Notes- Radical Ecology Swagggg- Ecophenomenology is the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures.- Read this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/- This is a pretty confusing arg the 2NC overview does a pretty good job of explaining it (or so I like to think) - if you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask me at edy0797@gmail.com and I will be happy to help #Ska1NC1NC Ecophenomenology CritiqueContemporary environmentalism was induced by the understanding of nature as distinct from humans. This dualistic thinking is the root cause of ecological destruction.Vanderheiden 11 Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, as well as Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Australia (Steve, Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom, Global Environmental Politics 11.1)//EDWhile constructions of nature have in the past provided environmentalists with focal points and normative ideals, has the concept of nature outlived its usefulness? Wapner suggests in Living Through the End of Nature that it has, as environmentalists have reified nature, building their movement around its preservation in what he terms the dream of naturalism and describes as the proposition that we live best when we align with the natural world (pp. 5455). Here, nature stands in for an ideal of a physical world untarnished by humanity, defined as unnatural and a threat to its pristine condition, and an impossible reference point for maintaining natural environments in the face of all-pervasive anthropogenic interference in what can thus no longer accurately be viewed as such. For Wapner, Bill McKibbens announcement of the end of nature comes not as a glum obituary or cause to lament the ubiquity of human influence, but represents a profound opportunity for the environmental movement to liberate itself from a nature-centric perspective (p. 12). Nature, he argues, stands at the center of the movement, but has become a distraction from the most pressing issues at hand. Without nature obstructing our view of human settlements and affairs, concern for the environment can be reoriented toward the problems and possibilities that surround us (as in the German umwelt, or surrounding world) rather than being cast away from people as corrupting influences on that environment. As Wapner writes, this postnature environmentalist trajectory can address urban sustainability, social justice, poverty alleviation, and the rights of indigenous peoples (pp. 1213), precisely because it need not take nature preservation or restoration as the movements core imperative. Issues of justice and human rights, which a few scholars and activists have for years trumpeted as environmental issues while most dismissed them as only peripherally related or opposed to environmental protection aims, emerge as the old construction of nature as devoid of human stain recedes. People are not just the sources of pollution and resource depletion, as Wapner reminds us, they are also its victims. Ever since Aldo Leopold admonished his readers to view themselves as plain citizens of the biotic community, and despite his plea for an integrative view of humans within nature, the human/nature dichotomy has served as the basis for counterproductive nature teleologies and uncritical generalizations about the human place in the world. Anthropocentrism has become a term of abuse in some green circles and outright misanthropy a calling card in others, reinforcing the very human exceptionalism that drives ecological degradation by implying than humans are exempt from natures laws, equating reverence for nature with contempt for humanity. Along with this false and potentially self-defeating naturalism, Wapner finds in contemporary constructions of nature a related desire for mastery, or the successful control of natural forces and manipulation of natural resources for human ends, based on the sort of unguarded optimism noted above. As before, this view posits humans as outside of nature, capable of imposing their will upon the natural world rather than being subject to its laws. While the Cartesian desire for mastery of nature is often identified as responsible for motivating environmental harm, it is less clear what postnature environmentalism would condemn in it. Wapner suggests that these two ideal types have become almost theological in character, and that environmental politics has been mired for too long in an endless debate (p. 24) about which should carry the environmentalist flag. Nonetheless, he ends up endorsing a modest version of mastery in describing the postnature environmentalist goal as one of creating a livable world for all (p. 218).This ecological outlook is a violent discourse of control and discipline which seeks to construct and maintain ecologically-minded subjects that internalize biopolitical operations and tendancies. Darier 99 Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University (Eric, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 22-25)//EDThis concern for life (biopolitics) identified by Foucault is largely anthropocentric, in that the prime target is the control of all aspects of human life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction. Current environmental concerns could be seen as an extension of biopolitics, broadened to all life-forms and called ecopolitics (Rutherford 1993). On this scenario, the normalizing strategy of ecopolitics is the most recent attempt to extend control (management) to the entire planet (Sachs 1993). In this context, the promotion of ecocentrism by deep ecology, for example, can be seen as not only a critique of prevalent, increasing instrumental control of the natural world, but as inserting itself very well into the new normalizing strategy of an ecopolitics. My point here should not be interpreted as a negative evaluation of deep ecology per se. Instead, I want to illustrate the complexity of power relations and the constant dangers but also opportunities lurking in the field of power. In this context, the adoption of a Manichaean approach to environmental issues by many environmental theorists fails to acknowledge that their tactic of environmental resistance is always what de Certeau calls maneuver within the enemys field of vision, and cannot be positioned as a referential externality (de Certeau 1984: 37). This is why Foucaults genealogical approach is so important for an environmental critique. Foucaults approach to space is the third concept which might also be extremely relevant to an environmental critique. Foucault explored the problematization of space within a historical context (Foucault 1984e; 1989d: 99106). According to the framework of governmentality, the security of the state is guaranteed not so much directly by the control of a territory (space), but rather through the increasing control of the population living in that territory. In fact, Foucault suggested that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the government of France started to think of its territory on the model of the city. According to Foucault, The city was no longer perceived as a place of privilege, as an exception in a territory of fields, forests and roads Instead, the cities, with the problems that they raised, and the particular forms that they took, served as the models for the governmental rationality that was to apply to the whole of the territory. A state will be well organised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of the cities extends over the entire territory. (Foucault 1984b: 241) Consequently, one historical rupture which became a condition for the environmental crisis was the attempt to extend the system of social control in place in the cities to the countryside. This historical analysis of the increasing control of the non-urban space (the more natural environment) is similar to the critique of social ecologists who might agree with Foucault that the domestication of nature was part of a system of (urban) power relations among humans which had for its objective the maintenance of the given social order (Bookchin 1982). As the environmental crisis was one of the results of specific power relations such as social inequalities and political hierarchy it would presumably have to be addressed before or at least at the same time as the environmental crisis. Obviously, deep ecologists, like George Sessions, would interpret this focus on human issues as the continuation of anthropocentrism which created the environmental crisis in the first place (Sessions 1995b). Locating Foucault with social ecologists against deep ecologists is not accurate either. Foucaults studies of the emergence and rise of human sciences in the context of governmentality as a specific reason of state based on security could also be the basis for a critique of anthropocentrism. However, unlike deep ecologists, Foucault would not suggest replacing anthropocentrism by ecocentricism, which also presents its own set of traps. For example, Foucault would probably agree with Timothy Lukes critique of ecocentrism (i.e. anti/non-anthropocentrism) as being also, ultimately, a humanly constructed category which is policed by all-too-human ecocentrists. Justifying human actions in the name of nature leaves the unresolved problem of whose (human) voice can legitimately speak for nature and the inherent dangers of such an approach. As Luke remarks admirably, deep ecology could function as a new strategy of power for normalising new ecological subjects human and non-human in disciplines of self-effacing moral consciousness. In endorsing self-expression as the inherent value of all ecospheric entities, deep ecology also could advance the modern logic of domination by retraining humans to surveil and steer themselves as well as other beings in accord with Natures dictates. As a new philosophy of nature, then, deep ecology provides the essential discursive grid for a few enthusiastic ecosophical mandarins to interpret nature and impose its deep ecology dictates on the unwilling many. (Luke 1988: 85) This longing for nature, either through the self-effacement of humans before wilderness (deep ecology)22 or through nostalgia for a simpler social order in harmony with nature (social ecology)23 is possible only in the context of an intimate distance brought about by the dislocation of nature in modernity (Phelan 1993). Consequently, the space that Foucault is talking about is not the unproblematized physical and material environment of the environmentalists, but the various problematizations of space raised, for example, by feminists (Lykke and Bryld 1994). In this sense, Foucault and the environmentalists are not located in quite the same space! However, the reconceptualization of space for example, as heterotopias (Foucault 1986) enabled Foucault to create a break in our current physical understanding(s) of space. We shall come back to the important concept of heterotopias as two of the contributors to this volume, Thomas Heyd and Peter Quigley, apply it.All interactions between humanity and ecologies have become regulated by managerial power-knowledge regimes, resulting in endless biopolitical violence and ecological degradation. Luke 99 University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory. (Timothy W, Training Eco-Managerialists: Academic Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation. Living with Nature: Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics, eds. Frank Fischer and Maarten Hajer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 103-120.)//EDThe ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable development discourse are intriguing. And, perhaps if they were implemented in the spirit that their originators intended, the ecological situation of the Earth might improve. Yet, even after two decades of heeding the theory and practice of such eco-knowledge, sustainable development mostly has not happened, and it most likely will not happen, even though its advocates continue to be celebrated as visionaries. Encircled by grids of ecological alarm, sustainability discourse tells us that todays allegedly unsustainable environments need to be disassembled, recombined and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in such enviro-disciplinary frames, any environment could be redirected to fulfil the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives and administrative writs denominated in sustainability values. Sustainability, then, engenders its own forms of environmentality, which would embed alternative instrumental rationalities beyond those of pure market calculation in the policing of ecological spaces. Initially, one can argue that the modern regime of bio-power formation described by Foucault was not especially attentive to the role of nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault 1976: 13842). The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism, however, did generate systems of bio-power. Under such regimes, power/knowledge systems bring life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations, making the manifold disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into new sorts of productive agency as part of the transformation of human life (ibid. 145). Once this threshold was crossed, social experts began to recognize how the environmental interactions of human economics, politics and technologies continually put all human beings existence as living beings in question. Foucault divides the environmental realm into two separate but interpenetrating spheres of action: the biological and the historical. For most of human history, the biological dimension, or forces of nature acting through disease and famine, dominated human existence, with the ever present menace of death. Developments in agricultural technologies, as well as hygiene and health techniques, however, gradually provided some relief from starvation and plague by the end of the eighteenth century. As a result, the historical dimension began to grow in importance, as the development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and the observations and measures relative to mans life and survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death (ibid. 142). The historical then began to envelop, circumscribe or surround the biological, creating interlocking disciplinary expanses for the environmental. And these environmentalized settings quickly came to dominate all forms of concrete human reality: in the space of movement thus conquered, and broadening and organising that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them (ibid.). While Foucault does not explicitly define these spaces, methods and knowledges as environmental, these enviro-disciplinary manoeuvres are the origin of many aspects of environmentalization. As biological life is refracted through economic, political and technological existence, the facts of life pass into fields of control for any discipline of eco-knowledge and spheres of intervention for the management of geo-power. Foucault recognized how these shifts implicitly raised ecological issues to the extent that they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme for defining human interactions with nature. Living became environmentalized as humans, or a specific living being, and specifically related to other living beings (ibid. 143), began to articulate their historical and biological life in profoundly new ways from within artificial cities and mechanical modes of production. Environmentalization arose from this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latters techniques of knowledge and power (ibid.). Strangely, even as he makes this linkage, Foucault does not develop these ecological insights, suggesting that there is no need to lay further stress on the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence (ibid. 1434). Even so, Foucault here found the conjunction needed for the environment to emerge as an eco-knowledge formation and/or a cluster of eco-power tactics for an enviro-discipline. As human beings begin consciously to wager their life as a species on the products of their biopolitical strategies and technological systems, a few recognize that they are also wagering the lives of other, or all, species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as just one of many lacunae in his analysis, everything changes as human bio-power systems interweave their operations in the biological environment, penetrating the workings of many ecosystems with the techniques of knowledge and power. Once human power/knowledge formations become the foundation of industrial societys economic development, they also become a major factor in all terrestrial life-forms continued physical survival. Eco-knowledge about geo-power thus becomes through enviro-disciplines a strategic technology that reinvests human bodies their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence with bio-historical significance. It then reframes them within their bio-physical environments, which are now also filled with various animal and plant bodies positioned in geo-physical settings, as essential elements in managing the health of any human ecosystems carrying capacity.Western thought also relies on the dualism between nature and human, which is, of course, hierarchal and anthropocentric. The impact is the devaluation of everything considered sub-or-non-humanHoetzer 10 Law lecturer at the Sydney International Campus of Central Queensland University. Irene is currently completing a PhD in environmental law at Macquarie University, (Irene, Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hoetzerpaper.pdf p. 4)//EDOne explanation of why a society does not feel morally compelled to protect nature can be attributed to its underlying belief system. In the Western world, this is largely shaped by Christian ideals and traditions, according to which nature is viewed to exist for human use, thus as something to be exploited for its materials and resources and sources of knowledge, which in turn lead to power and control.15 Also under this belief system, [hu]mankind is created in the image of a God, who is omnipotent, omniscient but also benevolent. Whilst the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience are clearly evident in the desire for power and control, the aspect of benevolence is however clearly overlooked, perhaps because utilitarian objectives intuitively do not take the interests of others into account. Thus, the moral standing of the West is to value others only in terms of its own interests, so all judgments are made in terms of Western perceptions, values and experiences. Furthermore, Western thought also organises things into hierarchical dichotomies according to which the world is to be interpreted and interactions with it dictated. As it is believed that humans are created in the image of God, humans are considered to be the most important entity on earth and to have been granted greater powers than others, as evidenced in the power of reason. This anthropocentric view of the world, which distinguishes between instrumental and intrinsic values, fails to acknowledge the intrinsic value of anything that is not human.16 Environmental ethicists challenge this view and claim that all of nature has its own, separate intrinsic value. Ecofeminists also hold this view but further argue that the culture over nature dichotomy that dominates Western thought is representative of the dominance/subordinance hierarchy that permeates the fabric of patriarchal capitalist society and results in women and nature sharing a common inferior position. For ecofeminists, therefore, the ecological crisis is more than a question of environmental destruction and human misery. By drawing attention to the interconnection of women and nature, ecofeminists argue that egalitarian, non-hierarchical structures must be created, in which the inherent value of nature is acknowledged and the relationships between humans, non-humans and the natural environment become just and sustainable.17Interspecies violence operates at the caliber of genocide, colonialism, and war.Kochi and Ordan 08 Queens University & Bar Ilan University (Tarik & Noa, An argument for the global suicide of humanity, vol 7, no 4, Borderlands, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf)//EDWithin the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity might comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was evil, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. borderlands 7:3 10 Hence, if we are to think of the content of the human heritage, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of the West generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of race war that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially inferior and in some instances that they were closer to apes than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of race is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans consider themselves the crown of creation, for animals all people are Nazis and animal life is an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750).Our alternative is to affirm a rethinking of our ontological relationship with Nature through adoption of a relational ontology that has radical openness to fields of flesh. Flesh is the fabric of our relationship to the world around us. It is this connection that allows us to question our ontological relationships in the world by recognizing that our bodies are made out of the same flesh as everything else in this world.Bannon 11 Wesleyan University (Bryan E, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357)//EDHaving explored the notion of the flesh of things, we are now prepared to reformulate the meaning of the flesh of the world. We receive a clue as to what this flesh might be like in the earlier cited note from May 1960 where Merleau-Ponty states, Flesh of the world, describe (a propos of time, space, movement) as segregation, dimensionality, continuation, latency, encroachment.90 We can characterize the flesh of the world descriptively in terms of time, space and movement; these are, after all, how we predominately experience ourselves in the world. Nonetheless, what allows us to experience the world in these ways are relations that segregate things, the different dimensions through which things relate to one another, the persistence and mutability of these relations across a duration, the latent processes of relation that we do not perceive, and the ways in which various field-beings encroach upon one another. The implication here is that the flesh of the world is the overarching fabric of space and time that we perceive, made possible by the many fleshes occurring between bodies in a place. To go on to say that my body is made of the same flesh as the world and the flesh of my body is participated in by the world is simply to say that the body participates in the same kinds of relations as those that obtain between all other things within the field and that the world in turn is the product of these relations. The flesh of the world, then, is of seen-Being;91 it is the Gestalt formed by the contact between field beings; it is the overlapping of fields that remains pregnant with myriad possibilities. As such a Gestalt, the flesh of the world reflects the distribution of beings within its field, but is not reducible to the sum of its parts. This flesh exists insofar as bodies are open to affection and therefore organize a spatial and temporal field about themselves. Ontologically speaking, the flesh of the world is the fabric of space, time, and movement within which we dwell, produced by the interrelation of the myriad bodies that exist. It is not, however, a substance out of which beings are composed, since space, time, and movement are themselves relational processes.We seek to analyze our ontological assumptions about the world by adopting a relational ethos that is dynamic and open-ended. This allows us to rethink the way we conceive our relationship with Nature.Malette 10 University of Victoria, (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological Relationality,)//EDAfter examining the current fragmentation and absorption of the ecological movement by what appears to be an overarching rationality of governmenta rationality best described by Foucaults notion of governmentality as applied by green governmentality scholarsthe second part of my dissertation will engage Foucaults ontological assumptionsassumptions that enable his critique but that are bound up with the rationality he puts into question. I wish to suggest that Foucaults critical project should be examined from a more thoroughly ecological standpoint, leading toward the adoption of a broader, less ethnocentric and anthropocentric ontology. As such, I am neither advocating for obvious institutional changes, nor for any quick-fix solutions to the complex arrangements between our conceptions of politics and Nature that have led to the creation of a predominantly Eurocentric, exploitative, materialistic and anthropocentric global way of life. To challenge the complex sedimentation that has led to our modern ways of life, I rather suggest the adoption of a relational\critical ethos: that is a dynamic and open-ended shift in our attitude, sensibility and awareness (rather than a fixed solution) that may encourage us to rethink the ways in which we conceive ourselves in relation to the differences we find both in our human and non-human encounters, including with this irreducible, symbiotic and dynamic diversity I call Nature.2NC Essentials2NC OverviewNature is not something external to us; living experience IS nature things like rocks, trees, and water do not comprise a nature that surrounds us, or a nature that we live in, but rather, they are a part of us, an extension of ourselves. We are composed of the same fabric or "flesh" as those things, so we should respect and embody that connectivity, rather than sever ourselves from it as technocrats, scientists, environmentalists and politicians would have us do in the name of staving off crisis. Separation of OUR flesh from the flesh of the world allows us to dehumanize objects, subjects, entities that we view as separate from ourselves and leads to instrumentalization and destruction. Rather than an ontology based around a subject acting on an object, we should embrace a relational ontology; one of relative experience and an awareness about that experience to shape our lives.Thus, the role of the ballot is to establish a radical openness towards nature through fields of flesh. This is a necessary prerequisite for ethical relations between beings because otherwise we only view nature as a resource to consume. Even if they win a technical approach could succeed in the short term, it still renders annihilation inevitable because it deprives nature of its inherent value. More importantly, without a relational ontology there is no ethical basis for weighing any of their impacts because the deaths of other beings is referred to as a merely the breaking of a tool. The aff is necessary to escape this nihilism - thats Malette, Luke, and Brook. This means that we will always be a prerequisite to any pragmatic solutions that they provide and perms wont solve.We control the only internal link to human extinction the misguided annihilation of non-human causes extinction because we underestimate our dependence on non-humans thats Luke.We also control the root cause of anthropocentrism - Specism is the root of exploitation and annihilation because it was the founding distinction that allowed for discrimination. Its extensions allows for separation and relations of exploitation between races and classes - thats Kochi and Ordan.

2NC A2 FWOur interpretation: the negative is allowed one conditional test of the methodology posited by the affirmativeFirst our offense A) Its a gateway the validity of ones method of knowledge is the entire starting point for political queryB) Key to education no epistemic certainty exists without establishing and defending a method.C) It is necessary to question the presuppositions of our discourse to allow an ontological interrogation of how we relate to nature. How we think precedes and determines politics.Dalby 02 Prof. of Geography and Political Economy at Carleton Univ (Simon, 2K2 Simon, Environmental Security)//EDThat said, however, I have been heavily influenced by many post-structuralist writers, and although the sources, arguments, and evidence used in what follows are much less than obviously post, the themes of space, identity, and colonization, and my overall strategy of problematicizing the taken for granted, fit with its ethos. This book is a work of criticism, a contribution to investigations in a number of overlapping academic fields, as well as an argument with the ongoing discussions about security in North America and Europe. As such I follow David Campbells remainder to readers of his Writing Security, regarding what Michel Foucault said about critique: A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchalleneged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. While I do not wish to suggest that the environmental security discourse is facile, in many ways its premises, and its assumptions about environment in particular, are not nearly as self-evident as its many authors sometimes apparently think. And how we, of whatever fictional community, think leads not only to how we act politically, but also to our understandings of who we act politically, but also to our understandings of who we are, what we value, and what we are prepared to countenance to protect our self-preferred identities. This is the very stuff of security. This book does not engage in any detail with either the history of environmental philosophy or the specific compatibilities of various streams of environmentalist writing and politics with international relations of security studies. Such efforts have been undertaken recently by other scholars. Neither does it revisit the major debates in the 1970s about the limits of growth, steady states, and political alternatives that were, in some ways, precursors to the contemporary discussions. Invoking various narratives of environment, and in particular a critique of colonizing practices, does not simply suggest that this environmental story line offers some transcendental or objective discourse that provides the singular truth from which policy can be derived. Such themes are very much the stuff of both environmental and international politics; nature has been invoked in numerous contexts to rationalize many political programs. Rather, the counter-narrative that follows aims to disrupt the conventional formulations of environment as a technical matter for expert regulation or as a matter for global management, big science, and specifically security discussions. In the process it will show how the politics of invoking something called environment works and will suggest that the geographical presuppositions in the discourse are especially important. By focusing on historical antecedents of the contemporary crisis, the terms in which we currently understand both environment and security can be criticized and their politics investigated. This is not a matter of disputing the claims that environmental change is or is not occurring, or challenging the technical practices of numerous disciplines. Whatever the finer points of the specification of global ecological processes, there are many reasons for great concern on all manner of issues and in numerous contexts from biodiversity decline to stratospheric ozone holes, and from rising childhood asthma incidence rates to the contemporary sufferings of marginalized peasants and refugees. What is most worrisome to anyone who observes these matters is not any single concern- be it climate change, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals, deforestation, long-lived radioisotopes, or any one of many other matter, but the totality of the disruptions caused by modern industrial systems and the consumption of their products, whose cumulative and increasing impact has reached into all parts of the biosphere. This is, of course both the strength of the environmentalist argument and, given the diversity of its subthemes, simultaneously its greatest political difficulty. The focus in some of what follows in this volume is on the use of fossil fuels, both because they are so integral to contemporary modern modes of economic existence, and hence can be read as symptomatic of the larger condition, and because at a very simple level, by literally turning rock into air, their widespread use draws attention directly to the anthropogenic alterations of basic planetary systems. What is most important for the argument that follows is a recognition that contemporary endangerments materialize within political and cultural contexts that constrain, in important ways, how these matters are represented. The political and economic order of modernity is rarely fundamentally questioned in such discussions. The commodification of nature is taken for granted as an unavoidable necessity. In particular, despite all the ambiguities of modernity, the developmentalist assumptions that suggest that each state will become modern along approximately similar trajectories of industrialization and modernization are implicit in most conventional analyses. Environmental discourses occur within larger discursive economies where some identities have more value than others, and crucially where the dominant development and security narratives are premised on geopolitical specifications that obscure histories of ecology and resource appropriation. They also frequently operate in discursive modes that reassert geopolitical identities by how they specify other peoples and places. Environmental politics is very much about the politics of discourse, the presentation of problems and of who should deal with the concerns so special. These discourses frequently turn complex political matters into managerial and technological issues of sustainable development where strategies of ecological modernization finesse the questions by promising technical solutions to numerous political difficulties and, in the process, work to co-opt or marginalize fundamental challenges to the contemporary world order. In Tim Lukes apt summation: Underneath the enchanting green patina, sustainable development is about sustaining development as economically rationalized environment rather than the development of a sustaining ecology. Linking such themes to security, with its practices of specifying threats and its managerial modes for responding to dangers, suggest a broad congruency of discourse and practice. But what ought to be secured frequently remains unexamined, as does the precise nature of what it is that causes contemporary endangerments. Like other disciplinary endeavors, both environmental management and security studies have their practices for the delimitation of appropriate objects, methods, and procedures. Making these explicit and showing how they both facilitate and simultaneously limit inquiry is an unavoidable task for any study that takes Foucaults formulation of critique seriously. Challenging conventional wisdom is rarely easy, and disrupting geopolitical categories can be especially unsettling. Asking unsettling questions about the identities of those who think in the conventional categories is not easy either. But it seems very necessary now, given the limitations of both the security and the environmental discourses we have inherited from the past and the pressing need to think intelligently about what kind of planet we are making.D) Reps precede policy on the environmentLuke 03 University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory, (Timothy, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)//EDSo the book of nature then remains for the most part a readerly text. Different human beings will observe its patterns differently; they will choose to accentuate some while deciding to ignore others. Consequently, nature's meanings always will be multiple and fixed in the process of articulating eco-managerialist discourses. In the United States, the initial professionalized efforts to resourcify nature began with the second industrial revolution, and the original conservation movements that emerged over a century ago, as progressively minded managers founded schools of agriculture, schools of engineering, schools of forestry, schools of management, and schools of mining, to master nature and transform its materiality into goods and services. By their lights, the entire planet was reduced through resourcifying assumptions into a complex system of inter-related natural resource systems, whose ecological processes in turn are left for certain human beings to operate efficiently or inefficiently as the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure. Directed towards generating greater profit and power from the rational insertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production, the discourses of resource management work continuously to redefine the earth's physical and social ecologies, as sites where environmental professionals can operate in many different open-ended projects of eco-system management. The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to environmental policy, however, are rarely rendered articulate by the existing scientific and technological discourses that train experts to be experts. Still, a logic of resourcification is woven into the technocratic lessons that people must acquire in acquiring their expert credentials. In particular, there are perhaps six practices that orient how work goes here. Because I have a weakness for alliteration, I call them Resource Managerialism, Rehabilitation Managerialism, Restoration Managerialism, Renewables Managerialism, Risk Managerialism, and Recreationist Managerialism. E) Phenomenology comes first and is the best methodBrown 03, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. X-xi)//EDIf philosophy does have a contribution to make in today's practical decision making, this contribution will likely begin with steady and insightful clarification of our ethical and metaphysical assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. These basic assumptions- about the relation between individual and society, human nature, the nature of nature, and the nature of the Good-underlie all of our current behavior, both individually and culturally. But the assumptions that have guided our past behavior reveal their limitations as we think about, imagine, and live through the events and consequences of what we call the environmental crisis. When confronted with the consequences of our actions-mass extinctions, climate change, global pollution, dwindling resources-we inevitably experience a moral unease over what has been done, what we have done, to nature. We cannot help but ask about the root of this deep-seated moral reaction, and the changes it calls for in our cur- rent practices. To answer these questions, we need the help of philosophy' The suggestion that philosophy should play a role in reorienting our relation with the natural world will no doubt come as a surprise to many. It may be even more surprising that the present volume is dedicated to the role phenomenology can play in developing this new relation with nature, given its reputation as a highly abstract theoretical inquiry into consciousness or being. In fact, one of the basic themes of the present collection of essays is that phenomenology, as a contemporary method in philosophy, is particularly well suited to working through some of the dilemmas that have faced environmental ethicists and philosophers of nature. Originating in the work of Edmund Husserl and developed and enriched by thinkers such as Max Scheler Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas, phenomenology has won a worldwide following, not only among philosophers, but also ,among scholars in fields ranging from anthropology and architecture to geography and nursing. While there have been methodological divergences over the course of phenomenology's first century, phenomenologists have continued to share the rallying cry first introduced by Husserl himself: "To the things themselves!" Phenomenology takes its starting point in a return to the "things" or "matters" themselves, that is, the world as we experience it. In other words, for phenomenologists, experience must be treated as the starting point and ultimate court of appeal for all philosophical evidence.We also have some defense A) Its fair the AFF can either defend their method, argue that this type of criticism is bad, or impact turn the KB) Its predictable pretty much every K on this topic that isnt some generic cap 1NC is going to talk about ecological discourses you should be ready to engage this by nowC) Default negative if they win a superior framework, its only a reason to reject our filter, not our argument or the team. You still weigh our impact and link claims as a case turn.This means they should NOT get perms A) the aff is a rhetorical artifact - theyve already picked their method and they are stuck with it till the endB) if they win the perm vote neg on presumption because it proves the 1AC was FLAWED and we should re-think strategies you should vote on the 1AC verion of the aff, not the 2AR version, because that would justify the aff completely shifting their advocacy and making it impossible for the negative to be competitive 2NC A2 Perm (Policy Aff)1. The perm either links or it severs severance is a voter for fairness and education2. The drive to reform science through the political dooms the permutationit is a guise to reinscribe a bad form of knowledge productionLuke 09, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory, (Timothy, Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for green governmentality, in Harry F. Dahms (ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.129-159)//EDThe prospect of seeing Earth as a coupled human and natural system, which could be plagued by a sudden deep disruption, non-linear change, and chaotic complexity, is real. It first became a definite material possibility in a very decisive fashion on August 6 and 9, 1945. During this 96-hour period over six decades ago, it became quite evident as various thinkers foresaw how atomic weapons technologies could proliferate and then different thermonuclear stockpiles would grow that humanity immediately could be a profoundly earth-altering force in 60 minutes or less on any given day. Acknowledged openly in the MAD doctrines of the 1960s, and the nuclear winter debates of the 1980s, a full-blown nuclear war very quickly would prove human beings powers to alter the planet on a historical and geological timescale (Luke, 1989a, 1989b). And, no matter what Earth System Science does to imagine the planet as a system ready and able to be closely controlled for the best environmental outcome through expert planetarian ecomanagerialism, this game-changing alternate type of planetary change also will sit on the sidelines as long as nuclear weaponry exists and nuclear power is used to abate the greenhouse gassing of caused by fossil fuels. While part of the environmental science being mobilized here and now is concentrated upon improving its practitioners instruments, laboratories, theories, and data, all of the current findings they offer come with the proviso that the data typically are incomplete, the theories are not entirely confirmed, the laboratories currently in operation are too few, and the instruments already are not fully reliable. Ordinary principles of good scientific practice, then, should stress the need for constant caution, determined doubt, and stiff skepticism about the findings of Earth System Science. Some producers and consumers of their findings do display this professional wariness about the entire enterprise. Yet, too many other consumers and producers of Earth System Science tend to have an unwarranted certitude about what is well-founded scientific knowledge, and what might be only provisionally detected and/or incompletely confirmed observations about the planet's many complex coupled systems. Regrettably, these less cautious centers-of-calculation often become involved in latently political, or even manifestly institutional, networks of policy debate about what must be done. Expertarch jargon about market mechanisms, fair programs of industrial growth, vulnerability assessments, and inducement regimes are mystifications of their grab for greater green governmentality. The conduct of conduct is the target of such green governance. Moving directly from statements about what is actually or allegedly true to statements, on what ought to happen is rarely productive, and logically flawed as rules of ethical and political practice. Nonetheless, one sees these elaborate networks of scientific mapping, technical monitoring, and managerial modeling operating in principle as engines of alternative administrative approaches, platforms of shadow cabinet consultation, or foundries for protyped environmental regulation.3. Science is not intrinsically bad, but your approach is. You cant just pick and choose the portions of the aff and the alt you want to do this is the EXACT managerialism were criticizing. Science cannot be understood outside of its connection to the flesh of the worldKirkman 07, Georgia Institute of Technology. (Robert, A Little Knowledge of Dangerous Things: Human Vulnerability in a Changing Climate, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, Edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, State University of New York Press, 2007)//EDThe problem with the objectivist account is precisely that this disem-bodiment can never be complete. The retreat to objectivism is the equiva-lent of locking oneself in a room with a two-way mirror: the objectivist pretends to gaze out at the world with magisterial detachment, but remains nonetheless a creature of flesh in a world of flesh. In one of his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reminds himself to justify science as an operation within the given situation of knowledge, and to characterize the scientific treatment of being, time, evolution, and so on, as a locating of features of the Universe or of fea-tures of Beings, a systematic explanation of what they imply in the virtue of their role as hinges. Scientists are participants in the flesh of the world, even if they do have highly specialized ways of speaking and acting in the world. It is only as participants that they can make any headway in reveal-ing the structures of the world, its hinges or pivots, as Merleau-Ponty also calls them, certain traits of the inner framework of the world (VI 279/225).4. If they win the perm, kick the alt for us and vote neg on a case turn you can still evaluate our links and impacts as a DA to the affs metho+d2NC A2 Utilitarianism/Consequences Their utilitarian impact calculus is indistinguishable from self-destructionExploding crises speak to the incapacity of anthropocentrism to account for limitless violence against our common world Oliver 10, prof phil at Vanderbilt U, [Kelly, Animal Ethics: Towards an Ethics of Responsivenss Research in Phenomenology 40: 267-280]//EDIn this era of global warming, species extinction and shrinking biodiversity, endless war, military occupation and expanded torture, record wealth for the few and poverty for the rest, gated-communities and record incarceration, more than ever we need a sustainable ethics. A sustainable ethics is an ethics of limits, an ethics of conservation. Rather than assert our dominion over the earth and its creatures, this ethics obliges us to acknowledge our dependence upon them. It requires us to attend to our response-ability by virtue of that dependence. It is an ethics of the responsibility to enable responses from others, not as it has been defined as the exclusive property of man (man responds, animals react), but rather as it exists all around us. All living creatures are responsive. All of us belong to the earth, not in the sense of property, but rather as inhabitants of a shared planet. Echoing Kant, a sustainable ethics is an ethics circumscribed by the circumference of the globe, which, if we pull our heads out of the sand, compels us to admit to our own limitations and obligates us to relearn our primaryschool lesson: we need to share. Given the environmental urgency upon us, generosity is a virtue that we cannot afford to live without. Acknowledging the ways in which we are human by virtue of our relationships with animals suggests a fundamental indebtedness that takes us beyond the utilitarian calculations of the relative worth of this or that life (so common in philosophies of animal rights or welfare) or economic exchange values to questions of sharing the planet. This notion of sharing does not require having much in common besides living together on the same globe. But it does bring with it responsibility. The question, then, is not what characteristics or capacities animals share with us but, rather, how to share resources and life together on this collective planet.LinksLink EnergyDiscourses about energy turn energy into a product, defining the epistemology of Nature, the only goal of policymakers and scientists is to gain management and control over the environment.Luke 99 University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory. (Timothy W, Training Eco-Managerialists: Academic Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation. Living with Nature: Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics, eds. Frank Fischer and Maarten Hajer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 103-120.)//EDBefore scientific disciplines or industrial technologies turn its matter and energy into products, nature already is being transformed by discursive work-ups into 'natural resources'. Once nature is rendered intelligible through these interpretative processes, it can be used to legitimize many political projects. One vital site for generating, accumulating, and then circulating such discursive knowledge about nature, as well as determining which particular human beings will be empowered to interpret nature to society, is the modern research university. As the primary structure for accrediting individual learners and legitimating collective teachings, graduate programmes at such universities do much to construct our understanding of the natural world (Gibbons et al. 1994). Over the past generation, graduate study in environmental science on many American university campuses has become a key source of new representations for'the environment' as well as the home base for those scientific disciplines that generate analyses of nature's many meanings. Indeed, a new environmental episteme has evolved over the past three decades, allowing new schools of environmental studies either to be established de novo or to be reorganized out of existing bits and pieces of agriculture, forestry, science, or policy studies programmes. These educational operations now routinely produce eco-managerialists, or professional-technical workers with the specific knowledge-as it has been scientifically validated-and the operational power-as it is institutionally constructed-to cope with the environmental crisis' on what are believed to be sound scientific and technical grounds. Increasingly, graduate teaching in such schools of the environment has very little room for any other social objectives beyond the rationalizing performativity norms resting at the core of the current economic regime. To understand the norms of this regime, as Lyotard asserts, 'the State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goals: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power' (Lyotard 1984: 46).Science continually seeks to infrastructuralize the earth by attempting to capture energy and manage the natural environment, this produces a system in which green governmentality will continually manage the earth.Luke 96 Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, (Timothy, Generating Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF)//EDHere, environmental sciences infrastructuralize the Earth's ecologies. The Earth becomes, if only in terms of technoscience's operational assumptions, an immense terrestrial infrastructure. As the human race's "ecological life-support system," it has "with only occasional localized failures" provided "services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge." 19 As the environmentalized infrastructure of technoscientific production, the Earth generates "ecosystem services," or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable. 20 This complex system of systems is what must survive; human life will continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue. And, as Colorado State's, Yale's, Berkeley's or Duke's various graduate programs all record, these infrastructural outputs include: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification/distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro and macro climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes, and aesthetic enrichment. 21 Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the planet's ecology requires highly disciplined reengineering to guide its sustainable use. In turn, the academic systems of green governmentality will monitor, massage, and manage those systems which produce all of these robust services. Just as the sustained use of any technology "requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically," so too does the "sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural amenities." 22Link - RenewablesUnder managerial schemes nature is broken up into a system of systems that can be dismantled, analyzed and recombined to suit the needs of wealthier, industrialized states renewables are merely the newest form of managerialism.Luke 97, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory. (Timothy, Ecocritique, p. 78-80)//EDThe work of the Worldwatch Institute rearticulates the instrumental rationality of resource managerialism on a global scale in a transnationalized register. Resource managerialism is one very particular articulation of ecology. This is ecology as it has been constructed by modern nation-states, corporate capital, and scientific professional organizations. Although voices in favor of conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this particular approach to Nature as actual policy comes into being, first, with the closing of the open frontier in the American West during the 1880s and 1890s in the United States and, second, with the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s.11 Whether one looks at John Muirs preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchots conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industrys power to deplete natural resources, and hence the need for new protective arrangements for conserving resources or slowing their rate of exploitation, is well established by the early 1900s. President Theodore Roosevelt made these policies a cornerstone of his presidency. In 1907, for example, he organized the Governors Conference to address this concern at the federal and state levels, inviting the participants to recognize that the natural endowments upon which the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already exhausted.12 Over the past nine decades, the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have changed significantly. On one level, they have become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts (or engineers and scientists) on the shop floor, and professional managers (or corporate executives and financial officers) in the main office, resource managerialism has imposed corporate administrative frameworks on Nature in order to supply the world economy or provision national society with more natural resources through centralized state conservation programs. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature is reduced to a system of systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce its many resources efficiently and in adequate amounts when and where needed in the modern marketplace. On a second level, during the 1970s and 1980s, resource managerialism transcended simple strategies of merely conserving available quantities of nonrenewable resources by moving toward more expansive programs of protecting various types of environmental quality and providing for new systems of renewable resource generation. Still, these shifts are not a major departure from the original premises of conservation. They only broaden the conceptual definitions of resources either being created from or conserved within Nature, while expanding the prerogatives of managerial authority to renew as well as conserve resources. By envisioning it as an elaborate system of systems, Nature can be continually tinkered with in this fashion to find new fields within its systematcities to rationalize, control, and exploit for the benefit of human beings in wealthy, powerful nation-states. Beautiful vistas, clean air, and fresh water are redefined as resources that should not be overconsumed or underproduced, and the managerial impulse easily can rise to this challenge by creating recreational settings, scenery, and ecosystem services as entitlements to be administered by the stae for multiple use in the economy, society, and culture.Regimes of renewable energy and sustainability discursively frame the Earth as nothing more than a standing reserve which, is preserved to be rendered perpetually useful and exploitable to humanityLuke 99, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, (Timothy, Discourses of the Environment, p. 146-47)//EDThe application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of eco-knowledgeable, geo-powered forces to police the fitness of all biological organisms and the health of their natural environments. Master concepts, like survival or sustainability for species and their habitats, empower these masterful conceptualizers to inscribe the biological/cultural/economic order of the Earths many territories as an elaborate array of environments, requiring continuous enviro-discipline to guarantee ecological fitness. The survival agenda, as Gates argues, applies simultaneously to individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems; and it applies simultaneously to the present and the future (Gates 1989: 148). When approached through this mind-set, the planet Earth becomes an immense engine, or the human races ecological life-support system, which has with only occasional localised failures provided services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge (Cairns 1995). As this environmentalized engine, the Earth then generates ecosystem services, or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen 1978). This complex is what must survive; human life will continue if such survival-promoting services continue. They include the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification! distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro- and macroclimates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns 1995). As an environmental engine, the planets ecology requires eco-engineers to guide its sustainable use, and systems of green governmentality must be adduced to monitor and manage the system of systems which produce all these robust services. Just as the sustained use of technology requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically, so too does the sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural amenities (ibid.3).Link - Mapping and ManagingEnvironmental policymaking is focused on viewing the earth as a resource that dispenses services and creates natural and artificial events. Their goal is to map, measure, monitor and manage ecology. Luke 09, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory. (Timothy, Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for green governmentality, in Harry F. Dahms (ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.129-159)//EDThe ordinary operations of environmental policy-making typically approach the Earth in one of three ways: first, as a site of accumulated material resources, which contains/holds stock; second, as a structure of vital processes, which dispenses/vends service; or third, as sites and structures of coupled artificial-and-natural events, which constitutes/delimits system. In assessing the new risks of second modernity (Beck, 1992), many environmentalists have accepted these root metaphors to guide social practices as they institutionally map their new organizational initiatives for the sustained conservation of natural resources or the more secure preservation of the Earth (Cairncross, 1992; Chertow & Esty, 1997; Bliese, 2001). On the one hand, the imagination of Earth as a store of accumulated material stocks to be exploited judiciously and hopefully never depleted (WCED, 1987), or, on the other hand, as a structure of rising-and-falling vital processes with ecological services to be utilized on a more transparent cost/benefit basis (Westmen, 1978) already have served as productive policy stances (Gobster & Hull, 2000). Both of these conceptual frames have allowed experts to recognize the Earth's capacious, but still limited, carrying capacity to prevent any crippling degradation. Such analytical and axiological frames have underpinned the many resource mangerialist strategies employed in most American political jurisdictions for decades (Gore, 1992, 2006; Gottlieb, 1993). Having surveyed those practices extensively elsewhere (Luke, 2004, 2002, 1999b), this study will focus more on the growing importance granted in ecological policy studies to a notion of system. More recently, national scientific bodies, transnational scientific networks, and international nongovernmental organizations have augmented the spatial scope of their engagement as environmental protection agencies at local, regional, and national scales of analysis with a more global perspective, adopting a planetarian viewpoint that looks beyond stock and/or service to system (Luke, 2008b, 2005a, 2008a). No single jurisdiction has sovereign command-and-control of this planetary spatiality, but there are many organizations, firms, and individuals intent upon preparing to direct responses to such system-level challenges on a strategic basis rather than tactical action (De Certeau, 1988). Designs like these approach the environment and society as coupled systems both artificial and natural whose complexly tight, loose, or indeterminate couplings will be appraised by technical networks known as Earth System Sciences. Their role is to map, measure, monitor, and manage the environmental sustainability of complex social and natural systems generated from all the ecological services and natural resource stocks of the planet (Luke, 2005b). Consequently, the dispositif of Earth System Sciences opens the planet's workings to clusters of expert power and knowledge formations intent upon accounting for, and then perhaps administering, the systems of the Earth as coupled complex ecologies and economies (Briden & Downing, 2002).Link - Mind-Body DualismAttempts to quantify the environment as a thing exercises problematic mind-body dualism.Sanart 97, Sanart Association for the Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod, former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS, http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)//EDAlthough custom and etymology may lead us to think of environment as surroundings, the idea remains complex and elusive. It may already be apparent that I do not ordinarily speak of "the" environment. While this is the usual locution, it embodies a hidden meaning that is the source of much of our difficulty. For "the" environment objectifies environment; it turns it into an entity which we can think of and deal with as if it were outside and independent of ourselves. In The Beauty of Environment, a comprehensive and systematic inquiry into environmental aesthetics, Yrj Sepnmaa accepts the conventional usage. Although his sensitive discussion of the concept of environment retains its association with the external world of an observer, he expands its scope to include the cultural environment and the constructed environment, in addition to the natural one. See The Beauty of Environment (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1986), p.17. Where, however, can we locate "the" environment? Where is "outside" in this case? Is it the landscape that surrounds me where I stand? Is it the world beyond my window? Outside the walls of my room and house? On the other side of the clothes I wear? Is environment the air I breathe? The food I eat? Yet the food metabolizes to become my body, the air swells my lungs and enters my bloodstream, my clothes are not only the outermost layer of my skin but complete and identify my style, my personality, my sense of self. My room, apartment, or home defines my personal space and world. And the landscape in which I move as I walk, drive, or fly is my world, as well, ordered by my understanding, defined by my movements, and molding my muscles, my reflexes, my experience, my consciousness at the same time as I attempt to impose my will over it. Indeed, many of us spend much of our lives in the electronic space of television and computer networks. "The" environment, one of the last survivors of the mind-body dualism, a place beyond which we think to contemplate from a distance, dissolves. "The" environment dissolves into a complex network of relationships, connections, and continuities of those physical, social, and cultural conditions that circumscribe my actions, my responses, my awareness, and that give shape and content to the very life that is mine. For there is no outside world. There is no outside. Nor is there an inner sanctum in which I can take refuge from inimical external forces. The perceiver (mind) is an aspect of the perceived (body) and, in like manner, person and environment are continuous. Thus both aesthetics and environment must be thought of in a new, expanded sense. An aesthetics of engagement rather than contemplation also suits our understanding of environment as continuous with us, its inhabitants. In both cases, art and environment, we can no longer stand apart but join in as active participants.Link - Dualism The cause of the ecological crisis and the human nature binary, it has its roots in the human desire and drive toward alienation that operates prior to any other mode of ethical relationality.Brown and Toadvine 03, Professor of philosophy @ Emporia State University, Assistrant professor of Philosophy @ University of Oregon (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself , New Yoork University Oress)//EDFor the existential philosopher, the roots of the ecological crisis may be much deeper than the Radical Ecologists realize. The humanity-nature disorder is perhaps best conceived as a manifestation of the tendency toward alienation inherent in the human condition one that operates prior to any particular meaning system. This tendency toward alienation, leading to war and oppression in the past, has now been coupled with the technological power to sustain a massive homo centrus centrus population explosion, the by-products of which are poisoning and dismantling the earth's bio-web. There is a certain irony here as the realization of massive, ecological destruction occurs just when we had thought that our science and technology would save us from the ravages of the organic world. lnstead we find ourselves hurtling toward or perhaps through an irrevocable tear in the fabric of the planetary biotic web (and perhaps beyond). l) Dreams of technological Utopia have been replaced overnight by nightmares of ecological holocaust. The existential philosophers remind us that the replacement of one conceptual system for another is not enough unless there occurs with it a corresponding shift or lifestyle change that actually ushers in a new mode of being for humanity. Such thinking reinforces the claim of radicality within the projects of Radical Ecology.The current ecological catastrophe is interconnected with viewing humanity as outside of nature. The development of a new form of thought is a necessary step to resolving the ontological and normative implications that an inadequate relationsip with nature has brought upon us. Brown and Toadvine 03, Professor of philosophy @ Emporia State University, Assistrant professor of Philosophy @ University of Oregon (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself , New Yoork University Oress)//EDHusserl's rather passionate critique of the evils of naturalism make him a clear but unnoticed ally of contemporary ecological philosophers who have argued that there are important and largely unnoticed connections between our worldviews, metaphysical systems, and forms of rationality, on the one hand, and social and environmental domination, on the other. Such philosophers, often known as Radical Ecologists, typically are social ecologists, deep ecologists, or eco-feminists. According to their specific diagnoses, each offers suggested cures involving some kind of revolution in thinking that would produce the kind of spiritual metanoia needed to develop and sustain socially just and environmentally benign practices. Radical Ecologists share the conviction that the massive ecological damage we are witnessing today, as well as inequitable and unjust social arrangements, are the inevitable products of those ways of thinking that separate and privilege humanity over nature. The Radical Ecologist's call to overcome this kind of thinking and replace it with a new understanding of the humanity-nature relation that would result in the emergence and maintenance of environmentally benign Practices requires a thinking of both the meaning of humanity and the meaning of nature in which normative and ontological issues are at stake. Such questions lie in the very interesting crossroads of metaphysics and value theory but also intersect with a Green political agenda and (forgive the term) a "spiritual" quest for the cultivation of a new state of humanitas 3 that transcends the relative barbarism of homo centrus centrus. The Radical Ecologists see this damage as symptomatic of a deeper disorder embedded within the humanity-nature relation. It is embedded within the way nature and humanity are experienced in daily life, in myth, in literature, and in abstract thought. To the extent that the ecological devastation we witness today is the result of anthropocentrism androcentrism, or a dualistic value hierarchical worldview (as many have claimed), the ecological crisis is a crisis of meaning. It is ultimately the meaning of nature and humanity that is at stake. As such it can be managed, solved, or perhaps overcome by new myths or improvements in thinking that would reconceptualize the boundaries, as well as the content, of our understanding of humanity and nature.Link - EcoGov Ontology BadNeed to challenge the ontological assumptions of eco govMalette 10, B.A., M.A. (Laval University), Ph.D. (University of Victoria), Postdoc (University of Melbourne) (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)//EDAnalytically speaking, notions such as green or eco governmentality seem natural extensions of Foucaults own notion of governmentality. But normatively and ontologically speaking, the critical ethos assumed by most Foucaultian and green governmentality scholars remains problematic, in part because such ethos assumes that Nature cannot be an entity in its own right or a vector of transcultural norms, but only is the result of some conceptual and cultural constructs toward which we should be particularly suspicious. Our challenge is thus to better understand how the current greening of our political rationalities can be seen as deepening governmental studies through notions such as green or eco governmentality (this by raising our awareness to that which may well form the next global modes of domination and subjectification), while simultaneously engaging the underlying ontological and political assumptions found in green governmentality studies, which, far from challenging the edifice of modern governmentality, may well be in its very heart.Link - EnvironmentalismEnvironmentalism is a form of political managerialism aimed at preserving bad forms of modernityMalette 10, B.A., M.A. (Laval University), Ph.D. (University of Victoria), Postdoc (University of Melbourne) (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)//EDYet, despite the challenges addressed to the culture of modernity, environmentalism is also generating various political rationalities which aim at shaping human behaviours through their ecological modulations. As Webers assessment of modernity suggests, the spread of such rationalities would entail a managerial and instrumental ethos more than an ethical re-examination of our relations with Nature. The rise of environmentalism would contribute to the creation of eco-management tendencies, often relegating ontological and ethical discussions about Nature to academic philosophers. The domain of political ecology would not only broaden the scope of the instrumental rationalities and the cult of innovation for the sake of innovation they serve, which are the hallmarks of the culture of modernity, it would also propagate the seeds of this managerial ethos beyond the traditional enclaves of modern government.Your environment approach is not the exceptionMalette 10, B.A., M.A. (Laval University), Ph.D. (University of Victoria), Postdoc (University of Melbourne) (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)//EDAll these concerns have sparked a plethora of environmental discourses arguing for re-structuring or re-conceptualizing our relations with Nature so as to provide for thedevelopment of sustainable societies and environmental justice. 2 On the one hand, we find supporters of authoritarian-conservative approaches for whom an increasing centralization of power and control over institutionalized violence still appears as the best remedy to the various crises humanity may encounter, including ecological ones (Hay 2002, pp.173-93). On the other hand, we find supporters of socialist, anarchist and deep ecology approaches confident that current environmental problems can best be solved by a profound reconfiguration of our modern ways of life, including the power dynamics at play. We also find various thinkers for whom the entry of ecological thinking into politics would be safer under the guidance of the democratic and liberal ethos that Western civilizations have crafted to ensure universal progress and ultimately save the world from the barbarity otherwise pervasive (Ferry 1992; Hayward 1995). Of course, the emergence of the environmental movement cannot simply be reduced to green delineations of conservatism, liberalism, socialism and anarchism. We find numerous environmental approaches mixing or borrowing solutions from every ideological corner, making it difficult to understand their positions strictly in term of the Left versus Right or any other consistent political taxonomy. We also find ecological thinkers who deliberately attempt to distance themselves for the dominant social, political and economic representations which would somehow make uniform the culture of modernity. Yet, it seems that most of the political solutions proposed by environmentalists remain largely articulated within the framework delineated by the culture of modernity. Stemming from the assertion that nation-states are increasingly challenged by ecological problems, we find, for instance, the solution of creating a global Leviathan capable of planetary coercion on thes e matters (Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Kuehls 1996; Liftin 1998; Breitmeir, Young and Zrn2006). We also find the idea that, while humans are not likely to comply without coercion to eco-friendly behaviours, creating a world government is too dangerous and/or inappropriate for such challenges (Hay 2002). We also find scholars suggesting that an ecological society can only emerge via the development of social organizations operating through decentralized, classless and direct democracies fixed at a local level. In sum, few original solutions for environmental politics have been recently formulated outside the usual debates, alternatives, and solutions crystallised by the culture of modernityLink - Nuclear WarObsession with salvaging the earth from nuclear war is only a new form of the methodology that seeks to control and manage and survey the earthLuke 09, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory, (Timothy, Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for green governmentality, in Harry F. Dahms (ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.129-159)//EDBased on a perspective that regarded the Earth as an object of observation from astronautical, aeronautical, and nautical platforms, national command-and-control authorities often had to integrate their understanding of the world in pre-war, warring, and post-war scenarios in which human and nonhuman life worldwide would experience rapid coupled destructive events in a thermonuclear war (Luke, 1989b). Moving from such hypothetical strategic models to actual environmental monitoring in a more eco-managerial mindset was not a major methodological shift. Seeing the Earth as a composite of various thermonuclear battle spaces on a 247, 36510, or 1010 timeline speculated about plausible environmental damage zones on daily, weekly, yearly, or decade-long time horizons, while networks of experts tweaked their instruments of Earth surveillance to fulfill and improve upon new missions of ecological surveillance. AlternativeAlternative - Relational OntologyOur conception of subjectivity is one that denies the autonomous individuality of the West this is critical to creating relational agency which leads to different models of social and ecological interactionMalette 10, B.A., M.A. (Laval University), Ph.D. (University of Victoria), Postdoc (University of Melbourne) (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)//EDWith respect to human freedom, which is often conceived in terms of having sovereignty over oneself, the same relational considerations could be invoked. From a relational standpoint, freedom is not the primary quality of a distinct object/subject in the world. Freedom is rather a momentary crystallization of various relations understood and conceptualised by a dominant binary logic in terms of object/subject/quality. In other words, the freedom by which we experience a coherent and autonomous sense of self involves relationships, mutualism, empathy and sympathy with that which is other than oneself from the start (Naess 2008). In Aristotelian terms, no passage from potentiality to actuality could rely solely on its own; the passage to actualization requires numerous interactions which themselves can be viewed as integral to any state of actualisation. It follows that the whole tradition which has organized the hierarchy of beings according to their level of autonomy from the Prime Mover as the metaphysical and cosmological Arch, to the Polis deemed as the mature political entity by virtue of its autonomy as a social organism, to the consecration of human consciousness as superior because of its capacity of obeying its own moral laws would have to be critically reassessed. The vertical and atomistic logic linking the dominant representation of God (or the first cosmological Grand cause), the notion of political sovereignty, and the liberal representation of the individual as a creature of free-will would have to be re-examined in light of an ontological relationalism. From the perspective of ecological relationalists, it is thus clear that the concept of autonomy central to Western culture from the Greeks onward is inherently flawed. In sharp contrast, a relational conception of autonomy and agency would invite a richer understanding of our ontological interdependency which would lead to different models of social and ecological interaction and mediation.The affirmative isnt to dream of a world in which humanity never interfered with nature or created a pristine nature, rather, we must reorient ourselves towards a world in which human has an environmental ethic which recognizes the interconnectivity among all beingsBannon 11, Ph.D. Philosophy (Universityof Memphis) B.A. Philosophy and Honors (University ofRhode Island) (Bryan E, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)//EDAnother important benefit of breaking with the anthropomorphism inherent within the experiential approach is that it allows us to develop an ethic within which time itself becomes a relevant category of ethical consideration. Considering time in this way proves especially helpful within an environmental context. If flesh relations are always between singular bodies and these relations are spatializing and temporalizing, then within any given field there will be multiple temporal scales at work. Usually, our ethical considerations concerning nature only take account of a human temporal scale, but ecological systems, precisely because they are complex systems of interrelationships between beings, are operating within, and changing along, multiple temporal scales simultaneously. If the plurality of temporal relations is ignored, then even well-intentioned and skillfully executed conservation projects may fail to promote wildness. If, for example, an ecological restoration project orients itself toward reestablishing the biological conditions that obtained at a specific point from within human history, this pursuit might neglect the ways in which species and geography have changed in the intervening period, result in the eradication of c