces its own space. But the production of social space is not likethe production of commodities, because space subsumes many different things, is both outcomeand means (of fresh action), and is both product (made by repetitious labor) and work (i.e.something unique and original).lt consists of objects (natural and social) and their relations(networks and pathways). Space contains things yet is not a material object; it is a set of relations between things. Hence, we are confronted with many, interpenetrated social spaces superimposedone on the other, a "hypercomplexity" in which each fragment of space masks not one socialrelationship but many. For Lefebvre, the "problematic" of space has displaced that ofindustrialization. (Peet 1998: 103) ~s capitalism progresses, space increasingly becomes

"abstract" (i.e. socially constructed), and as this happens there is increasing potential for thevarious elements that construct a space to conflict with each other. Thus, the production of spaceemerges as an arena for the implosion of the structural contradictions of capitalism. j Lefebvre presents a more robust model of socio-spatial construction than that offered by Castells. ForCastells, social change may engender massive changes in spatial organization, but once thosechanges are implemented the new spatial formations are unstable only to the extent that there isinstability in the social system underlying them. Thus certain spaces, such as the first layer of thespace of flows, may be written off by Castells as relatively unproblematic. For Lefebvre,however, spaces require continual reproduction, and, because every space has multiple facets, theact of space construction inherently is dialectical, the intensity of this dialectic increasingcommensurate with the level of a space's abstraction. It follows that every socially constructedspace - including the sea which, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, increasingly is

constructed as a multi-faceted, abstract space- is a potential site and subject of social change.While the sea may not be a space where significant value is added and it may not be experienceddirectly by most individuals, it is a space of social construction, and as individuals construct thesea they are participating in the construction of the institutions and structures that govern theirlives. Consumers of the Nike sneakers that remained on the Hansa Carrier during the 1990 stormreferred to at the beginning of this book probably did not think of the sea when they purchasedtheir pair of sneakers, but through this action they did more than reproduce the exploitative socialrelations at the factory in Asia where the shoes were made. They also reaffirmed the constructionof the sea as a friction-free transport surface, a necessary counterpoint to the hierarchical divisionof the world into a series of developable investment sites that are at different rungs on the ladderof modernizatim[The social construction of ocean-space, like that of land-space, is a process bywhich axes of hierarchy, identity, cooperation, and community are contested, establishing bases

for both social domination and social opposition. J There is a long history of marine-based socialformations serving as models for social change in land-space. While the Grotius-Freitas-Seldendebate was an exercise to construct a regime for a marginal area of the world-economy, it resultedin the establishment of a structure for all interaction among land-based states. Indeed, it was because of his contributions to the nascent Law of the Sea that Grotius is known as the "Father ofthe Law of Nations" (Colombos 1967: 8). Likewise, the efforts by sixteenth-centurycartographers to draw lines through the ocean as they reinterpreted the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillascontributed to the establishment of the modern norm of the sovereign, territorial state (Steinberg2000). In a similar vein, late mercantilist-era sailors established many of the norms and



solidarities that went on to characterize the industrial capitalist-era proletariat (Rediker 1987).Early twentiethcentury communists, anarchists, and syndicalists looked to the sea as a likelyarena for developing new structures to govern social relations in land-space (Sekula 1995), and anumber of contemporary anarchists and scholars continue to find inspiration in the communal,non-statist ethics of the mercantile-era pirate band (Kuhn 1997; Osborne 1998; Rediker 1987;Wilson 1995).



2NC – K Prior – Aff Suspect

Production-first energy ideology skews technology assessment – all aff

solvency evidence is suspect.


Power Tools Unsurprisingly, profit motives likely induce much of the gravitational fieldsurrounding productivist energy solutions. For the most part, knowledge elites can patent orotherwise control productivist technologies — manufacturing, marketing, and selling them for a profit (or at least federal handouts). On the other hand, many energy reduction strategies are not patentable because they are based on age-old wisdom and common sense. Solar photovoltaiccircuitry, wind turbine modulators, nuclear processes, and even biomass crops are all patentableand commodifiable in a way that passive solar strategies and walkable neighborhoods are not.The profit motive of this ilk is a chronic theme in America; we are a country that values drugresearch (commodifiable) over preventative health (not commodifiable); most of our soybeanfields are planted with corporate issue genetically modified plants (patentable) rather than seed

saved from last year‘s crop (not patentable). The debate about whether profits are a noble or acorrupted motivation is a political matter to be argued over a pint of beer, not here in these pages.I aim only to shed the humblest flicker of light on the illusion that the world of alternative energyoperates within some virtuous form of economics. It doesn‘t. The global economic systemrewards the commoditization of knowledge and resources for profit — why would we expect it to be any different for the field of alternative energy? It‘s not just our economic system that offersvirulence to our productivist inclinations; our political system does as well. The politics of production are far more palatable than the politics of restraint, as President Jimmy Carter learnedin the 1970s. When he asked Americans to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater, hereceived a boost in the polls. But voters ultimately turned to label him a pedantic president oflimits. ―No one has yet won an election in the United States by lecturing Americans about limits,even if common sense suggests such homilies may be overdue,‖ remarks historian Simon

Schama. ―Each time the United States has experienced an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia,new versions of frontier reinvigoration have been sold to the electors as national tonic.‖31 Cleanenergy is the tonic of choice for the discerning environmentalist. Over recent decades, flows of power within America and other parts of the world began pooling around alternative energytechnologies. Mainstream environmental organizations took a technological turn, which gainedmomentum during the 1970s and became especially palpable in the 1980s when the BrundtlandCommission brought the idea of sustainable development into the spotlight. The commission passed over societal programs to instead underline technology as the central focus of sustainabledevelopment policy.32 The commission‘s 1987 report, Our Common Future, stated, ―New andemerging technologies offer enormous opportunities for raising productivity and living standards,

for improving health, and for conserving the natural resource base.‖33 This faith in the ability of

technologies to deliver sustainable forms of development evolved during a period of publiceuphoria surrounding information technology, agricultural efficiency through petrochemicals,management technology, and genetic engineering. As in other periods throughout Americanhistory, there was a sense that if nature came up short, the wellspring of good ol‘ Americanknow-how would take up the slack.34 Mainstream environmental organizations were all tooeager to fill the pews of this newly energized church of technological sustainability, which theythemselves had helped to consecrate. For instance, a World Resources Institute publicationdeclared in 1991, ―Technological change has contributed most to the expansion of wealth and



productivity. Properly channeled, it could hold the key to environmental sustainability as well.‖35The next year the United Nations developed a sustainable development action plan called Agenda21, which charged technological development with alleviating harmful impacts of growth. As thenew centerpiece of social policy, there was little debate around technology, other than how toimplement it. During the 1980s and ‘90s, environmental organizations began to disengage fromthe dominant 1960s ideals, which centered on the earth‘s limits to growth. They shifted to

embrace technological interventions that might act to continually push such limits back, makingroom for so-called sustainable development. The former enthusiasm for stringent governmentregulation waned as environmental organizations expanded the roles for ―corporateresponsibility‖ and ―voluntary restrictions.‖ As a result, legislators pushed aside publicenvironmental stewardship and filled the gap with corporate techniques such as triple-bottomlineaccounting and closed-loop production systems, which purported to be good for the environmentand good for profits.36 In 2002, breaking with past mandates, the United Nations World Summiton Sustainable Development‘s Plan of Implementation narrowed its assessments by assuming that

technological sustainability would require ―little if any political and cultural negotiation about modern lifestyles, or about the global systems of production, information, and finance on whichthey rest.‖37 And by 2004, Australia Research Council Fellow Aidan Davison observed that ―theinstrumentalist representation of technologies as unquestioned loyal servants‖ had come to fully

dominate sustainable development policy.38

Renewables solvency claims are symptoms of productivist ideology.


Erecting the Clean-Energy Spectacle Since progrowth ideals are well-funded, politically powerful, connected with media, and pervasive in public thought, it‘s no surprise that most of ushave come to accept many progrowth premises as self-evident truth. Together they form aformidable force within local and international polity and economy. We expect companies toincrease their earnings, labor to expand, and material wealth to increase throughout the world

until every last child is fed, clothed, educated, and prosperous. This story line is conceivable onlyif we are willing to delude ourselves into believing there are enough resources on the planet formany more inhabitants of the future to consume, eat, play, and work at the standards that wealthycitizens enjoy. I‘ve come across little convincing research to support the possibility that this is physically viable today, let alone in a more heavily populated and resource depleted planet of thefuture.41 These progrowth ideals act to structure future energy investments. For instance, theInternational Energy Agency (iea), as do other governmental agencies, crafts long-term predictions of world energy use, primarily extrapolating from past trends in population growth,consumption, efficiency, and other factors. Subsequently, large energy firms evoke these predictions in their business plans in efforts to prod governments and investors to support drilling,exploration, pipeline construction, and other productivist undertakings. Alternative-energycompanies have historically done the same. Once firms translate these predictions into

investment, and investment into new energy supply, energy becomes more affordable andavailable. Energy consumption increases and the original predictions come true. Numerous actorsand factors hold the self-fulfilling prophecy together. Powerful energy lobbies promote their productivist inclinations in the halls of government. Industry and a consumer driven public sop upany excess supply with a corresponding increase in demand.42 And since side effects are oftenhidden or displaced, the beneficiaries can continue at the expense of others who are less politically powerful, or who have not yet been born. For all practical purposes these side effectsmust remain hidden in order for the process to continue.43 Experts have developed a language todetermine what is counted and what is not.44 For instance, an influential congressional report



from the National Research Council, entitled The Hidden Costs of Energy, explicates numerousdisadvantages, limitations, and side effects of energy production and use. But it specificallyexcludes some of the most horrible of these — including deaths and injuries from energy-relatedactivities as well as food price increases stemming from biofuel production.45 The authorsdedicate several pages and even a clumsy appendix to convincing readers that such factorsneedn‘t be interrogated because they don‘t meet the economic definition of ―externalities.‖ Here

their tightly scripted definition comes to run the show. It stands in for human judgment to decidewhat gets counted and what doesn‘t. Within this code, a whole world of side effects needn‘t beinterrogated if they don‘t fit neatly within the confines of a definition.46 In a moment of trainedincapacity, the authors miss that it‘s the definition itself that requires interrogation.47 It‘s not particularly shocking that this could happen in a formal policy report. It happens all the time.What‘s shocking is that a report featuring such glaring omissions could attract the signoff of over

one hundred of the nation‘s most influential scientific advisers. There are some oversights it takesa PhD to make.48 Since we live on a finite planet with finite resources, the system of ever-increasing expectations, translated into ever-increasing demand, and resulting in again increasedexpectations will someday come to an end, at least within the physical rules of the natural worldas we understand them. Whether that end is due to an intervention in the cycle that humanity plans and executes or a more unpredictable and perhaps cataclysmic end that comes unexpectedly

in the night is a decision that may ultimately be made by the generations of people alive today.Perhaps we should find the courage to do more than simply extrapolate recent trends into thefuture and instead develop predictions for a future we would like to inhabit. These are, after all,the aspirations that will become the basis for policy, investment, technological development, andultimately the future state of the planet and its occupants.49 The immediate problem, it seems, isnot that we will run out of fossil-fuel sources any time soon, but that the places we tap for theseresources — tar sands, deep seabeds, and wildlife preserves — will constitute a much dirtier, moreunstable, and far more expensive portfolio of fossil-fuel choices in the future. Certainlyalternative-energy technologies seem an alluring solution to this challenge. Set against the backdrop of a clear blue sky, alternative-energy technologies shimmer with hope for a cleaner, better future. Understandably, we like that. Alternative energy technologies are alreadygenerating a small, yet enticing, impact on our energy system, making it easier for us to envision

solar-powered transporters flying around gleaming spires of the future metropolis. And while thisis a pristine and alluring vision, the sad fact is that alternative-energy technologies have no suchgreat potential within the context that Americans have created for them. An impact, yes, perhapseven a meaningful one someday in an alternate milieu. However, little convincing evidencesupports the fantasy that alternative-energy technologies could equitably fulfill our current energyconsumption, let alone an even larger human population living at higher standards of living.



2NC – Turns Case (Energy/Climate)

Changing the ideological structure that governs energy use is a pre-requisite

for renewables to have a positive impact.

Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ‘12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets ofClean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 173

In the existing American context, increasing alternative energy production will not displacefossil-fuel side effects but will instead simply add more side effects to the mix (and as we haveseen, there are plenty of alternative-energy side effects to be wary of ). So instead of a world with just the dreadful side effects of fossil fuels, we will enter into a future world with the dreadfulside effects of fossil fuel plus the dreadful side effects of alternative-energy technologies — hardlya durable formula for community or environmental prosperity. If we had different political, legal,and economic structures and backstops to assure that alternative-energy production woulddirectly offset fossilfuel use, these technologies might make more sense. But it will take years toinstitute such vital changes. Focusing our efforts on alternative-energy production now onlyserves to distract us from the real job that needs to be done. Worse yet, if fundamental economic,social, and cultural upgrades are not instituted, the project of alternative energy is bound to fail,which would likely lead to crippling levels of public cynicism toward future efforts to producecleaner forms of power. As it stands now, even if alternative-energy schemes were free, theymight still be too expensive given their extreme social costs and striking inability to displacefossil-fuel use. But as it turns out, they aren‘t free at all—they‘re enormously expensive.

Shifting the discourse of renewable energy from development to sufficiency is

a pre-requisite for solvency.

Karena SHAW Envt‘l Studies @ Victoria ‘11 ―Climate deadlocks: the environmental politics ofenergy systems‖ Environmental Politics 20:5 p.757-758

Keeping an eye on the ball Unpacking what is at stake in the conflicts over climate and energy policy in BC is a struggle, not least as so many different things are at stake.19 What I seek toresist here is what I argue was the source of the conflict amongst environmentalists describedabove: the reduction of climate change policy to an emissions-reduction agenda. Reducing the problem in this way – although it does make it more tractable as a policy issue – runs a range of

very real risks.20 Most centrally, it runs the risk of decreasing the sustainability of our

societies precisely as we seek to address climate change, through increasing the environmental

impact and social inequality produced by our energy systems. Although the impact within BC ofthe kind of large-scale renewable energy development promoted by the Liberal government will

depend largely on the policy framework through which it is enacted, there are few indications

that this framework will include attentiveness to values of ecological resilience and social

equity – quite the opposite.21 Further, it is unclear that developing renewable energy for export

will actually have much impact in reducing GHG emissions. There is no clear policy frameworkto ensure that exported energy will displace GHG-producing sources,22 and even if maximizedBC‘s export capacity will be a drop in the bucket of demand from its southern neighbors. Themost concrete impact is likely to be economic, but private ownership of the plants minimizessome of this benefit to British Columbians, even as it also distributes some of the risk.23 So the



current approach runs some serious risks – to biodiversity, equity, and climate change mitigationitself – for some fairly tenuous benefits. All of this is not to say that the Liberal climate policy isfor naught: it contains many important elements, and may well result in a reduction of domesticGHG emissions. It may also do so in a way that is economically beneficial to the province.However, the energy policy element of it also runs the risk of worsening the longer termsustainability profile of the province. Most worrisome in this regard is the further exclusion of the

public from any engagement with energy policy itself. Decisions are being made at a range ofscales that will determine the character of BC for the foreseeable future – its economic structure,large-scale infrastructure, environmental impact (both generalized and specific), capacities formitigating and adapting to climate change – without the explicit engagement of the citizens of the province. And the trend is towards reducing their capacity to participate in such decisionmaking:with the passage of the Clean Energy Act, all major energy decisions in the province will beremoved from any independent oversight. These are decisions with direct ramifications forclimate change: whether to build a large transmission line to northwestern BC to facilitate large-scale oil and gas development there, for example, or whether to build a large (900 MW) dam onthe Peace River. Likewise the decision to change BC‘s own energy policy priority from one of

cost-effective self-sufficiency to being a ‗clean energy powerhouse‘ suggests a maximization

of energy production in the province, something that may in fact be deeply problematic interms of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The point I wish to emphasize here concernsless the substance of the decisions being made, however, than the implications of, on the onehand, failing to robustly integrate climate and energy policy, and, on the other, of excluding the public from engagement with these policy decisions. If we accept the framing of climate changeas an energy problem presented above, these decisions are some of the most vital when it comesto choosing how to respond to climate change. Further, they are decisions with direct and verylong-term implications for society. Given the nature of climate change as an energy problem, theenergy system could provide a powerful tool to assist society in responding to climate change.Establishing feedback loops around energy use and impact, for example, could encourageindividual, social and technological innovation to increase the sustainability of society. Creatingthe possibility that the energy system should be developed in accordance with wider social values

and commitments could in this way provide a robust focus for the kind of social transformationnecessary to respond effectively to climate change. Perhaps many of the decisions reachedcollectively would mirror or echo those being made on behalf of the public now, but if so theywould proceed with social license – and understanding and appreciation of what is at stake in thedecisions – rather than the resistance they face today. As this suggests, perhaps the mostimportant issue raised when we reframe climate change as an energy problem is the issue of politics. When we understand how central energy systems are both to climate mitigation and tosocial, economic, and ecological futures, it poses the question of how to respond to this politically. It causes us to confront the considerable momentum around an emissions reduction policy focus that might indeed achieve part of its goal, but whose goal is insufficient to the potential we face. At the very least, a primary focus on emissions reduction is a risky strategy – the possibilities for climate change mitigation that arise from an energy systems focus are much

more diverse and robust. But more, such a focus excludes the social, ecological and political benefits that could arise from a serious engagement with energy systems. What such anengagement might look like is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can see potential roots of itemerging in the struggle of environmental groups in BC to situate energy policy within anecological, social and political context. To put it perhaps most bluntly: the challenges of puttingenergy systems at the center of environmental politics are myriad, but in a world seeking torespond to climate change there is no more salient political focus.



2NC Impact – Structural Violence

Unsustainable consumption produces limitless slow violence – we should

privilege displaced structural violence over their immediate scenarios.

Rob NIXON English @ Wisconsin ‘11 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor p.1-4

When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated that the bank develop ascheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, hedid so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning. Such a scheme, Summers elaborated,would help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is anoverlooked but crucial subsidiary benefit that he outlined: offloading rich-nation toxins onto theworld's poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nationenvironmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effluent that theycondemned as health threats and found aesthetically offensive. Summers thus rationalized his poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefit the United States andEurope economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nationenvironmentalists. Summers' arguments assumed a direct link between aesthetically unsightlywaste and Africa as an out-of-sight continent, a place remote from green activists' terrain ofconcern. In Summers' win-win scenario for the global North, the African recipients of his plan

were triply discounted : discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of

what I call in this book " slow violence," and discounted as cultures possessing environmental

practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers' extraordinary proposal because itcaptures the strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts theenvironments-and the environmentalism of the poor. Three primary concerns animate this book,chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, andtheoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs

gradually and out of Sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and

space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence iscustomarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacularin space, and as erupting into instant sensational viSibility. We need, I believe, to engage adifferent kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather

incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal

scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategicchallenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawingcryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars,acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes presentformidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively.

The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecologicalthat result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons ofmass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries withmass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions ofviolence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventionalassumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused,time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow



violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domesticabuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge isrepresentational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional butalso exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferatingconflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually

degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral,eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades,even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and acceleratedspecies loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convolutedcataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the mediavenerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediateneed, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image andnarrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymousand that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driventechnologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence intostories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these

emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of ourtime? This book's second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen povertyis compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Ourmedia bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated asdisposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those

whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called" disposable people ."z It is against such

conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgentenvironmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not excluSively) across the so-called globalSouth. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults onresources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles orthrough activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal

alliances. "The poor" is a compendious category subject to almost infinite local variation as wellas to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation.Confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development, impoverishedcommunities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. Howmuch control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence andmarket strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive survival? How will that community negotiatecompeting definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, andthe moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvisedalliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverishedresource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments areseamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threatnot as a planetary abstraction but as a set of inhabited risks, some imminent, others obscurely

long term.

Survival rhetoric is ideological – their impacts prove we need to critique the

ideology of development and production.

Wolfgang SACHS Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy ‘99 Planet Dialectics p. 67-68



In the late 1980s, concern about dwindling resources and worldwide pollution reached thecommanding heights of international politics. Multilateral agencies now distribute biomassconverters and design forestry programmes, economic summits quarrel about carbon dioxideemissions, and scientists launch satellites into orbit in order to check on the planet's health. Butthe discourse that is rising to prominence has taken on a fundamentally biased orientation: it callsfor extended management, but disregards intelligent self-limitation. As the dangers mount, new

products, procedures and programmes are invented to stave off the threatening effects ofindustrialism and keep the system afloat. Capital, bureaucracy and science - the venerable trinityof Western modernization - declare themselves indispensable in the new crisis and promise to prevent the worst through better engineering, integrated planning and more sophisticated models.However, fuel efficient machines, environmental risk assessment analyses, the close monitoringof natural processes and the like, well-intended as they may be, have two assumptions incommon: first, that society will always be driven to test nature to its limits, and second, that theexploitation of nature should be neither maximized nor minimized, but ought to be optimized. Asthe 1987 report of the World Resources Institute states programmatically on its first page: 'Thehuman race relies on the environment and therefore must manage it wisely. ' Clearly, the word'therefore' is the crux of the matter; it is relevant only if the competitive dynamic of the industrialsystem is taken for granted. Otherwise, the environment would not be in danger and could be left

without management. Calls for securing the survival of the planet are often, upon closer

inspection, nothing more than calls for the survival of the industrial system . Capital-,

bureaucracy- and science-intensive solutions to environmental decline, in addition, are notwithout social costs. The herculean task of keeping the global industrial machine running at ever

increasing speed, and at the same time safeguarding the bisophere, will require a giant leap in

surveillance and regulation. How else should the myriad decisions, from the individual to thenational and the global levels, be brought into line? It is of secondary importance whether thestreamlining of industrialism will be achieved, if at all, through market incentives, strictlegislation, remedial programmes, sophisticated spying or outright prohibitions. What matters is

that all these strategies call for more centralism , in particular for a stronger state. Since ecocrats

rarely call into question the industrial model of living in order to reduce the burden on nature,they are left with the necessity of synchronizing the innumerable activities of society with all theskill, foresight and tools of advancing technology they can muster. The real historical challenge,therefore, must be addressed in something other than ecocratic terms: how is it possible to buildecological societies with less government and less professional dominance? The ecocraticdiscourse that is about to unfold in the 1990s starts from the conceptual marriage of 'environment' and 'development', finds its cognitive base in ecosystems theory, and aims at new levels of

administrative monitoring and control. Unwilling to reconsider the logic of competitive

productivism that is at the root of the planet's ecological plight, it reduces ecology to a set of

managerial strategies aiming at resource efficiency and risk management. It treats as a technical problem what in fact amounts to no less than a civilizational impasse - namely, that the level of productive performance already achieved turns out to be not viable in the North, let alone for the

rest of the globe. With the rise of ecocracy, however, the fundamental debate that is needed on

issues of public morality - how society should live, or what, how much and in what way it

should produce and consume - falls into oblivion . Instead, Western aspirations are taken for

granted, and not only in the West but worldwide, and societies that choose not to put all their

energy into production and deliberately accept a lower throughput of commodities become

unthinkable. What falls by the wayside are efforts to elucidate the much broader range of

futures open to societies that limit their levels of material output in order to cherish whatever



ideals emerge from their cultural heritages. The ecocratic perception remains blind to diversityoutside the economic society of the West.



2NC Impact – Energy Technocracy

The supply-side energy regime produces chronic failure. Energy becomes an

end-in-itself with no social or ethical guidance.

John BYRNE Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy & Public Policy @Delaware AND Noah TOLY Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy ‗6 in Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, & Glover p. 20-21 [Gender paraphrased]

The Technique of Modern Energy Governance While moderns usually declare strong preferencesfor democratic governance, their preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude theachievement of such ambitions, or require changes in the meaning of democracy that are soextensive as to raise doubts about its coherence. A veneration of technical monuments typifies both conventional and sustainable energy strategies and reflects a shared belief in technologicaladvance as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern proclivity to search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery has led some to warnof a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in which socialvalues are sublimated by the objective norms of technical success (e.g., the celebration of

efficiency in all things). In this politics, technology and its use become the end of society and

members have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu what

should be valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133- 146) replaces

critical thinking about modern life with an awed sense and acceptance of its inevitable reality .

From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant Power, to the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers modernistenergy transitions. Refinement of technical accomplishments and/or technological revolutions are

conceived to drive social transformation, despite the unending inequality that has accompanied

two centuries of modern energy's social project. As one observer has noted (Roszak, 1972: 479),

the "great paradox of the technological mystique [is] its remarkable ability to grow strong bychronic failure . While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for

disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technicalexpertise." Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by the magnetismof technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace a strain oftechnological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to authoritativestatus vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and systems. Such agovernance structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain described by Mumford (1964). Governance "by the people" consists of authorizing qualified experts to assist politicalleaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In the narratives of both conventional andsustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of the energy regime whilelargely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations. Indeed, systems of the sort

envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies are not governable in ademocratic manner. Mumford suggests ( 1964: I) that the classical idea of democracy includes "agroup of related ideas and practices ... [including] communal self-government ... unimpededaccess to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and asense of moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community." Modernconventional and sustainable energy strategies invest in external controls, authorize abstract,depersonalized interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate economic growth andtechnical excellence without end. Their social consequences are relegated in both paradigms tothe status of problems-to-be-solved, rather than being recognized as the emblems of modernist



politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality,which "deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, [and]overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimatelycontrol over [hu]man[ity] himself, the chief purpose of existence" (Mumford, 1964: 5).Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regardedas scientifically and technologically unassailable.

Challenging technocratic energy regimes is a pre-requisite for meaningful

existence.

Andrew FEENBERG Philosophy of Technology @ Simon Fraser (Canada) ‘10 Between Reason

and Experience p. 69-72

For many critics of technological society, Marx is now irrelevant, an advocate of outdatedeconomic theories. But Marx had important insights for philosophy of technology that must not be lost along with his discredited economics. He focused so exclusively on economics because production was the principal domain of application of technology in his time. With the penetration of technical mediation into every sphere of social life, contradictions and potentials

similar to those he identified in the factory follow as well. In Marx's view, the capitalist isultimately distinguished not just by ownership of wealth but also by control of the conditions oflabor. The owner has a technical as well as an economic interest in what goes on within hisfactory. By reorganizing the work process, he can increase production and profits. Control of thework process, in turn, gives rise to new ideas for machinery, and the mechanization of industryfollows in short order. This leads over time to the invention of a specific type of machinery thatdeskills workers and requires management. Management acts technically on persons, extendingthe hierarchy of technical subject and object into human relations in pursuit of efficiency.Eventually professional managers represent and in some sense replace owners in control of thenew industrial organizations. Marx calls this the "impersonal domination" inherent in capitalismin contradistinction to the personal domination of earlier social formations. It is materialized inthe design of machines and the organization of production. In a final stage, which Marx did not

anticipate, techniques of management and organization and types of technology first applied tothe private sector are exported to the public sector, where they influence governmentadministration, medicine, and education. The whole life environment of society comes under the

rule of technique . In this form the technological essence of the capitalist system can be

transferred to socialist regimes built on the model of the Soviet Union. The entire development ofmodern societies is thus marked by the paradigm of unqualified control over the labor process onwhich capitalist industrialism rests. Technical development is oriented toward the disempoweringof workers and the massification of the public. This is "operational autonomy," the freedom of theowner or her representative to make independent decisions about how to carry on the business ofthe organization, regardless of the views or interests of subordinate actors and the surroundingcommunity. The operational autonomy of management and administration positions them in atechnical relation to the world, safe from the consequences of their own actions. Theseconsequences may be dire where the enterprise rides roughshod over worker and communityinterests, but from the suppression of the Luddites down to the present, the agents of enterprisehave usually been protected from the resulting outcry. In addition, operational autonomy enablesthem to reproduce the conditions of their own supremacy at each change in the technologies theycommand. Technocracy is an extension of such a system to society as a whole in response to thespread of technology and management to every sector of social life. Technocracy armors itselfagainst public pressures, sacrifices community values, and ignores needs incompatible with itsown reproduction and the perpetuation of its technical traditions. The technocratic tendency of



modern societies represents one possible path of development, a path shaped by the demands of power. In subjecting human beings to technical control at the expense of traditional modes of lifewhile sharply restricting participation in design, technocracy perpetuates elite power structuresinherited from the past in technically rational forms. In the process it mutilates not just human beings and nature but also technology. Technology has beneficial potentialities that aresuppressed under capitalism and state socialism. These potentialities could be realized along a

different developmental path were power more equally distributed. Critical theory of technologyidentifies the limits of the technical codes elaborated under the rule of operational autonomy. Thevery same process in which capitalists and technocrats were freed to make technical decisionswithout regard for the needs of workers and communities generated a wealth of new "values,"ethical demands forced to seek voice discursively. Democratization of technology is aboutfinding new ways of privileging these excluded values and realizing them in technicalarrangements. A fuller realization of technology is possible and necessary. We are more and morefrequently alerted to this necessity by the threatening side effects of technological advance. Theseside effects constitute feedback loops from the objects of our technical control to us as thesubjects of that control. Normally the feedback is reduced or deferred so that the subject oftechnical action is safe from the power unleashed by its own actions. But technology can "bite back," as Edward Tenner reminds us, with fearful consequences as the feedback loops that join

technical subject and object become more obtrusive (Tenner 1996). Today we are most obviouslyaware of this from the example of climate change, an unintended consequence of almosteverything we do. The very success of our technology ensures that these loops will grow shorteras we disturb nature more violently in attempting to control it. In a society such as ours, which is

completely organized around ever-more-powerful technologies, the threat to survival is clear .



AT: Climate O/W

Only an alternative to development and production can create the

institutional changes to cope with climate impacts.


Preparing for Climate Change More than a few climate scientists fear it may not matter what wedo to slow climate change — it may already be too late. Others believe that harms could beavoided but hold little hope that humans are capable of mobilizing the necessary changes. Even ifAmericans stop burning oil, coal, and natural gas, some say, the Russians, Indians, and Chinesewill burn it anyway, leading to the same global outcome either way. Keeping the world below atwo-degree-Celsius global temperature rise will require every signatory nation of the CopenhagenAccord to perform within the top range of their promises according to the International EnergyAgency, a goal the organization‘s chief economist Fatih Birol claims is ―too good to be

believed.‖6 Climatologists claim we‘ll be lucky if sea levels rise less than two feet. They expectthat in forty years the probability of experiencing a summer hotter than any yet recorded will be10 – 50 percent. In eighty years the chances rise to 90 percent.7 Long before then, scientists believe that heat waves will increasingly shock crops — a single hot day can cut local agriculturalyields by 7 percent. In a world with unbounded emissions, they warn, yields could decline 63 – 82 percent.8 Are these pessimistic outlooks justified? Perhaps. Does it mean we shouldn‘t botherimplementing the first steps outlined in this book? Absolutely not, and here ‘s why: In a worldravaged by climate change, these initial strategies will become not only valuable, but vital. Evenif the first steps I have proposed are only partially realized (as they already are to varying degreesthroughout the world), they should still prove advantageous. In a world with a rapidly changingclimate, we ‘ll be better equipped to coordinate international cooperation if we‘ve been peacefullysupporting world democracies, transparency, and the rights of workers. We ‘ll be better preparedto deal with local calamities if our neighborhoods are more accessible by walking and biking andour civic organizations are strong. If storms ravage the world‘s fields, it will be easier to movecrop production to lesser-quality fields if there are fewer mouths to feed. If heating or cooling ourhomes becomes too expensive, we‘ll be thankful they are well insulated and designed to make the

most of the sun‘s energy. If members of society are unequally impacted, we ‘ll be fortunate tohave a government designed for citizens, not moneyed special interests. If it comes to makingdifficult choices about goods and services, we ‘ll benefit from economies with more socially based enterprises rather than those devised to consolidate profits for distant shareholders. Andwhen the holidays arrive, we‘ll be thankful we‘ve come to appreciate the many gifts of ourfriends and family, even if they are not the kinds that arrive wrapped in a box. In short, thestrategies we can embrace to avoid catastrophic global climate change are the same ones we ‘llneed should the worst occur . And if those horrors don‘t unfurl? Well then, we‘ll likely be leftwith stronger communities, empowered women and girls, lower crime rates, cleaner air, more

free time, and higher levels of happiness. Not a bad wager.

Specific scenarios in energy-transition planning should receive less weight

than social goals. Expert specificity is more vulnerable to short-term thinking

and bias in favor of existing interests.



Derk LOORBACH Dutch Research Institute For Transitions @ Erasmus University(Netherlands) ‗7 Transition Management: New Mode of Governance for Sustainable

Development p. 91-92

Anticipative strategies in general help to deal with three problems of intelligent change: 1)ignorance: uncertainties about the future and the causal structure of experience, 2) conflict:

inconsistencies in preferences and interests, 3) ambiguity: lack of clarity, instability andendogeneity in preferences and interests (March and Olson 1995). Like Lindblom, March andOlsen are negative about the use of expert intelligence, saying that "the history of efforts to actintelligently in democracies is a history of mistakes". They are especially critical about political

change based on anticipatory rationality , based on backward reasoning from anticipated

consequences5 : "Too many atrocities of stupidity and immorality have been based on

anticipatory rationality, and too many efforts to improve human action through importingtechnologies of decision engineering have been disappointing" (March and Olson 1995 198-199).They clearly show the limitations of the use of anticipatory outcomes but are too negative withregard to anticipation in general. Anticipation in general seems to be a good basis for action, atleast when taking into account uncertainties and maintaining reflexive. In part, this is what

transition management tries to make explicit through its use of visions. Although transitionvisions are primarily meant as guidance for short-term action (Grin and Grunwald 2000), theyalso help to influence or shape expectations about what might happen (thereby also influencing

anticipatory behaviour). Transition visions and goals are therefore by no means expert

predictions or 'hard' goals for policy , but much more represent qualitative societal goals and

ambitions that evolve through new insights, knowledge and experiences derived from short-termexperiments. In transition management experiences thus inform next steps as much as long-termvisions and ambitions do. So visions and transition processes are mutually dependent: visions areguiding in transition processes but transitions do also co-shape the visions developed. This isexactly the aim of transition management, to pressurize the current regime subtly, by developingalternative visions and an alternative agenda within protected environments, transition arenas(Meadowcroft 2005).



AT: Renewables Better than FF

Comparing different production sources detracts from genuine debate

changing consumption.Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ‘12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets ofClean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 333-335

Asking Better Questions When I criticize alternative-energy technologies, clean-energy

proponents frequently grumble that I just don‘t get it. Each energy technology needn‘t be perfect,they say, because in the future we ‘ll rely on a mix of energy sources — a little solar, a little wind,a little biofuel, and so on. They have a valid point, to be sure; I won‘t argue with that. But I wouldargue instead that ―a little, plus a little, plus a little‖ won‘t get a growing consumption basedeconomy very far. We would need ―a lot, plus a lot, plus a lot‖ for that. Creating meaningfulquantities of any so called clean energy certainly won‘t be easy or affordable. Even if we wereable to pull it off, these technologies stand to intensify and entrench energy-intensive ways oflife — hardly a durable formula for social or environmental prosperity. This boomerang effect ismost pronounced in economic, political, and social contexts that prioritize material growth as thesole measurement of well-being. In the United States, lavishly fueling this Wall Street model ofeconomic expansion has led to drops in almost every quality-of-life indicator compared to otherindustrialized nations, including health care, happiness, equality, primary education, and trust.1Cheap power drives growth, expands gdp, ratchets up sprawl, and fuels surplus materialconsumption. Generating even more power, regardless of the means used, won‘t quench thesefactors but will rather extend their reach. Given present American demographics andconsumption, an alternative-energy future doesn‘t look especially probable or desirable. Even ifwe could afford to dramatically increase alternative energy production, what would such a futurelook like? Would simply adding alternative energy to our current sociopolitical system lead togreater well-being? Or would it just leave us with another strain of fossil-fuel dependence,spinning off hyperconsumption and additional side effects? When alternative-energy

productivists do acknowledge the leaks, waste, and other consequences of ―clean‖ energy, theyquickly follow up by asserting that these effluents are less harmful than those from theexceptionally dirty fossil-fuel industries. In a very limited sense, they may be right, but they areusing an inappropriate and misleading benchmark. Comparing every new energy technology tothe filth of fossil fuels is hardly a reasonable yardstick for thoughtful people — especially when wehave no historical experience, current data, or future backstops in place to assume that thesetechnologies will even offset fossil fuel use at all. Nevertheless, energy rhetoric in the UnitedStates has largely devolved into arguments pitting production versus production in manufactured pseudodebates that fool us into thinking we are making genuine energy choices. The only reasonthese appear to be reasonable comparisons is that we are so deeply immersed in the dirty fossil-fuel way of life that a less-dirty bad idea can seem good. (We should remember that the rise of

petroleum itself was seen initially as an environmental benefit as it slowed the extermination ofwhales for their oil.) Why not measure the virtues of electric vehicles against the virtues ofwalkable neighborhoods? Or the benefits of solar cells against the benefits of supportingcomprehensive women‘s rights? Or the costs of nuclear energy against the costs of pluggingenergy leaks? These are the comparisons environmentalists should be thinking about, because in aworld of limited finances and pricey resources, these are the very real trade-offs that will defineour lived experience. So where can we best invest our time, energy, resources, and research?Consider a dilemma many environmental organizations face. If you had a million dollars to



reduce environmental harms, where would you spend it? Numerous researchers have attempted tolocate where you‘d get the best bang for your buck. Nearly a decade ago, Robert Socolow andStephan Pacala published an article in Science envisioning fifteen potential ―wedges‖ to flattenthe upward trend of co2 emissions (e.g., vehicle efficiency, carbon sequestration, solar power,cropping alterations, etc.), only seven of which would have to be fully implemented for success.2Another team at the consultancy McKinsey and Company extended this work by ranking co2

reduction schemes by cost and benefit.3 Their rankings fall into three overlapping clusters: (1)energy-efficiency strategies that typically save money, (2) agriculture and forestry managementthat either save a little or cost a little, and (3) energy-production strategies that cost the most perton of ―avoided co2.‖ Both of these prominent studies greatly influence environmental researchand policy. Nevertheless, while these studies are helpful analytical tools, they are perfectlyunsuitable for high-level decisionmaking. First, they draw upon the ahistorical assumption thatincreasing efficiency or expanding alternative-energy production will automatically displacefossil-fuel use. Further, they limit their options to trendy interventions and leave their results to benarrowly dictated by convenient cost and co2 abatement measurements. More fundamentally,they attend to the symptoms rather than the sources of our energy troubles. Foundationalstrategies such as human rights, or costs extending beyond dollars and cents, or benefits asidefrom co2 abatement are all unintelligible within such fact-making missions. Truths are as much a

matter of questions as answers.



AT: Perm

Discourse of sustainable development intensifies the ecological and economic

contradictions in capitalist exploitation of the oceans.


The stewardship of ocean-space The third aspect of the postmodern era's social construction ofoceanspacestewardship - fuses the late capitalist concern for nature with the concept ofstewardship that characterized the Roman Mediterranean and mercantilist-era ocean-spaceconstructions as well as elements of the industrial capitalist-era construction. Under thestewardship paradigm, the ocean is seen as a socially significant space providing crucial resources(whether these are resources of connection or material resources). To ensure access to theseresources, the ocean (or areas thereof) is designated as off-limits to territorial appropriation, butindividual states, the community of states, and/ or non-state actors are permitted to exercise social power in the interest of stewarding marine resources. I The postmodern doctrine of marinestewardship continues and intensifies this construction, but with a key difference: In themercantilist era, the sea was designated as a special space insulated from the norms of possessionand property (res extra commercium) because of the special function that it served as a surface fortrade. In the postmodern era, the basis for this designation has been expanded because the seaincreasingly also serves as a special space of nature. In contrast to the intervening industrial era,when the sea was denigrated as a void between the terrestrial spaces of production andconsumption, the ocean once again is constructed as a significant space wherein states andintergovernmental entities are permitted to exercise non-territorial power so as to manage theocean's resources in a rational, efficiency-maximizing manner and to ensure continued access toresources deemed necessary for the long-term survival of the social system. -1 This "nature-space" (or "resource-space") perspective on the ocean, which expands upon some of the resource-specific non-territorial treaties of the late industrial era, can be seen in a number of recentintergovernmental initiatives, such as Part XII of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea(United Nations 1983); Chapter 17 of Agenda 21, the report of the UN Conference onEnvironment and Development (United Nations 1993); and the events and programs surroundingthe International Year of the Ocean, 1998. These programs and documents, especially the lattertwo, explicitly place the world-ocean within the discourse of sustainable development, adiscourse that others have noted is devoted to the rational management of scarce resources so thatnature can continue to serve as a material base for capital accumulation well into the twenty-firstcentury (M. O'Connor 1994a). As the statement of objectives for the International Year of theOcean (IYO) reads, in its entirety: The overall objective is to focus and reinforce the attention ofthe public, governments and decision makers at large on the importance of the oceans and themarine environment as resources for sustainable development. The major aim of the joint effortsduring 1998 will be to create awareness and obtain commitments from governments to takeaction, provide adequate resources and give the priority to the ocean and coastal areas which they

deserve as finite economical assets. This is most important, in view of the increasing threats of pollution, population pressure, excessive fishing, coastal zone degradation and climate variabilityto the finite resource the ocean represents. Without a healthy ocean, the life-supporting system ofthe earth would be seriously endangered. (TOC 1997b, emphasis added)5 An IYO planningdocument leaves little doubt about its overall orientation toward what Esteva (1992) calls "the

reign of scarcity": "Finite size must be emphasized" in all IYO activities and publications(Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 1997a). This application of the sustainabledevelopment discourse to the ocean at the intergovernmental level has been supported by



representations of the ocean in the popular media. In 1995 alone, two major US publications,Time and National Geographic Magazine, featured cover stories celebrating the ocean as aresource-rich, but fragile environment (Lemonick 1995; Parfit 1995). Time tells an optimisticstory: The sea is a frontier replete with opportunity, at last capable of being "conquered." National Geographic Magazine tells a more pessimistic story: The sea is an endangeredenvironment wherein new technologies both respond to and reproduce scarcity. Both stories,

however, place the sea within a discourse of sustainable development similar to that constructed by the promoters of the IYO: As the sea is a space of "finite economical assets," thecommodification of its environment should be guided by long-term planning for maximumefficiency and productivity. Also associated with these efforts to promote investment in thesustained exploitation of the ocean's riches is a general campaign for what Leddy (1996) calls the"Cousteauization" of the oceans, a popular movement to cultivate public interest in the ocean's biota with the effect of generating support for further marine research and governmental and / orcorporate stewardship of marine resources, similar to the "Audubonization" of birdlife identified by Luke (2000). In the United States, perhaps the most visible spokesperson for this movementhas been publicist/ author / bureaucrat/ oceanographer Sylvia Earle, supported by a marineresearch and development military-industrial complex represented by individuals such ascomputer entrepreneur and former US Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard and retired

Admiral James Watkins, a former US Chief of Naval Operations and US Secretary of Energy,who headed the Consortium for Oceanographic Research ,a..n . d Education to January 2001(Broad 1997). 1 Like the other two aspects of the postmodern ocean-space construction, the riseof the stewardship principle reflects specific aspects of the spatiality of postmodern capitalism.Capitalism has a tendency to abstract space and time from nature (Lefebvre 1991) and, asAltvater (1994) notes, this abstraction has become exceptionally intense as the parameters of timeand space within which individual capitalists make investment decisions collide with the realityof nature, which is variable, contingent, and unpredictable. The discourse of sustainabledevelopment is an attempt to bypass capitalism's "ecological contradiction" by incorporating thematerial obstacles of space and time into the business cycle, with corporate leadership providingenvironmental stewardship (M. O'Connor 1994b). The discourse of a resource-rich, but fragileocean in need of comprehensive management and planning is the result (Nichols 1999). Kfhus,

National Geographic Magazine asserts that individuals engaged fishing must come to terms with"this world of inevitable limits" and give way to long-range planning undertaken by states andcorporations (Parfit 1995: 29). Although National Geographic Magazine regrets the loss of theindependent fishing boat owner plying the ocean's wilds, the bureaucratization of oceanmanagement and the privatization of rights to its resources is presented as the maturation of ourattitudes toward nature. The stewardship of marine resources by agents of capital is naturalizedthrough explicit parallels to the enclosure of agricultural land in the western United States:Fisheries, like post-Dust Bowl agriculture, must be allowed to evolve into "big industry: highlyregulated, tidy," where rational management is applied for long-term sustainability (Parfit 1995:37). A similar perspective is advocated by The Economist: If people want both to preserve the seaand extract the full benefit from it, they must now moderate their demands, and structure them.They must put aside ideas of the sea's immensity and power, and instead take stewardship of the

ocean, with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies. (Economist 1998: 18) /While thiselement of the postmodern construction of ocean-space should meet some of the requirements of postmodern capitalism, it, like the other two elements, cannot offer a permanent solution to the problems that inspired its creation. Considering that every adjustment in capitalism's mechanismfor (de)valuing nature implicitly poses a challenge to its means of ordering social relations(Harvey 1996), it appears unlikely that corporate decision-makers truly will be willing (or able) toadopt a calculus that incorporates the spatial and temporal conditions of production (J. O'Connor1994). _\ r Secondly, even if an ocean-management regime consistent with the stewardship principle were to negotiate successfully the ecological contradiction of capital, it still would need



to negotiate capitalism's spatial contradiction. Under postmodern capitalism, this spatialcontradiction is more intense than ever, as the ocean is increasingly used as an asocial space ofmovement (supported by the great void principle and the tendency toward annihilation), a socialspace of development (supported by the land-like principle and the tendency towardterritorialization), and a non-possessible space that provides crucial resources for the socialsystem (supported by the nature-space principle and the tendency toward stewardship). Each of

these objectives leads to contradictory policies. The territorialization of the sea (whether by anintergovernmental authority or individual states) would probably interfere with its maintenance asa friction-free transport surface. A regime dedicated to the preservation of free trade and theannihilation of barriers in oceanspace would probably fail to provide sufficient security for potential investors in extra-state P,roduction sites where they seek to locate spatially fixedinvestments. \And the granting of marine governance to a global ecocracy with the mission ofstewarding marine nature would probably interfere both with development objectives and withthe ideal of constructing the sea as a space immune to socially generated friction. j jDuring theindustrial era, a blending of these three principles was possible because their associated activitieswere performed less intensively and - to a large extent - they were carried out in distinct areas ofthe ocean. Now, as the associated uses intensify and overlap, they are increasingly in conflic.!:)Todate, one of the most dramatic of these conflicts has been the controversy surrounding the

establishment of a regime to govern the mining of manganese nodules from the deep seabed.

Changing the set of resources the ocean provides doesn‘t alter the

development frame.

Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‗1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p.19-20

Because the international regime/resource management perspective begins with the observationthat there are multiple, conflicting uses (and users) of ocean-space, this perspective especially isamenable to a more complex rethinking of the relationship between land-space and oceanspace.The "pluralist" nature of this perspective allows it to be expanded to include non-extractive"resources" provided by the ocean, including the "resources" of connection (as mobilized through

shipping) and domination (as mobilized through naval power). The merging of the various perspectives on ocean-space also has been encouraged by the intensification of ocean-space uses.J uda and Burroughs (1990), for instance, have argued that extractive-, military-, and transport-oriented activities now conflict so often within any given region of the ocean that the time hascome for a series of strong, regional ocean-space regimes to replace the many global single-useorganizations (e.g., the International Whaling Commission) that currently prevail. This expansionof the resource management perspective amidst multiple, conflicting uses is exemplified by a"multiple use" chart published in The Times Atlas and Encyclopaedia of the Sea, in whichnavigation/ communication, waste disposal/ pollution, strategy I defense, research, and recreationuses and concerns are considered alongside and in interaction and competition with the extractionand harnessing of mineral/ energy and biological resources (Couper 1989: 208). ~Still, even this perspective fails to provide a framework for viewing ocean-space as an integral space of ongoing

social processes. The "expanded" resource management perspective, like the other traditional perspectives, still implies that the ocean is a space designed and managed by land-based societiesto serve land-based societies. In contrast, it is proposed here that the ocean - like land-space - issimultaneously an arena wherein social conflicts occur and a space shaped by these conflicts. The"socially constructed" ocean that results then goes on to shape social relations, on land and at sea.In short, the ocean is not merely a space used by society; it is one component of the space ofsociety.



The aff is technological opposition to technology – reducing political debates

to a choice between energy inputs supports existing power and economic

distribution.

Ulrich BECK Sociology @ Munich ‘95 Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the

Risk Society Trans. Mark Ritter p. 38-39

Undoubtedly, there are many basic improvements, in all areas of our life, that we cannot imaginedoing without. In this sense, modernity has become second nature to us. But humanity has never

before had to live so much under the threat of self-annihilation . Never before have entire oceans

been threatened with poisoning. Never before have entire animal species disappeared from theface of the earth, almost overnight, through greed or carelessness. Never before has an artificialoverheating of the atmosphere threatened world climate. There is no need to glorify the past tokeep one's eyes open very wide to all the so-called side effects of modernization. The publiccritique of modernity has largely been snagged on the issues in the area between science andtechnology. The "big secret" in the prevailing self-concept is technology. In technology aregathered all the forces that keep the motor of innovation running, transforming the still-new

society into an old one. Religions may decline, cultures may collapse, nature may be dying-industrial-society man is virtually hypnotized by the machine. In it his creativity becomes

tangible. This fascination is especially obvious where industrial-society man risks losing controlof technology, where utility and destruction go hand in hand. It is a paradox of modernity that itcreated a social system that assigns a central position to technology, and that thereby conceals itsown sociality behind the facade and the fascination of technological processes. In particular, the

debates of the past few decades, which have deployed the entire arsenal of arguments critical of

technology and industry, have remained at heart technocratic and naturalistic. They exhaust

themselves in exchanging and citing figures for pollutant levels in the air, water, and food, figures

comparing population growth, energy consumption , nutritional requirements, raw material

shortage, and so on, with as much ardor and intensity as if there had never been anyone-a certain

Max Weber for instance-who (apparently) wasted his time proving that this debate is either

senseless or vacuous , and probably both, unless one also considers society's power structures

and distribution structures , its bureaucracies and its prevailing norms and thought patterns .

A preconception has crept in and established itself by which modernity is truncated to thereference frame of technology and nature as perpetrator and victim. In the process, however, thevery thing one had hoped to combat is involuntarily promoted. The possibilities for structuringtechnology remain hidden from this conception of modernity (as well as from the politicalenvironmental movement) behind the ideology of objective constraints, which is further

strengthened by the technological opposition to technology . And is modernity really off the

hook, so to speak, if wastewater is taken care of? Isn't humanity implicitly abolished once again ifour concern is limited to modernity's impact on nature and health? isn't humankind then reduced

to its biological basis-a reduction with which we in Germany are only too familiar?



AT: Enviro-Pragmatism

Pragmatism maintains dualism between theory and practice. purely

pragmatic response can‘t create value changes in our approach to energy.

Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‗8 ―The Neoliberal State, EnvironmentalPragmatism, and its discontents‖ Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 648-649

This last tendency to separate practise from theory pervades contemporary Pragmatism.Separating practise from concepts is extremely detrimental and serves to maintain a veryconservative position amongst Pragmatic environmentalists. For example, in the prologue of their book Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz (1996) make extraordinary claims againsttheorising about the environment – that ‗The ideas within environmental ethics are, apparently,inert – like Hume‘s (1958) Treatise, they fall deadborn form the press‘. They ‗argue thattheoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreementon basic policy imperatives‘ (Light & Katz, 1996: 7). The aim of contemporary EnvironmentalPragmatists is to stifle some elements of environmental debate, especially poststructuralist positions, in favour of a consensus of ideas which are presumed to guide policy from above.Unlike their predecessors (who were more like Hume than their later namesakes), contemporaryPragmatists make a stark distinction that separates practice from theory, and they valorise oneside of other dualisms such as anthropocentricism over non-anthropocentricism, instrumentalityover intrinsic value, and culture over nature. The common sense assumptions of contemporaryPragmatist emerge from a very explicit group of Classical Grand Masters – Pierce, Royce, James,Mead, Dewey – and a less explicit set of theoretical influences, most notably Hegel, materialismand Liberal Utilitarianism. Cultural conservatism makes contemporary Pragmatism inadequate

for attempting the kinds of cultural transformation that are necessary to adequately achieve amore ethical and genuinely sustainable interaction between human societies and the ecosystem.The heyday of recent Environmental Pragmatism seems to have been in 1996 yet it is importantto examine it because like many other American ideologies, it dominates much environmentaltheoretical debate at present. In 2001 Mintz advocates contemporary Pragmatism as a guide forthe law because, pragmatic thought has much to add to contemporary discourse regardingenvironmental laws and policies. Pragmatism‘s stress on concrete facts, flexibility,experimentation, and practical, workable solutions to realworld problems, combined with its clear preference for democratic consensus-building and social justice, appears to provide a sensibleintellectual framework for innovation and reform in environmental decision-making at all levels.(Mintz, 2001) Pragmatists address the perceived gap between environmental theorists and policyanalysts, activists, and the public. To achieve this cohesiveness contemporary Pragmatiststheorise a normative basis that will provide the ground for the convergence of activists on policychoices and at the same time win theoretical and meta-theoretical arguments about moral

pluralism as opposed to poststructuralist ‗relativism‘ in ‗normative‘ environmental theory.

Eco-pragmatism is anti-practical — it only caters to the american middle class.voting negative is the only way to ensure that critical questions about global

equity and imperialism get priority.

Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‗8 ―The Neoliberal State, Environmental

Pragmatism, and its discontents‖ Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657

Light is intrigued by the need to ‗convince people‘ to pursue environmental ends. Unfortunately



this is the only element of interest in his essay, ‗The case for a practical pluralism‘, which is asuperficial skate over what is for him familiar terrain. He does little to explain the various formsof pluralism apparently advocated by the authors he surveys. He blithely avoids any engagementwith ‗deconstructive poststructuralist differance‘ (Light, 2002b: 15) by naming and shaming it asmoral relativism.Relativism entails abandoning the view that there are some moral stances better than others that

could guide our ethical claims about how we should treat nature. If we admit relativism then, onecould argue, we would give up on attempts to form a moral response to the cultural justifications put forward to defend the abuse or destruction of other animals, species or ecosystems.Relativism entails that ethics is relative to different cultural traditions. (Light, 2002b: 7)Lightmaintains a North American faith in the ‗normative force‘ of American cultural superiority. Thiscriticism of relativism neglects the emphasis on critique, where evaluation based on mutualrespect for differing viewpoints can still come to an ethical decision – but quite possibly not aconsensus. ‗Pragmatic‘ resignation to Western prejudice avoids the hard ‗development‘ questionsabout uneven global wealth distribution, skewed global economic and environmental policy.Avoiding theory results in ignoring the absorption of old liberal and more recent environmentalterms, such as ‗choice‘, ‗freedom‘, ‗equality‘, ‗sustainability‘ into the neoliberal lexicon and itsresultant policy initiatives that are being implemented in nations around the planet. Ignoring

theory is to ignore what is actually going on.

Perm creates theoretical monoculture. Theoretical frameworks for

approaching environmental issues are more important than immediacy. Our

alternative doesn‘t mean inaction— it means careful thinking about how and

why we act.

Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‗8 ―The Neoliberal State, Environmental

Pragmatism, and its discontents‖ Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 653-654

Light argues that the antagonism towards anthropocentricism is so pervasive in environmentalethics it has become dogma. His complaint is that theories about the environment based on non-anthropocentric values (or non- Utilitarian values) are mere ‗intramural‘ word-play. They do notground the actions of most environmental activists. Instead, using the example of the AmazonRainforest, Light notes that the environmentalist Chico Mendes was motivated to protect theRainforest because it was the livelihood of his entire community. Light looks to AmericanPragmatism to sort out the theory versus practice debate. The many different theoreticalapproaches in environmental ethics, whether they be anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric, all

seem to end up in a practical ‗convergence‘ which tends towards protecting or creating ecologicalhabitats. Bryan Norton developed this theory of ‗convergence‘, arguing that in the end, if taken intheir ‗pure‘ form, both anthropocentric and ecocentric environmentalisms would eventually turnup the same policy results (Norton, 2005: 508). So, even the animal rights theorists such as Singerwill prudently advise the humane hunting of exogenous rabbits, for example, for the larger goodof the Australian Outback. While I sympathise with the desire for urgent and practical action, I donot think careful thinking requires postponing all environmental care. It is naive and evendangerous to relegate the myriad debates about Utilitarian versus intrinsic value, oranthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric, or individualist versus community aims, and evenmonad versus pluralist beliefs, to a ‗convergent‘ interest in environmental protection. Norton believes that nonanthropocentric ethics will turn out to converge with anthropocentric ethics because in the end both are politically contested by humans (Norton, 2005: 508). While I thinkhis point that political dualism may collapse towards the same ends, the notion of a mature



political convergence, or dialectical synthesis is not necessarily going to be the case. Clearly notall political views are interested in environmental protection. Some interest groups claim to beenvironmentally motivated, such as big business including ‗sustainability‘ in their missionstatements and advertising without any genuine attempt to alter capitalist practices in a far-reaching way. Conflicting strategies produce divergent politics that play out in the practices ofactivists, politicians, citizens and schoolteachers. Theoretical premises affect the organising

paradigms, selfunderstanding and the actions of societies, communities, and individuals. In aglobal world, anthropocentric capitalism dominates the ‗view‘ that the media, advertising,education, work ethic, consumerism and so forth take on the environment. As Heidegger cogentlyargues, everything in the modern world is enframed and understood as potential resource. Sothinking our way out of these conundrums is vitally important, in both the short and long term,for realigning the relationship that humanity as a whole has with the earth in all its aspects.Diverging ideas about how the relationship between humanity and the earth can be best cared foris a constructive way forward (and impossible to annihilate) because different contexts generatedifferent relationships. Thought is like biodiversity; difference shelters contingent possibilities forunexpected problems, monoculture fails when confronted with new disease, or new weatherconditions, new predators, new constraints, and new conditions of possibility.



AT: Prioritize Scientific Method

Prioritizing mechanistic scientific thinking can‘t account for the constitutive

relations between humans and ocean environments.


Parts and Pieces: Mechanistic Epistemology Mechanistic thinking is premised on the idea thatindividual replaceable cogs can adequately explain the whole. If this is in reference to nature,then the cogs are organisms that lose their inherent value and there is little violation in exploitingthem because the relationship is an instrumental one defined by the needs of the user. Mechanisticepistemology is an obstacle to understanding global phenomena and meaning because it is blindto constitutive relationships. Constitutive relationships are relationships that make up a systemwhere the joined pieces are more meaningful than their isolated individuality. These relationshipscreate all theories of the global, but the nature of how these relationships change is based on thetheoretical outlook. Thus, constitutive relationships make a group of parts n1.ore than their simplesum, and looking only at the isolated parts will, by definition, miss the dynamics of the systemcreated by these connections. This implies a complexity so deep that humans' interaction with, in particular, large ecosystems like the World Ocean may be sustainable only through pragmaticexperimentation (Lee 1993). Perhaps a good example of a system with constitutive relations is afamily. People in families are indeed individuals with the ir own lives, and it is important tosocial scientists to understand individuals to the best of the scientist's capacity. However, thefamily is responsible, to at least some degree, for who individuals become and how they act. Thefamily is not entirely responsible for who the individuals become, and the individuals are rarely,if ever, entirely independent of their family. Nonetheless, people in the family become a part ofone another, making the family something sometimes intangible, but constitutive. Concern overonly individual units, such as individual people, rs important, but it necessarily blurs theimportance of the systems and subsystems of which the individual is a part-language systems,ethnic and historical subsystems, religious creeds, geographic subsystems like watersheds, and inour case, ocean systems. This concern over the individual requires a certain rationality thatfocuses on the interests and behavior of individual parts. Similarly there is rationality withinglobal theory that focuses on the interests of the whole and the system. And, like the family, thehuman and ecological systems examined here are alive and have their own inherent value so thatmechanistic exploitation of the ocean will lead to dysfunction just as exploitation of a family orfamily member leads to the same. Work that ideologically favors these systemic interests issometimes labeled "globalism." However, this designation is really not specific enough to behelpful. Nearly everyone would support the globalization of peace and prosperity, though activistArundhati Roy is well known for saying that the "only thing worth globalizing is dissent."However, along with this she says we need a sharing of spirit and community-across the world.This implies that other things are worthy of globalization: What we need to search for and find,

what we need to hone and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Notthe politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics offorcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands acrossthe world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I'd say that the onlything worth globalizing is dissent. (Roy 2002, online) This sentiment of resistance and commonspirit implies that the tone and structure of this new politics are important because the peace and prosperity cannot arrive through authoritarian rule that forces these conditions. Nor can the peaceand prosperity come with a short time horizon that ends because of ecological changes forced by



exploitation. I am a globalist in the sense that I do see . humanity in a common lot; however, thislot has been purposefully segregated and cosmopolitan ("we are all in it together") sentiments donot ring true while the majority of people in the world suffer important deprivations while aminority dine elegantly. Consequently, I assume that because we are in a common lot, thisextreme difference in well-being is undesirable, and that moderating the extremes of economicglobalization for the middle ground of economic wellbeing is morally right (see Conca 200 I for a

discussion on "sustaining the middle"). When we take a global frame of reference, we are forcedto place ourselves and our subjectivity within the system, because there is nowhere for humansubjectivity to hide, and human interests become tied into the interests of the whole. This is because ifi am thinking of the whole, I am included within the configuration, and it is implausibleto think that there is a viable mechanical distance between the subject and objects of inquiry.Overtly dissolving mechanistic claims of distance and objectivity are important, since many philosophers have indicated this line of attack is often used to conceal exploitation of nature andsociety. A mechanistic epistemology breaks the pieces into distinct units and studies them apartfrom the whole, like cogs in a machine. The object of inquiry becomes the parts, not theirrelationships, which may be equally or more important. What are the pieces that are obscuring thewhole in ocean politics? Perhaps the most dizzying factor is that of the single-species fisherycatch statistics. So much of our current understanding of the state of fisheries is made up of these

numbers. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of fish caught does not andcannot indicate the health of a fish population because the precise number of the populations arenot known, and are very often estimated based on those very catch levels, as a proportion of effortused in catching the fish. This is referred to as "catch per unit of effort." An increase in effort butnot in fish catch implies a lower population. Second, this means we are relatively limited in theknowledge about fish populations outside what people try to catch. Because about 7 5 percent ofthe world's marine fish focuses on 200 species, or about I percent of existing known species, theknowledge that is not captured in single marine fish catch statistics is startling (Holmlund andHammer I999). The fact that fish catch has risen tren1endously since the 1950s (by about 300 percent) gives the impression that fish stocks are fine. This does not say anything about thestructure of these fish, such as how much of the catch is top predator and how that proportion haschanged over time, nor does it say anything about the state of marine biodiversity in general

through these increased catches. Despite the fact that there have not been studies that justifysingle-species fish statistics as a measure of how much catch can be sustained, this is the primarymethod by which fishing policies are made (Earle 1995; Jacques and Smith 2003). Even moremenacing is the fact that fishing policies based on these singlespecies catch trends By in the faceof increasing ecological change. Loss of mangroves and other important coastal destruction, asnoted in chapter 6, is disconnected from future policy on fishing levels, despite the importance ofmangroves for fish nurseries. Likewise increased pollution levels from urbanizing areas in boththe Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Likewise for climate changes for any of these regions. Thusfocusing on the single-species catch per unit of effort is terribly inadequate to set sustainablefishing levels. As a way to conceive of the ocean system without making the above kind ofcritical error (some of which cannot be avoided given available information), I have conceived ofthe World Ocean system as an amalgam of material, energy, and life that is functionally

integrated. The material of the system is the water column, which contains heat and kineticenergy and the coastal zone that phases the terrestrial into the marine. Life in the system is seenthrough coral reefs and fisheries. I think of the coral and the fisheries as communities thatfunction within these material settings, but changes in either can impact both. For example,changes in the coastal zone impact fish populations, which then change the diversity and kinds of plants and animals on the reefs. This specific functional relationship is seen in all of the regions because overfishing is contributing to declining reefs. The energy in the system- the heat andcurrents and waves (not to mention the chemical energy not discussed here )--impacts all of thesesections. Thus, mechanistically breaking the "object" of knowledge into pieces fundamentally



distorts our ability to see "reality" and empirically and morally understand the world around us.Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant has famously argued that changing from an organic model of the planet-one that promoted the image of the earth as a single living organism- to a mechanistic onewas the beginning of industrialized environmental degradation because there was no ethicalobligation to dead, discrete cogs in the earth (Merchant I 980). However, one does not need to bean ecofeminist to argue in favor of holistic epistemologies. Raymond Holder Wheeler argued as

early as I936 that science is cyclic in its focus on the whole and on the part, what he termsvitalism/ organicism versus atomism/ mechanism. To see this cycle, Wheeler must use a holisticanalysis: In order to see clearly, why science is now turning organismic, it is necessary to look athistory as a whole. Such a perspective shows us that the main problem of science, any science,always has been to solve the part-whole relation, the problem of the many in the one, of pluralismand unity, of permanence and change, if the role played by the part in the whole. (30; emphasis inoriginal) The possibility of holism is precluded by the mechanistic approach to knowledge. This problem extends into ecology. If one turns to ecological scientific journals, the inevitable findingswill be particularistic, minutely specified research working off assumptions of ceteris paribus,that is, all things being equal. Through an assumption of ceteris paribus, isolation of a part and itschanges can be subjected to reproducible tests of causation from independent variables. Tests purposefully isolate influences on the object to see which one can explain more, accurately.

Precision is gained from mechanism, but context and the meaning and importance of constitutiverelationships are lost. One of the things we have learned (hopefully) in social science is that onemethod should not dominate and undermine other equally valid approaches, since the voice ofresearch starts with its methodology. Relying only on mechanistic science reduces the diversity ofvoices and analysis that will be essential for creative and innovative thinking crucial for complex problem solving. Further, reading about the effects of one microinfluence in a microregion on a particular species needs to be balanced with interpretations of the "big picture" that these studiescreate. I acknowledge here that choosing holisms blinds me to the specifics of a part-in this case,the dynamics of a single country. I also acknowledge that looking at these parts is importantwork, and I am glad others do this work; but this effort is one which, for better or worse, ishoisted on the mast, looking at the horizon, not at the waves on the bow. This too is of value. Iwill now discuss some epistemological frames for globalizing changes in the World Ocean. This

thought experiment begins with complex systems theory.

oceans development k - endi 14

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