Environmental Discourse Michigan 7 Week 08 Environmental Discourse-Negative

Environmental Discourse Michigan 7
Week 08
Environmental Discourse- Negative
Environmental Discourse- Negative............................................................................................................................................................1

INC- Environmental Discourse....................................................................................................................................................................3
Links – Alternative Energy..........................................................................................................................................................................6
Links – Alternative Energy .........................................................................................................................................................................8
Link- Environmental Prohibitions...............................................................................................................................................................9
Link- Environmental Managerialism.........................................................................................................................................................11
Link-Environmental Managerialism..........................................................................................................................................................17
Link - Managerialism.................................................................................................................................................................................18
Link – Ends Focused Policy Making.........................................................................................................................................................19
Link – Images............................................................................................................................................................................................20
Link- Protecting Biodiversity....................................................................................................................................................................22
Link-Individualized Approaches................................................................................................................................................................23
Link-Individualized Approaches................................................................................................................................................................25
Green Consumerism Link – The Earth Day Example...............................................................................................................................27
Individual Green Consumerism Bad..........................................................................................................................................................28
Link- Science.............................................................................................................................................................................................29
Link- Science and Climate Models............................................................................................................................................................30
Link-Population Crunch ............................................................................................................................................................................31
Link – Population- Resource Crunch.........................................................................................................................................................33
Link – Populations Crunch........................................................................................................................................................................34
Internal Link- Subject- Object Dichotomy................................................................................................................................................35
Internal Link  Militarization ..................................................................................................................................................................36
Internal Link – Capitalism.........................................................................................................................................................................37
Internal Link – Managerialism...................................................................................................................................................................39
Internal Link – Securitization....................................................................................................................................................................40
Internal Link – Securitization....................................................................................................................................................................41
Impact- Value to Life.................................................................................................................................................................................43
Impact – Colonialism.................................................................................................................................................................................44
Impacts – Turns Case.................................................................................................................................................................................46
Impact – Turns Case...................................................................................................................................................................................48
Impact – Turns Case...................................................................................................................................................................................50
Impact- Mass Death...................................................................................................................................................................................51
Impact- War and Colonialism....................................................................................................................................................................52
Alternative Solvency..................................................................................................................................................................................53
Alternative – Discursive Re-Framing/Resistance......................................................................................................................................54
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Alternative- Micro Resistance...................................................................................................................................................................55
Representations Key..................................................................................................................................................................................56
Alternative- Ecological Revolution...........................................................................................................................................................57
Alternative- Eco- Resistance......................................................................................................................................................................58
A2 Permutation .........................................................................................................................................................................................60
A2 Framework ..........................................................................................................................................................................................61
A2 Framework...........................................................................................................................................................................................63
AT Perm: “We Help People”......................................................................................................................................................................64
AT Perm: “We access the case”.................................................................................................................................................................66
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INC- Environmental Discourse
Link - The plan’s discourse of necessary environmental sustainability serves as a justification

for the state to exercise managerial power
Luke 97 (Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, March
18-22, 1997 “The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature,” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm)
A political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about ecology, environments, and Nature, first surfaced as the social project of
"environmentalism" during the 1960s in the United States, but it plainly has become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of
this takes the form of general theory, because most of its practices have been instead steered toward analysis, stock taking, and
classification in quantitative, causal, and humanistic studies. Nonetheless, one can follow Foucault by exploring how mainstream
environmentalism in the United States operates as "a whole series of different tactics that combined in
varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations."3 The
project of "sustainability," whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation to Earth's ecologies,
embodies this new responsibility for the life processes in the American state's rationalized harmonization
of political economy with global ecology as a form of green geo-politics.
These interconnections become even more intriguing in the aftermath of the Cold War. Having won the long twilight struggle
against communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed by leaders who now see "Earth in the balance,"
arguing that global ecologies incarnate what is best and worst in the human spirit. On the one hand,
economists, industrialists, and political leaders increasingly tend to represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991 world system as
one on which all nations must compete ruthlessly to control the future development of the world economy by developing new
technologies, dominating more markets, and exploiting every national economic asset. However, the phenomenon of "failed states,"
ranging from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities like Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, often is
attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with the (un)wise (ab)use of Nature by ineffective strategies for creating
economic growth.4 Consequently, environmental protection issues--ranging from resource conservation to
sustainable development to ecosystem restoration--are getting greater consideration in the name of creating
jobs, maintaining growth, or advancing technological development.
Taking "ecology" into account, then, creates discourses on "the environment" that derive not only from
morality, but from rationality as well. As humanity has faced "the limits of growth" and heard "the
population bomb" ticking away, ecologies and environments became something more than what one
must judge morally; they became things that state must administer. Ecology has evolved into "a public
potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses," as
it was recognized in its environmentalized manifestations to be "a police matter"--"not the repression of
disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces."5
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Impact –This new form of bio-political control seeks to expand its center in an attempt to discipline using
ecology as its Trojan horse
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,1999, Discourses of the
Environment, p. 142-44
The 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 today’s 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: 138—42). 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
man’s 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 latter’s 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. 143—4). 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 society’s 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 ecosystem’s carrying capacity.
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Alternative - Domination is perpetuated by the ability of those in power to define the discursive framing
of the field of contestation. Neither corporate managerialism nor traditional environmental activism has
any hope of securing lasting change in contemporary environmental debates – literally the ONLY hope
for change is a representational strategy like ours.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, June-July 2003, Alternatives,
p. 413-14
These new modes of existence present us with an opportunity. A world where one asks, “What are world politics?” and then funda-
mentally doubts all the answers about what the political world is taken to be gives both individuals and groups the opportunity to
transform their spaces for effective action. Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their advantage by defining how
the world is known. Unless they also face resistance, questioning, and challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will
remain the dominant forces. Looked at by itself, the neat division of the world into the realms of international relations and
environmental affairs remains somewhat colorless. Such terms continuously remediate our most common modes of interpretation, as
they now prevail in the world. Indeed, this language spins particular words—globalization, sustainability, development—into either
important choke points or major rights-of-way in the flows of political discourse. The connections between international relations and
the environment assume considerable importance in the 2000s because much of the world’s ecology has deteriorated so rapidly
during the past ten, thirty, or fifty years. This omnipolitanizing deterioration, in fact, has spread so quickly that neither green
fundamentalist preservationism nor corporate capitalist conservationism can do much to solve the pressing ecological problems of
the present. Now, after the industrial revolution, nowhere in the world holds out against machines; high technology is everywhere.
After two world wars, few places anywhere in the world hold onto traditional formulas of authority; liberal democracy is spreading
everywhere. After the Cold War, nowhere seriously holds forth as a real alternative to the market; corporate capitalism is everywhere.
So only a truly critical approach to international relations and the environment can unravel why these forces interact, and maybe
correct how they create ecological destruction. Improving the understanding of international relations as a scholarly discipline is one
possible response to this new context. Strangely enough, the dysfunction of markets and states is a key constituent component of
the contemporary world system’s environmental crisis.
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Links – Alternative Energy

The affirmative’s attempt to regulate and control the environment is a method of transforming
earth into a theme park for humanity. Once we sacrifice the natural unpredictability inherent
to the environment, we sacrifice the very human experience created by it.
Parker 96 (Kelly A. Parker, Pragmatism and Environmental Thought, in Environmental Pragmatism 21, 25 (Andrew
Light & Eric Katz eds., 1996).
(1) For the pragmatist, the environment is above all not something "out there," somehow separate from us, standing ready to be
used up or preserved as we deem necessary. As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, "Our own body is in
the world as the heart is in the organism".17 We cannot talk about environment without talking about experience, the
most basic term in pragmatism. All that we or any being can feel, know, value, or believe in, from the most concrete
fact ("I am cold") to the most abstract or transcendental idea ("Justice," "God"), has its meaning, first of all, in some
aspect of an immediately felt here and now. Environment, in the most basic sense, is the field where experience
occurs, where my life and the lives of others arise and take place. Experience, again, is not merely subjective. It has its
"subjective" side, but experience as such is just another name for the manifestation of what is. What is is the ongoing
series of transactions between organisms and their environments. The quality of experience - whether life is rich or
sterile, chaotic or orderly, harsh or pleasant - is determined at least as much by the quality of the environment
involved as by what the organism brings to the encounter. Environment is as much a part of each of us as we are parts
of the environment, and moreover, each of us is a part of the environment - a part of experience - with which other
beings have to contend. In asserting the fundamental relatedness among organisms and environments, pragmatism commits us to
treating all environments with equal seriousness. Urban and rural; wilderness, park and city; ocean and prairie; housing project,
hospital and mountain trail - all are places where experience unfolds. The world, in this view, is a continuum of various
environments. Endangered environments perhaps rightly occupy our attention first, but environmental philosophy and ecological
science are at bottom attempts to understand all the environments we inhabit. Attention to the whole continuum of environments
allows us to put into perspective what is truly valuable about each. The environments we inhabit directly affect the kinds of lives that
we and others can live. There is an unfortunate tendency to draw crassly instrumentalist conclusions from this line of thought. I want
to caution against this tendency. If environment "funds" experience, this reasoning might go, then let us use technology to
turn the whole world into an easily manageable, convenient stock of environments that conduce to pleasant human
experiences. This Theme Park: Earth line of thinking neglects our inherent limitations as finite parts of the world, and
sets us up for disaster. Repeated attempts to dominate nature (e.g., our damming the Nile and its damning us right back, or
our tragicomic' efforts to "tame" the atom) should have begun to teach us something about the limits of human
intelligence. Such attempts to dominate nature assume that no part of the environment in question is beyond the field
of settled experience. We can indeed exert remarkable control over parts of the experienced world, remaking it to suit
our purposes. This may be appropriate, if our purposes make sense in the first place. (I know of no reason to object to the
prudent use of natural gas to heat our homes, for example.) But the very idea that the environment funds experience involves the
notion that there is an ineffable aspect of the world. It is indeed arrogant to think that we can master nature; it is moreover
delusional and ultimately self-negating. If we have our being in the ongoing encounter with environment, then to will
that the environment become a fully settled, predictable thing, a mere instrumental resource in which there can be no
further novelty, is to will that we undergo no further growth in experience. The attempt to dominate nature completely
is thus an attempt to annihilate the ultimate source of our growth, and hence to annihilate ourselves.
Despite their laudable goals, regimes of alternative energy frame the Earth as nothing more than a
standing reserve which, instead of being exploited quickly, is preserved to be rendered perpetually useful
to humanity.
The 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 Earth’s many territ-
ories 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 simulta-
neously 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 race’s ‘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 planet’s 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
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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). Survival is the key value.
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Links – Alternative Energy

Protections for biodiversity are motivated by attempts to preserve “nature” for exploitation in the future
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1997, Ecocritique, p. 73-74
These aesthetic appeals, however, to preserve lands and scenery in keeping with the Conservancy’s initial organizational agendas,
just mystify the organization’s more recent objectives of preserving biodiversity. Scenery provides legitimation, land creates a
containment area, and rare ecosystems constitute storage sites for precious biogenetic information. Thus, these memorial parks for
“nature conservancy more importantly are becoming a network of cryogennic depots. Inside their boundaries, natural wetware
accepts deposits as genome banks, accumulating bioplasmic memory on the hoof, at the roots, under the bark, and in the soil of
Nature Conservancy protection actions. Nature is dead, but its environmental remains are put into a cryogenic statis until some future
day when science and technology can bring the full productive potential out of them that escapes human development now. At that
point, they too will be released from their frozen state to become the trade lands of tomorrow, as some snail, lichen, or bug is
discovered to hold a cure for cancer or the common cold. Under the guidance of Bob Jenkins’s biodiversity plan, Nature has been
transmogrified from the matter and space hoarded by the Ecologist’s Union into informational codes and biospheric addresses
archived by The Nature Conservancy. Plants and animals become more than endangered flowers or threatened fish; they become
unknown and unexploited economic resources essential to human survival. “Of all the plants and animals we know on this earth,” as
one Conservancy supporter testifies, “only one in a hundred has been tested for possible benefit. And the species we have not even
identified yet far outnumber those that we have. We destroy them before we discover them and determine how they might be
useful.”44 Conservancy preserves, then, are biodiversity collection centers, allowing a free-enterprise-minded foundation to suspend
their native flora and fauna in an ecologically correct deep freeze until scientists can assay the possible worth of the ninety-nine
untested species out of each hundred banked in these preserves.45 Meanwhile, grizzly bears, bald eagles, and spotted owls provide
high visibility entertainment value in its preserves for ecotourists, Conservancy members, and outdoor recreationists all seeking to
enjoy such Edenic spaces. In “preserving Eden,” the Conservancy more importantly is guarding the bioplasmic source codes that
enable the wetware of life to recapitulate its existence in the timeless routines of birth, life, reproduction, and death.46 Such riches
can only be exploited slowly, but they cannot be developed at all unless today’s unchecked consumption of everything everywhere is
contained by Nature Conservancy protection actions bringing the world economy to an absolute zero point of inactivity in these
Edenic expanses of the global environment.
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Link- Environmental Prohibitions

Practices of environmental protection employ governmentality and biopolitics by engaging in the
disciplining and punishing of the population.
Ronnie D Lipschutz, professor of politics at the university of California-santa cruz, Global Environmental Politics: Power,
Perspectives, and Practice, 2004, pg. 83-85
Governnientality and Biopolitics: Bringing Power Back In? Those environmental philosophies that resist domination are linked to
power relations among humans, and between humans and nature. As we saw earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 1, there is more
than one dimension of power, which is not something that can be simply accumulated or distributed, as are money or artifacts or
weapons. Nevertheless, all of the “antidomination” philosophies discussed so far seek to oppose and resist power in its first
dimension— usually the power of capital and the state—in the view that the ideal society is one in which power is evenly and fairly
distributed or from which it has been banished. If the unjust exercise of power could be eliminated, goes the implicit argument, not
only would intraspecific domination cease (among people), so would interspecific domination (between people and nature). There is,
however, a problem with this argument: it denatures or dismisses politics, so to speak. If politics is fundamentally about power, rather
than the distribution of resources, equalizing or eliminating power would have the effect of doing away with politics. In such a society,
everyone would have to hold the same beliefs and values, and all decisions would have already been made. It would be either a
harmonious society or a totalitarian one. It might be both. It is useful, therefore, to examine one final approach to the problem of
power, domination, and the environment, based on the work of Michel Foucault.102 Although Foucault said many relevant things about
both power and nature separately, he never wrote explicitly about the environment. He did, however, write about power and
domination and, in particular, the propensity of some men to manage both other men and things so as to order them. He called this
practice “governmentality.” 103 Government is not the same as politics; it is better understood as those practices that constitute
governing of “a sort of complex of men and things” within a state. As Foucault explained it, “The things with which in this sense
government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which
are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; lastly, men in
their relations to that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.” 104 In Foucault’s
analysis, power is not merely something that some men wield over others, it is also something that “induces pleasure, forms knowl-
edge, produces discourse.” 105 Power flows between people, it constitutes them, it makes them who they are, and it influences how
they behave. This is the case even when power is not visible as influence, coercion, or force. Domination becomes not the exercise of
power by some people over others and nature but is the result of people acting as they have been produced by power circulating
through what Foucault called the “capillaries” of society. In effect, governmentality becomes a way of managing those things that are
seen to threaten the welfare of that which is governed. This is accomplished through what Foucault called biopolitics. According to
Mitchell Dean, a scholar of Foucault and governmentality, biopolitics “is concerned with matters of life and death, with birth and
propagation, with health and illness, both physical and mental, and with the processes that sustain or retard the optimization of the
life of a population.” 106 It is about management of the biological functions and social practices of homogeneous populations. Dean
goes on to say: “Bio-politics must then also concern the social, cultural, environmental, economic and geographic conditions under
which humans live, procreate, become ill, maintain health or become healthy, and die. From this perspective bio-politics is concerned
with the family, with housing, living and working conditions, with what we call “lifestyle’ with public health issues, patterns of
migration, levels of economic growth and the standards of living. It is concerned with the bio-sphere in which humans dwell.’07” To put
this another way, all those institutions and practices concerned with exploiting, managing, and protecting the environment, including
international environmental regimes and regulated markets, are expressions of biopolitics. They are all concerned with the
management of human behavior and populations so as to maintain the material base of life, that is, the global environment. Unlike
the other philosophies discussed in this section, environmental governmentality and biopolitics take power as an essential part of
human social structures and relations. Power cannot be eliminated; at best, it can help to produce effects that are less dominating,
less oppressive, less manipulative, and more protective of both human welfare and nature. But it does not take much to move from
arrangements in which power is productive to those in which power is oppressive: one could easily imagine a system of global envi-
ronmental governmentality in which nature is protected but each individual’s every action is subject to surveillance, discipline, and
punishment. That might be too high a price to pay to achieve a cleaner environment.’08
The cataloguing and control of consumptive habits is the justification for massive state intervention and
domination of capitalist society
Timothy W. Luke, professor of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute and state university, Capitalism, Democracy, and
Ecology: Departing from Marx, 1999, pg. 71-72
This comodifying circuit of commodified reproduction elaborates the essential logic of “consummativity,” which anchors this entire
system. Instead of maintaining the irreducible tension between the public and private spheres that liberal economic and legal theory
accept as true to accept the individual contingency of rational living, the public and private have collapsed into commodifying circuits
of identity all across the technosphere in the coding systems of corporate-managed consummativity. The collective imperatives of the
firm or the state are in turn internalized by individuals in the form of personalized tastes of consumption in the family, firm, and mass
public. Such identity linkages allow the state and firm to regulate the economic and ecological existence of individuals closely,
inasmuch as most persons now desire the “needs” extended to them as rewarding reified scripts of normal behavior written by the
media, mass education, or professional experts and as the packages of mass-produced material goods made available by corporate
commerce.20 Yet these individual “needs” also are simultaneously required by the contemporary state and corporate firm as co-
modifying forces of organization, direction, and value. The aggregate possibility for economic growth and the specific quality of
commodity claims implied by these individual needs taken en masse are the productive forces guaranteeing further development in
today’s transnational corporate system of capitalist production. The underlying codes of technified consummativity in corporate
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capitalism rarely manifest themselves openly. They are masked instead as democratic social and economic revolutions “rooted in the
democratic alibi of universals,” like convenience, modernity, growth, utility or progress. As Baudrillard suggests, consummativity
presents itself “as a function of human needs, and thus a universal empirical function. Objects, goods, services, all this ‘responds’ to
the universal motivations of the social and individual anthropos. On this basis one could even argue (the leitmotiv of the ideologues of
consumption) that its function is to correct the social inequalities of a stratified society: confronting the hierarchy of power and social
origins, there would be a democracy of leisure, of the expressway and the refrigerator.”21 In a sense, then, as the inchoate mass
demands for a better “standard of living” in the “velvet revolutions” of Eastern Europe during 1989—91 illustrate, corporate capital can
still pose successfully as a revolutionary vanguard for those who want more bananas, autos, oranges, and washing machines.
Speaking on behalf of deprived consumers, and challenging the apparently more oppressive stratification, inequality, and material
deprivation of all other forms of precapitalist or anticapitalist society, the new class offers the promise of complete economic
democracy, social equality, and material abundance. This pledge is legitimated by the expansive corporate collateral of sparkling new
material goods, exciting cultural events, and satisfying social services.
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Link- Environmental Managerialism

Contemporary environmentalism discursively constructs the natural world as in need of the
saving grace of state intervention, rendering “nature” vulnerable to its expert management
and regimes of calculation.
In the USA, playing off stereotypes of ‘the environmentalist’, ranging from the limousine liberal to the Sierra Club backpacker to Earth
First! monkey-wrenchers, ‘wise use’ anti-environmentalism feeds on the self-evidence of mass media coverage on the environment.
Because elitist do-gooders and wacko tree-sitters allegedly agitate to trade off people’s jobs against the survival of spotted owls, snail
darters, or desert tortoises, the Wise Use/Property Rights movement in the USA pumps up these images from the six o’clock news as
its essential credo: environmental protection is costing jobs and undermining the American economy. Therefore, it is right to have
moved, as one of its key organizers, Ron Arnold, puts it, to declare a ‘holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and
sacrifice people’ (Helvarg 1994: 12). The self-evidence of radical fringe environmentalists abridging fundamental property rights to
realize their foolish pagan fantasies of resource non-use, as depicted in any network television send-up of such ecosubversives, gives
ordinary Americans causus belli to retaliate in the name of economic rationality and sound governance. Following Michel Foucault,
this study comes out against the self-evidence of the six o’clock news to breach the Wise Use/Property Rights movement’s invocation
of such historical constants, obvious prerogatives or basic rights as their justification for anti-environmentalism. Rather than seeing
mainstream or radical environmentalism so self-evidently as a distemper of foolish resource non-use when it comes to nature, this
study provisionally suggests that most environmentalist movements now operate as a basic manifestation of governmentality.
Indeed, this ‘green governmentality’, which the Wise Use/Property Rights movement occasionally decries, would seem to be
the latest phase in a solid series of statist practices beginning in the eighteenth century. Thus, this analysis is ‘a breach of
self-evidence’, and particularly ‘of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences, and practices rest’
(Foucault, in Burchell et al. 1991: 76), during a time in which the US Speaker of the House and the entire 104th
Congress act as if they are Ron Arnold’s closest allies in the holy war against environmental protection. As it is
discursively constructed by contemporary technoscience, the art of government now finds ‘the principles of its rationality’ and ‘the
specific reality of the state’ (Foucault 199 la: 97), like the policy programmes of sustainable development, balanced growth or
ecological harmony for its many constituent populations of human and non-human beings, in the systemic requirements of ecology.
Government comes into its own when it has the welfare of a population, the improvement of its condition, the increase
of its wealth, longevity, health and so on, as its object. And ecology gives rational governments all of life’s biodiversity to
reformat as ‘endangered populations’, needing various state ministrations as objects of managerial control ignorant of what is being
done to them as part and parcel of ‘a range of absolute new tactics and techniques’(ibid. 100). Ecology simply crystallizes the
latest phase of the ‘three movements: government, population, political economy, which constitute. . . a solid series,
one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved’ (ibid. 102) in the formations of green governmentality.
They re-establish the subject object dichotomy – in their politics, a subjectivized Nature is a
blank slate that humanity draws its collective visions of salvation upon, using it as nothing
more than a means to an end
Deep ecology’s ultimate value of self-realization claims to go “beyond the modern Western self which is defined as an isolated ego
striving primarily for hedonistic gratification or for a narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next.”51 Real selfhood, it is
claimed, derives from human unity with Nature, realizing our mature personhood and uniqueness with all other human and
nonhuman forms of being. Humanity must be “naturalized”; that is, the “human self” is not an atomistic ego, but a species-being and
a Nature-being as a self-in-Self, “where Self stands for organic wholeness.”52 Here, the essence of Nature, to a large extent, would
appear to be a projection of an idealized humanity onto the natural world. Nature is “humanized” in a myth of subjectivity to change
human behavior. The reanimation of Nature in deep ecology extends this selfhood to all natural entities—rocks, bacteria, trees,
clouds, river systems, animals—and permits the realization of their inner essence. As deep ecology depicts it, and as Georg Lukacs
would observe, Nature here refers to authentic humanity, the true essence of man liberated from the false, mechanizing forms of
society: man as a perfected whole who inwardly has overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and
practice, reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply an abstract
rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical.53 Nature in this myth of subjectivity
becomes for humanity the correct mediation of its acting that can generate a new, more just totality. Deep ecologists, however,
cannot really enter into an intersubjective discourse with rocks, rivers, or rhinos, despite John Muir’s injunction to think like glaciers or
mountains when confronting Nature. “The meditative deep questioning process” might allow humanity “an identification which goes
beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world.”54 A hypostatization of self in human species being, whales, grizzlies, rain forests,
mountains, rivers, and bacteria is no more than the individual’s identification of his/her self with those particular aspects of Nature
that express their peculiar human liberation. This ideological appropriation, in turn, is always (human) self-serving. One must ask, Is
humanity naturalized in such self-realization or is Nature merely humanized to the degree that its components promote human
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“maturity and growth”? This vision of self-realization appears to go beyond a modern Western notion of self tied to hedonistic
gratification, but it does not transcend a narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next. Nature in deep ecology becomes
humanity’s transcendent identical subject-object. By projecting selfhood into Nature, humans are saved by finding their self-
maturation and spiritual growth in it. These goals are found in one’s life by in-dwelling psychically and physically in organic
wholeness, as well as in the next life by recognizing that one may survive (physically in fact) within other humans, whales, grizzlies,
rain forests, mountains, rivers, and bacteria or (psychically in faith) as an essential part of an organic whole. Nature, then, becomes
ecosophical humanity’s alienated self-understanding, partly reflected back to itself and selectively perceived as self-realization,
rediscovered in selected biospheric processes.
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Managing natural resources inevitably entails rehabilitation managerialism because of the constant need
for capital to expand – protecting one resource today only ensures that another is exploited tomorrow
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Spring 2003, Aurora Online,
http://aurora.icaap.org/2003Interviews/luke.html, accessed December 10, 2004
Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality. While voices in favour of conservation can be found in
Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive establishment of this stance in the United States in the late 19th century.
From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw the closing of the western frontier. And whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist
programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there is a spreading awareness of modern industry's power to deplete nature's
stock of raw materials, which sparks wide-spread worries about the need to find systems for conserving their supply from such
unchecked exploitation. Consequently, nature's stocks of materials are rendered down to resources, and the presumptions of
resourcification become conceptually and operationally well entrenched in conservationist philosophies. The fundamental premises of
resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best, this code of practice has only become more
formalized in many governments' applications and legal interpretations. Working with the managerial vision of the second industrial
revolution, which tended to empower technical experts like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural
schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself as they say on
producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and professional managers, one found corporate executives and financial
officers in the main office, who are of course trained in business schools. Put together, resource managerialism casts corporate
administrative frameworks over nature in order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision society through national
and international markets. As scientific forestry, range management, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an
ethos of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result, the operational
agendas of what was called sustained yield were what directed the resource managerialism of the 20th century. In reviewing the
enabling legislation of key federal agencies, one quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their
institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy. As Cortner and Moote observe, the statutory mandates for both the Forest
Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management, the
Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield
approach to resource management. More often than not, however, these agencies adjusted their multiple use concept to correspond
to their primary production objective -- timber in the case of the Forest Service, grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management.
Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the legislated mandate of agencies such as the National Parks Service or the
Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case
of the parks, water supply in the case of water resources. So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output
system. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable
output up to or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-spread ecological
degradation, which leads to the project of rehabilitation managerialism. The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult.
Indeed, the will to manage environments arises from this wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One obvious outcome of building and then living around the
satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was pollution of the air, water, and land. As it continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and wildlife obviously
suffered, while soils and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic growth typically drove these processes of degradation until
markets fell, technologies changed, or the ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture, business and government leaders, working at the
local, regional, and national level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating people and settlements in industry to start
these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and environmental assets to revitalize their
resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation management then is about keeping production going in one way
or another. Agricultural lands that once produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water
courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic
ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank accounts. The engagements of rehabilitation management are to find a
commodifiable or at least a valuable possibility in the brown fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after
decades of abuse, there are useful possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted
waterways, and rust belt towns. Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation. Such operations
can shift agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves, and retrain workers. But the goals here are not
return ecosystems to some pristine natural state. On the contrary, its agendas are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of
course, what will be yielded and at what levels it is sustained and for which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the
one hand, the motives of rehabilitation management are quite rational, because these moves delay or even cancel the need to
sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other sites. Thus nature is perhaps protected elsewhere or at large by renewing
industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some ongoing project of industrial growth. On the other hand, rehabilitation
managerialism may only shift the loci and the foci of damage, rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain,
while simply redirecting the inhabitants of these sites to suffer new, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels, of
environmental contamination in other commodity chains. If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been ruined, one can then
perhaps get into restoring it.
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Environmental management is the new form of biopolitics – a discourse of control and discipline that
seeks to create and monitor properly ecologically-minded subjects that internalize the operations of bio-
politics.
Eric Darier, Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University, 1999, Discourses of
the Environment, p. 22-25
This 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 enemy’s field of vision”,’ and cannot be positioned
as a referential ‘externality’ (de Certeau 1984: 37). This is why Foucault’s genealogical approach is so important for an environmental
critique. Foucault’s 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: 99—106).
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.
Foucault’s 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 Luke’s
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 ‘Nature’s 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.
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Discourses of sustainable limits to population play into the hands of capitalist globalization, relying on
forming subjects as rational consumers of particular population control methods
Catriona Sandilands, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, 1999, Discourses of the
That the mode of sexual subjectivity generated in, and borne by, population-talk is intimately related to the economic and social
relations of (globalizing) late capitalism is not a stunning revelation: at the level of physical technologies, of course, family planning
and contraceptive development provide a fantastic new global market for the provision of goods and services. But at the level of
cultural technologies as well, discourses of the self associated with capitalist liberal individualism, and even particular family forms
associated with capitalist productive relations, are part of the normative package sold by the global family planning movement. As
Irene Diamond illustrates, these technologies are strongly tied together: In order to create a disciplined market that would find West-
ern contraception desirable, family planning professionals utilized enticing media images that were most always supplemented by
monetary and non-monetary incentives. Women of the South were told ‘contraceptives are a woman’s right’. And if in a particular dis-
trict an insufficient number of women became ‘acceptors’, zealous recruiters, whose own survival within bureaucratic delivery
systems depended on achieving their target goal, did not stop at tricking or compelling a woman to accept. (Diamond 1994: 73—4,
emphasis added) What I would like to suggest is that contemporary population discourses, acting largely (though never entirely)
through normative prescriptions of a particular form of managed sexual subjectivity, are part of the increasing global reach of
capitalist market economic relations. Just as biopower was intimately involved in the development of industrial capital in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too it is a foundational element in the globalization of monopoly capital at the end of the
twentieth. At one end of the spectrum is international aid tied to the implementation of coercive birth control strategies; at the other
is the even more insidious discursive linkage of (economic) well-being with small families through educational programmes sponsored
by international development agencies. Whereas the former is relatively easy to condemn (if still, unfortunately, common in some
places), the latter is the dominant discourse of organizations such as the United Nations, which are now beginning to speak the
language of liberal feminism and women’s rights. Contemporary population management strategies of education and increasing
women’s ‘rights’ of access to contraception effectively mask their imbrication in institutionalized discourses of capitalist economic
development under a layer of liberal feminist concern for women’s social position. This discourse suggests a sort of reproductive
structural adjustment; just as the politics of debt and aid force particular economic relations on countries of the South, so too the
politics of population management, especially given their transmission via particular reproductive technologies, impose particular
family and gender relations. In structural adjustment, countries are to produce themselves according to a capitalist productive logic;
in reproductive structural adjustment, women and men are to produce themselves according to profoundly normative discourses
about appropriate gender relations and family structures.
Practices of ecology in the context of the modern nation-state establish new regimes of biopolitics and
governmentality. By constituting both the object of government, the environment, and the means of
governing, scientific rationality, eco-biopolitics develops new techniques for the management not just of
the environment, but of whole populations.
Paul Rutherford, professor of environmental politics in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University
of Sydney, Australia, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 37-38
Modern thinking about the natural environment is characterized by the belief that nature can be managed or governed through the
application of the scientific principles of ecology. This chapter considers how governing the environment in this sense involves more
than the familiar political activities of the modern administrative state. Environmental governance in advanced liberal societies is far
more dependent on the role played by scientific expertise in defining and managing environmental problems than the more
traditional state-centric notions of politics and power would suggest. Scientific ecology has become a political resource that in
important respects constitutes the objects of government and, at the same time, provides the intellectual machinery essential for the
practice of such government. Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and governmentality can help provide a critical perspective on
contemporary environmental problems. In this chapter I attempt to demonstrate this by developing three basic propositions: first,
that the concern with ecological problems and environmental crises can be seen as a development of what Foucault called ‘the
regulatory biopolitics of the population’; second, that this contemporary biopolitics has given expression to a mode of governmental
rationality that is related to the institutionalization of new areas of scientific expertise, which in turn is based on a bio-economic
understanding of global systems ecology; and third, that this relatively recent articulation of biopolitics gives rise to new techniques
for managing the environment and the population that can be termed ‘ecological governmentality’.
Positions of environmental leadership allow the U.S. to articulate visions of disciplinary green
governmentality across the globe
So it is through acting as an agency of environmental protection on a global scale that the United States sees itself reasserting its
world leadership after the Cold War. As the world’s leader, in turn, America stipulates that it cannot advance economic prosperity and
ecological preservation without erasing the dividing lines between domestic and foreign policy. In the blur of the coming Information
Age and its global villages, the United States cannot separate America’s common good from the common goods of the larger world.
To be truly secure in the twentieth century, each American’s personal, family and national stake in their collective future must be
served through the nation’s environmental policies. Secretary of State Warren Christopher confirmed President Clinton’s engagement
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with the environment through domestic state-craft and diplomatic action thus: ‘protecting our fragile environment also has profound
long-range importance for our country, and in 1996 we will strive to fully integrate our environmental goals into our diplomacy —
something that has never been done before’ (Christopher 1996b: 12). Because ‘the nations of the world look to America as a source
of principled and reliable leadership’, new leading principles and reliable sources for this authority need to be discovered (ibid. 9).
And, to a certain extent, they can be derived from a tactics of normalization rooted within the codes of geo-power, eco-knowledge
and enviro-discipline. From President Nixon’s national launch of an American Environmental Protection Agency to President Clinton’s
global engagement of America as the world’s leading agency of environmental protection, one can see the growing importance of a
green governmentality in the state’s efforts to steer, manage and legitimate all of its various policies. Repudiating ‘the end of history’ thesis, Secretary of State
Christopher announced at a major address hosted by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that the Unites States must cope instead with ‘history in fast-forward’, since it now faces ‘threats from which no border can shield us —terrorism,
proliferation, crime, and damage to the environment’ (ibid. 11). Such ‘new transnational security threats’ endanger ‘all of us in our interdependent world’ (ibid. 12), 50 the United States will step forward in the post-Cold War era to combat these threats as an integral
part of its anti-isolationist policies. As it runs headlong ahead on fast-forward, the United States now pledges through its Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gases, ratify biodiversity conventions, and approve the Law of the Sea. Even so, President Clinton, Vice-
we can make greater use of environmental initiatives to promote larger strategic and economic goals
President Al Gore, and Secretary Christopher also recognize ‘how
. . . helping our environmental industrial sector capture a larger share of a $400-billion global market’ (ibid.). Consequently, Secretary
Christopher directed the staffs of Global Affairs, Policy Planning and the New Bureau of Oceans, International Environment and
Scientific Affairs to identify environmental, population and resource issues which affected key US interests during February 1996.
Along with naming a new Assistant Secretary for Oceans, International Environment and Scientific Affairs, Christopher also ordered
that each American embassy now have an environmental senior officer, and that all bureau and mission planning have an
environmental element in their agenda (1996a). As he told the House International Relations Committee, in 1996 things would
change at the State Department, because he was ‘fully integrating environmental goals into our daily diplomacy for the first time’,
and ‘making greater use of environmental initiatives to promote our larger strategic and economic goals’ (1996c: 160).
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Link-Environmental Managerialism
Green govermentality rests on a series of scientific “truths” that assume technocratic
language to submit both the earth and its inhabitants. Claims to create sustainable
environments serve to increase the states bio-political control
Eva Lövbrand is a PhD candidate in environmental science at Kalmar University, Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change:
Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism February 2006
Alongside the market-oriented approach to environmental problem-solving proposed by ecological modernization, a discourse of
green governmentality predominates in industrialized societies. This discourse epitomizes a global [End
Page 53] form of power tied to the modern administrative state, mega-science and big business. It entails
the administration of life itself--individuals, populations and the natural environment.12 According to the
original account proposed by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, governmentality is associated with a multiplicity of rationalities,
authorities and agencies that seek to shape the conduct of human behavior. By affecting the choices, aspirations and lifestyles of
individuals and groups, these disciplining practices involve the power over and through the individual.13 Knowledge and various forms
of expertise are intrinsically linked to this bio-political fostering or management of life. In the late 18th century Europe, when
governmentality was associated with the administration of human health, biology, criminology and medicine represented
authoritative areas of expertise.14 In more recent years global environmental threats have given rise to a new set
of "eco-knowledges" that extend government control to the entire planet.15
The current green twist to governmentality is manifested through a notion of stewardship of nature and
an all-encompassing management of its resources.16 In the name of sustainable development and
environmental risk management a new set of administrative truths have emerged that expand bio-
politics to all conditions under which humans live. These new eco-knowledges and practices organize and
legitimize common understandings of the environmental reality and enforce "the right disposition of
things" between humans and nature.17 The numerous scientific expert advisors that have emerged on the environmental
arena during the past decades play an authoritative role in the construction of these eco-knowledges. Resting upon a notion of
sound science, these well-trained environmental professionals provide credible definitions of environmental
risks as well as legitimate methods to measure, predict and manage the same risks.18 Since the growth of "big"
science in the mid 20th century, a world-wide techno-scientific infrastructure has developed that today enables environmental experts
to monitor and, in many cases, even manage the Earth's biogeochemical cycles, hydrological flows and human patterns of pollution
and environmental degradation. In the field of climate change, this physical manifestation of the green
governmentality discourse is particularly pronounced. Satellite supervision of the Earth's vegetation
cover, advanced computer modeling of atmospheric and oceanographic processes, a global grid of
meteorological stations and carbon flux towers exemplify the resource-intensive infrastructure used by
expert groups to study, monitor and predict the trajectories of human-induced climate change. [End Page
54]
In its technocratic expression green governmentality can be understood an elitist and totalizing
discourse that effectively marginalizes alternative understandings of the natural world.19 Through a
detached and powerful view from above--a "global gaze"--nature is approached as a terrestrial
infrastructure subject to state protection, management and domination.20 In the attempt to rationalize
human and natural conditions of life, this instrumental control over the natural world forms the basis of a
large-scale "terraforming" project that is in the process of reshaping the Earth into a planetary order of
complex socio-technical systems.21
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Link - Managerialism
Ensuring planetary survival is not a benign goal – survival formulated in ecological terms gives the state
carte blanche to violently enforce its model of sustainability across the globe, resulting in devastating
environmental colonialism
Environment, p. 147
This command to go anywhere at anytime to defend the cause of survival may direct enviro-discipline to pursue other equally
problematic values on a global level with the full force of state power and positive science: namely, stability, diversity and inter-
dependence. A powerful nation-state is no longer empowered simply to defend its territory to protect its population. As Clinton and
Gore claim, it must now also identify and police the surroundings in all of its many operational environments, to guarantee ecological
stability, biological diversity and environmental interdependence. Because some states are more sustainable than others, their
survival imperatives may become guide-lines for environmental colonialism. In order to survive, the state may choose to impose the
status of a green belt, forest preserve, nature reservation or environmental refuge upon other societies as part of its Strategic
Environmental Initiatives. To serve and protect the values of the ecosystem, Gates claims that the ecological ethic of stability as ‘a
steady state’ will not result in ‘stagnation’. Such an outcome would, of course, offend the growth fixations of consumers and citizens
living in liberal capitalist democracies. On the contrary, he believes that it would mean ‘directing growth and change in
nondestructive ways, generated within the standing pattern that supports life’ (Gates 1989: 152). But who directs growth and change
for whom? Is there a standing pattern that directs life? Does anyone really know enough about it to direct growth in accord with it? In
practice, Global Marshall Planners in Washington could use ecological criteria to impose their sustainable development of economic
growth at home as they also force an ecological steady state upon others abroad. If India’s hundred millions stay on foot or bicycles,
then Germany’s tens of millions would stay in their cars. If Indonesia keeps growing trees, then Japan can keep consuming lumber.
And if Brazil’s ranchers keep turning rain forest into cattle ranges, then America’s suburbanites will get their cheeseburgers.
Even laudable goals like ensuring the survival of the planet employ discursive frames that trap their
operations in violent representations and the application of disciplinary power
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1997, Ecocritique, p. 94
The health of global populations as well as the survival of the planet itself necessitate that a green spreadsheet be draped over
Nature, generating an elaborate ecomarket of global reach and scope. Hovering over the world in a scientifically centered
surveillance of health, disease, poverty, wealth, employment, and joblessness, Brown, Flavin, and Posrel declare that “the once
separate issues of environment and development are now inextricably linked.”56 Indeed, they are, at least, in the discourses of
Worldwatch Institute disciplines, which then survey this envelopment of Nature-in-crisis by auditing levels of topsoil depletion, air pol-
lution, acid rain, global warming, ozone destruction, water pollution, forest reduction, and species extinction. Worldwatching engages
in a continuous global surveillance sweep, searching over patterns of energy use, artifact manufacture, food production, shelter
construction, waste management, and urban design for technical, managerial, and economic inefficiencies. Once these searches are
concluded, the results indicate, as the Worldwatch Institute reads them, there is a need for a permanent perestroika, or an ongoing,
unending restructuring of everything artificial that extracts matter and energy from Nature in order to more rightly dispose of things
and more conveniently arrange ends.57 Here, once again, the peculiar environmental project of the Worldwatch Institute shows its
hand. The goal of sustainability, on one level, has many laudable intentions driving its designs; yet, on another level, its discursive
framing, its intellectual articulation, and its action planning already provide a power formation, a discursive center, and a rhetorical
foundation to empower worldwatchers to stand watch over everything and everyone else in the name of their resource
managerialism to attain bioeconomic efficiency.
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Link – Ends Focused Policy Making

Ends focused environmental approaches are created by insular groups that pervert those
policy versions discussed in the green sphere
Nick Garside, The Obscured Potential of Envvironmental Politics, Environments December 2002
In a recent article in the journal Environmental Politics, Douglas Torgerson (2000) argues that one of the biggest problems
with green political thought is that while the language of politics is consistently used it is rarely, if ever,
defined. The result is an unfortunate reduction of intrinsically valuable politics to instrumentally necessary
movements. The former is oriented toward becoming a part of the democratic forces of freedom and
equality or what Hannah Arendt (1963: 1) has called the most ancient cause of all, "the one, in fact that from the beginning of our
history has determined the very existence of politics, the causes of freedom versus tyranny." This non-instrumental aspect of
green political thought relies on conversation and debate within what Torgerson (1999: 129) has called the green
public spheres where "the very process takes on value for those who participate in it." Within these
sphere(s) of discourse green political theorists begin to realise their own particularity in relation to other green
theorists, and if opened to a wider audience, their own particularity in relation to broader democratic goals of increased freedom
and equality. The purpose of this discursive sphere is not to achieve a desired end point but to understand
others' positions and engage in creative conversation with those others. "The promise" of this type of
intrinsically valuable politics, Torgerson (1999: 130) explains, "gains credibility as a historical possibility for the simple
reason that a discourse has emerged, making it possible to formulate and discuss ideas that industrial discourse formerly
excluded or marginalized." The latter is necessarily concerned with achieving desired ends, be they the creation of
the conditions for harmonious relationships with non-human nature, or less lofty desires for access to decision-making bodies in order
to ensure concerns for the non-human are taken into account by those authorised to directly influence or make policy. These end-
focused approaches rely on knowledge usually pre-constituted in places free from public debate or
interaction with others who can challenge the singularity and inevitable limitation of the knowledge
generation. The substantive, instrumental, and end focused environmental movement -- regardless of its
apparent benign purposes -- tends to justify its actions through reliance on knowledge emerging from a
perverted version of a green public sphere. The claim that substantive end-focused goals of green political theorists have
outweighed less urgent and immaterial arguments surrounding a "rethinking of political action," is not controversial, and should come
as no surprise.
The blurring of with political action and environmental discourse
Nick Garside, The Obscured Potential of Envvironmental Politics, Environments December 2002
In the face of very real threats to ecological well-being, it seems irrational or irresponsible not to push for a
more ecologically benign society (Carter 1993) by any means available. In fact, it appears, as Michael Saward (1993: 65)
points out, that "our choice is no choice -- survival or self-administered destruction." The real significant point in
Torgerson's (2000: 1) argument lies in his recognition that even with the focus on purposeful movements
there is a challenge to, and rethinking of, political action "already present in green politics." By recognising this,
he is able to convincingly argue that without allowing the political side of environmentalism to appear and
act within green political discourse, an endorsement of the environmental position (1) can easily lead to
the endorsement of a new fundamentalism. This partnership eliminates the opportunity for participation in the "forces of
freedom" replacing discussion and debate with the need for well administered and managed individuals, groups and societies.
Without space for critical engagement and interaction amongst environmentally, and, more broadly, democratically concerned
citizens, there appears to be little chance of resisting the inevitable move towards greater dependence on the new elites and new
authoritative languages needed to legitimise green positions in elite decision-making and managerial bodies. As the critique of
political action is already present, the blurring of these two distinct aspects of green political thought --
politics and movement -- has consequences well beyond the boundaries of environmentalism. (2) The
costs are also of a democratic nature as general challenges to present day politics, which are implicit in
environmental discourse, are replaced with strong directional strategies that call for "extended
management, but disregard[s] intelligent self-limitation" (Sachs 1999: 67). These strategies either bypass
political critiques or replace democratic ideals of freedom and equality with disciplinary requirements
necessary for the realisation of end desires for harmonious relations between humans and non-humans.
These two options have always guided the reform/revolution, shallow/deep, environmentalism/ecology
debates and unfortunately still haunt present day environmental politics.
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Link – Images
Images of environmental utopias are artificial images designed to further consummativity
Luke 97 (Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, March 18-22, 1997 “The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of
Nature,” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm)
The Sierra Club deserves much credit for the good work that it has done to preserve many natural sites in the United States since
1892. Its highly effective lobbying campaigns have saved countless natural places from permanent destruction, while highlighting the
vital importance of environmental agendas to larger national audiences. If the Sierra Club did not already exist, then it perhaps would
be necessary to invent something like it. From its early days and in its current activities, however, one can find several causes for
the Sierra Club's fairly extensive involvement in transnational capitalism's consummational reimaging of Nature as
environment. The signs are everywhere, but they are particularly suggestive in its cultural acts and artifacts. We only need to
reread the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine, its popular calendars, or some Sierra Club direct mail appeals to find traces of these deeper contradictions. Since 1892, the Sierra Club has doggedly defended it original programs for valorizing "the Great Outdoors" as sites for
leisure pursuits by popularizing outdoor activities, organizing wilderness outings, and defending particularly important natural sites. Outings into California's High Sierras were first organized by John Muir and Will Colby, as David Brower suggests, "to get people into the
wilderness where they could have fun and fall in love with the wild. Becoming much more national in scope after the 1960s, the Sierra Club also became an important player in many different wilderness protection actions all over the nation through the 1990s in
Alaska, Florida, Appalachia, and California. All of these actions simply continue the 1951 Sierra Club charter: "to explore, enjoy and protect the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States," amending its original goals of exploring, enjoying and
rendering accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast.105 Here, one finds what is the essence of the Sierra Club as a environmental organization today. While the World Wildlife Fund or Nature Conservancy have devoted many of their energies to the cultivation
of "charismatic megafauna," like tigers, whales, or rhinos, to preserve Nature, the Sierra Club has identified special environmental sites, like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, California Redwood forests, as "mediagenic ecotopes" to be projected as endangered nature to
the nation's consumers and voters. Despite its newfound engagements at protecting wilderness across the United States, the most enduring commitment of the Sierra Club seems to be this unending devotion to protecting Nature from being reduced to "agro-industrial
resources" by transforming it through vivid image-riven projections into "scenic resources," which, in turn, need to be explored and enjoyed in those special ways that the Sierra Club renders accessible.
"Of all modes of representation," as Shapiro asserts, photography clearly is the one "most easily assimilated into the
discourses of knowledge and truth, for it is thought to be an unmediated simulacrum, a copy of what we consider
'real'."106 Few ideological formations have exploited this property in photography as expertly as the green gaze of the
contemporary Sierra Club in its coffeetable books, wildlife calendars, magazine photolayouts, or direct mail. Indeed,
the Sierra Club's own celebration of Nature through spectacular nature photography is particularly problematic. On one level,
there is no denying many of these images are striking evocations or breathtaking clarity. Hoping to see such sights in person and up close moves many to aid in the protection of Nature. Yet, on another level, Nature is continually reinvented through light and shadow
manipulations, or color and contrast machinations; it is how and where a Sierra Club vision of the good life and paradise brings into life a perfected set of images, symbols, and signs to stir up interest, devotion and loyalty. The modern Sierra Club, as it forced its way
onto the national stage, has generated a popular sense of greater Nature accessibility through mass-run photography-and-prose print products. This strategy began in 1960 with This is the American Earth by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newcall, which were followed
quickly by Cedric Wright's Words of the Earth, Ansel Adams These We Inherit: The Parklands of America, Eliot Porter's "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World" (a match of Thoreau with Nature photography), and Richard Kauffman's Gentle Wildness: The Sierra
Nevada (a mix of Muir's writings with color shots of the Sierras). Brower saw how effective these media were as mechanisms for propagating the green gaze of the Sierra Club among the powerful and/or influential: When you have photographers like Ansel Adams and
Eliot Porter, and writers like Wallace Stegner, Loren Eiseley, Nancy Newhill, and Rachel Carson appearing an organization's magazine and publishing books under the environmental banner, the high ground is easily captured. Those special books won many of our
battles for us, sitting there on the coffee tables until people of great power looked into them and began to understand.107
, this new way of seeing Nature through

Without such supreme visions of Nature, its benefits often are overlooked; yet, with the green gaze of Sierra Club photography, and in spite of its many problems
ecotopian mediagenesis became popularized as a potent power/knowledge formation. The photographic reimagination
of Nature, in fact, is one of the Sierra Club's most potent consummational weapons. Since the 1950s and 1960s, when its
first photographic books were used to show why conservation now is so vital by presenting perfect images of what might be lost to
hydroelectric dam building, clearcutting loggers, or ski resort developers, the Sierra Club uses high-quality photography for many
purposes: constructing pristine images of Nature, mobilizing political support, affirming organizational values, guiding
outdoorsmanistic practices, popularizing outing destinations, defending environmental sites. One of the well-meaning Sierra Club
member's prime directives is centered on the fusion of nature outing with nature photography: "leave nothing but footprints, take
nothing but pictures." The Sierra Club green gaze looks through camera viewfinders, which finds views of Nature as "great pictures."
Getting outside by foot, horseback or canoe to be somewhere worthy in the green gaze of being photographed constitutes, in many
ways, the essence of Sierra Club membership as members work to preserve places that can still be recognized as being as natural,
wild or pristine as various Sierra photographers have composed them. Photography also permits Nature's often very unscenic raw
stuff to be represented with the right lighting and camera angles as "scenic resources." The Sierra Club's real ideological task,
therefore, has been reconstructing the manifold appearances of real Nature as very unscenic stuff to conform to its
particular fetishization of green signs and symbols as hyperreal "scenic resources." Nature cannot simply exist as such;
it must be constructed, distributed, and stabilized to fit those categories of pristine spectacularity which Sierra Club
has chosen to assign to the great outdoors. The Sierra Club has resisted the raw consumptive industrialization of
Nature in order to advance its more sophisticated informationalization of Nature as scenic consummational images.
Instead of being a storehouse of materials, it becomes a terminal destination with aesthetic values and symbolic worth, because its
"renewing resources" provide an entertainment site, a communications resource, an informational utility. These applications can
unfold alongside the industrial economy; indeed, an informational sector needs material inputs and outputs from its engines of
growth to function. Nonetheless, this organization does not stand for appropriating and processing Nature as atoms; instead, it works
to transform it into images, signs, ideologies that can serve many profit agendas in other ways. Thus, "the Sierra Club"/"wise use
movement" contradiction perhaps is more of an odd internal capitalist contradiction between "tertiary" informational and "secondary"
industrial sectors of the same overdeveloped advanced economy rather than a real face-off between pre-industrial forces of "the
environment" versus hyper-industrial partisans of "the economy."
To reinterpret the corporate colonization of everyday life over the last century, Leach maintains that "whoever has the power to
project a vision of the good life and make it prevail has the most decisive power of all. In its sheer quest to produce and
sell goods cheaply in constantly growing volume and at higher profit levels, American business, after 1890, acquired such power and,
despite a few wrenching crises along the way, has kept it ever since."108 The Sierra Club often is tagged as one of the most effective
opponents of this Revolution, but a closer look raises doubts. Leach suggests that many hands were needed to turn America
into a consumer society; indeed, it clearly developed as a "consequence of alliances among diverse institutions,
noneconomic and economic, working together in an interlocking circuit of relationships to reinforce the
democraticization of desire and the cult of the new."109
From big banks to hotel chains, major corporations to national universities, trade unions to department stores, America changed after
the 1890s. Indeed, "after 1895, stores, museums, churches, and government agencies were beginning to act together to
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create the Land of Desire, redirecting aspiration toward consumer longings, consumer goods, and consumer pleasures
and entertainments."110 On one level, the modern Land of Desire was constructed "in-doors" within the modern industrial city in
contradistinction to the traditional "out-doors" pursuits of rural agrarian life. On another level, however, Nature too has been
remanufactured as consumer longings, consumer goods, or consumer entertainments, appearing as "outdoors"
activities. Of the many brokers promoting this change, the Sierra Club obviously has been overlooked. Yet, at the end of the day, the
Sierra Club's "nature outing" relies upon its own uniquely outdoorsmanistic spectacularization of Nature; like corporate
consumerism, its mediagenic ecotopes offer "a vision of the good life and of paradise" in images, symbols, and signs
that stir up interest at the very least, and devotion and loyalty at the most."111 Sierra Club members are devoted to Nature, but their devotion
typically assumes outdoorsmanist forms as their loyalties often rest more with "nature outings" than with Nature as such.
In many Sierra Club activities, the Land of Desire is sublated into a desire for land, a fixation upon accessing the most desirable lands, or a desiring of new lands whose undeveloped wild status equals fine sites for the good life of getting what John Muir called Nature's
"good tidings." Getting out there, preparing for being there, and equipping for special kinds of a sport-based becoming once there all tap deeply into "the transformation of American society into a society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-
being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods this year than last, more next year than this."112 As counterintuitive as it may seem at first blush, the Sierra Club is basically about consummativity--getting more nature outings this year than last, and
more next year than this. The Sierra Club member is an outdoorsmanist, or one who consumes his or her time and energy to get outdoors where comfort and well-being are realized as a hiker/rock climber/kayaker/camper/photographer who acquires miles walked/first
ascents/rivers run/camps made/pictures taken.
Gradually in the Land of Desire, the Sierra Club's outdoormanistic leisure outings have moved toward something new: a place or space that is much more like "Club Sierra." Like Club Med's bid to its clients to "go native" or "get wild," Club Sierra is a national
organization for an elite group of high-minded, outdoorsmanistic individuals intent upon enjoying themselves outdoors, particularly at special, select, secluded sets of limited access Nature sites. In fact, Nature reverence is mobilized to serve this desire of such lands.
For a world of perpetual motion in motion, Sierra Club photographs offer outdoors-minded consumers compelling images of high-profile places to go, things to do, sights to see in a geographic imaging system of pristine purities. Disingenuously, the Sierra Club poses as
being conservationist, or anti-market in orientation, when it is, in fact, niche marketing for Club Sierra at its most superlative pitch.
Sierra Club culture is the perfected culture of consumption conducted outdoors. At one level, this organization can
pose credibly as a green force, pretending to oppose the advanced industrial ecologies of energy-intensive, resource-
wasting, overdevelopment-centered cities, growing by leaps and bounds around the planet. Such industrial lifestyles often
are portrayed by big business or desperate politicians as the foundational bedrock of contemporary urban life in which anything worth
doing is done indoors; indeed, "wise use" movement culture is often simply the culture of consumption conducted indoors.113 Whether
one simply becomes a couch potato at home in the big-screen TV room, a sports fan in some urban domed stadium, or a mall rat at
the regional shopping center, the only life worth living happens inside. Hence, Nature must be (un)wisely (ab)used to maintain it. Of
course, more importantly, the consumptive industrial order with its own powerful bloc of owning and managing classes, depends
upon cultivating and then supplying the needs required to sustain this system. But, on a second level, the getting to these outdoors
regions, the sporting practices approved once one arrives, and the imagination of Nature as places to go or things to do in the Sierra
Club's consummational culture all are four-square centered upon the same consummativity that drives indoorsmanistic being.
Sierra photos unfortunately look too good, because they are too good. While things appear natural, trees often are
pollution stressed, the soils are laced with heavy metal deposits, the streams are dying from acid rain, and the skies
are shot through with ozone holes. Sierra photos must be contested as the utopian projections of ecotopian
mediagenesis, creating images of a somewhere so perfect they really are nowhere.114 The Sierra Clubs' outdoorsmen
pretend to be able to secure this perfection, even though each one of their eco-tourism trips to New Zealand, the Yukon, Nepal, the
Galapagos, or New Guinea in search of these goals is little more than a slickly packaged industrial pollutant wrapped up as a high-end
personal statement "to protect the biosphere."
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Link- Protecting Biodiversity

Protections for biodiversity are motivated by attempts to preserve “nature” for exploitation in the future
These aesthetic appeals, however, to preserve lands and scenery in keeping with the Conservancy’s initial organizational agendas,
just mystify the organization’s more recent objectives of preserving biodiversity. Scenery provides legitimation, land creates a
containment area, and rare ecosystems constitute storage sites for precious biogenetic information. Thus, these memorial parks for
“nature conservancy more importantly are becoming a network of cryogennic depots. Inside their boundaries, natural wetware
accepts deposits as genome banks, accumulating bioplasmic memory on the hoof, at the roots, under the bark, and in the soil of
Nature Conservancy protection actions. Nature is dead, but its environmental remains are put into a cryogenic statis until some future
day when science and technology can bring the full productive potential out of them that escapes human development now. At that
point, they too will be released from their frozen state to become the trade lands of tomorrow, as some snail, lichen, or bug is
discovered to hold a cure for cancer or the common cold. Under the guidance of Bob Jenkins’s biodiversity plan, Nature has been
transmogrified from the matter and space hoarded by the Ecologist’s Union into informational codes and biospheric addresses
archived by The Nature Conservancy. Plants and animals become more than endangered flowers or threatened fish; they become
unknown and unexploited economic resources essential to human survival. “Of all the plants and animals we know on this earth,” as
one Conservancy supporter testifies, “only one in a hundred has been tested for possible benefit. And the species we have not even
identified yet far outnumber those that we have. We destroy them before we discover them and determine how they might be
useful.”44 Conservancy preserves, then, are biodiversity collection centers, allowing a free-enterprise-minded foundation to suspend
their native flora and fauna in an ecologically correct deep freeze until scientists can assay the possible worth of the ninety-nine
untested species out of each hundred banked in these preserves.45 Meanwhile, grizzly bears, bald eagles, and spotted owls provide
high visibility entertainment value in its preserves for ecotourists, Conservancy members, and outdoor recreationists all seeking to
enjoy such Edenic spaces. In “preserving Eden,” the Conservancy more importantly is guarding the bioplasmic source codes that
enable the wetware of life to recapitulate its existence in the timeless routines of birth, life, reproduction, and death.46 Such riches
can only be exploited slowly, but they cannot be developed at all unless today’s unchecked consumption of everything everywhere is
contained by Nature Conservancy protection actions bringing the world economy to an absolute zero point of inactivity in these
Edenic expanses of the global environment.
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Link-Individualized Approaches
Individual approaches to limiting consumption depoliticize the environmental crisis because they locate
the solution within the realm of consumption rather than production, thereby neglecting a wider critique
of capital and squandering opportunities at wide-scale political action
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1997, Ecocritique, p. 119-
122
Saving the earth and preserving the environment are extremely complex challenges, and there are no easy or simple solutions for
today’s ecological problems. Yet, in complete fulfillment of the fallacy of generalization— namely, if every X did Y, then Z would
certainly follow—the Berkeley, California-based Earth Works Group confidently markets a whole series of self-help manuals based
upon “50 simple things” that everyone can do to “save the Earth.” The first book, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth,
alleges that it “empowers the individual to get up and do something about global environmental problems.”7 “Most of the 50 Things,”
the reader is told, “are unbelievably easy. They are the kind of things you would do anyway to save money—if you knew how much
you could save.”8 The book claims that, rather than allowing negative media coverage of the environmental crisis to drive one to
despair, each consumer can do some “unbelievably easy” things to conserve cash as well as to solve “intractable environmental
problems.”~ If every consumer bought this one book and followed its directions, ecological salvation would surely follow. How does
the Earth Works Group’s solution hope to work? First, by acknowledging the real powerlessness of consumers; and, second, by
whittling away at major supply-side irrationalities through urging consumers to make slightly more frugal and marginally more
rational choices about obtaining the material wherewithal needed for their day-to-day survival. Instead of thinking about how to
reconstitute the entire mode of modern production politically in one systematic transformation to meet ecological constraints, the
book, like most tracts of green consumerist agitation, bases its call for action on nonpolitical, nonsocial, noninstitutional solutions to
environmental problems “that cumulate from the seemingly inconsequential actions of millions of individuals. My trash, your use of
inefficient cars, someone else’s water use—all make the planet less livable for the children of today and tomorrow.”10 Consequently,
the corporate institutions that produce goods wrapped in this trash, that restructure cities to require travel in their inefficient cars,
and that build appliances, homes, and cityscapes based on wasting water are automatically excused almost from the outset, except
inasmuch as individuals might effect change by choosing to use less of their products or deciding to purchase alternative
merchandise. The logic of these corporate institutions’ resistance, then, just like the logic of the average consumer’s initial
compliance, is centered on the still largely passive sphere of consumption rather than on the vital sites of production. The ecological
battle lines are drawn at the gas pump or in the supermarket aisles not at the factory gates or in the corporate boardrooms. The Earth
Works strategy asserts: Few of us can do anything to keep million-barrel oil tankers on course through pristine waters. All of us can do
something, every day, to insure that fewer such tankers are needed. None of us can close the hole in the ozone layer above
Antarctica. All of us can help prevent its spread to populated areas by reducing our use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).1’ This
characterization of environmental conflicts rightly notes, on one level, that using less gasoline and underarm sprays in the United
States might well lessen oil tanker traffic and reduce the hole in the ozone layer. But, on another level, it wrongly suggests that
people cannot really expect to use collective political means to keep tanker accidents from happening or to totally eliminate CFCs.
The whole ecological crisis ultimately is reinterpreted as a series of bad household and/or personal buying decisions: “as much as we
are the root of the problem, we are also genesis of its solution.”12 The aggregate effects of the ecological crisis, therefore, can only
be framed in terms of the accumulated collective impact of consumers choices. The key dimensions of the crisis, according to Earth
Works, are the greenhouse effect, air pollution, ozone depletion, hazardous waste, acid rain, vanishing wildlife, groundwater pollution,
garbage, and saving energy. In turn, allegedly reckless individual consumption, which now supposedly causes all of these problems,
can, at the same time, solve them by individuals shifting consciously to patterns of reasonable individual conservation. Conservation,
ecological sustainability; frugality “can be accomplished by simple, cost-effective measures that require little change in lifestyle.”’3
Here is the other major flaw in the Earth Works approach. In fact, more reasonable patterns of individual consumption were once
quite common, but corporate imperatives to stimulate mass consumption of mass-produced goods have overridden these traditional
restraints with today’s throwaway lifestyles. Corporations have spent decades developing complex, cost-effective techniques that
have required massive changes in each consumer’s lifestyle, which is based on wasting large amounts of energy and resources by
purchasing corporate-provided commodities.
Green consumerism treats corporations just like individual consumers, precluding an assault on the
production process itself and allowing capitalism to commodify its ecological sensibilities.
Indeed, the Earth Works Group implicitly recognizes these limitations since it also has produced a follow-up book, The Next Step: 50
More Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, that suggests “snipping six-pack rings may be a start, but it’s not the solution. . . . It’s
time to reach out to the community.”15 This handbook does begin to ask some political questions, but its style of politics is posed
almost entirely in the tame dialects of Naderite public interest insurgency.16 The “next step” of “fifty more things to save the earth”
simply takes green consumerism down already familiar tracks, such as using affinity-group charge cards, pushing for local curbside
recycling programs, starting a ride-sharing system, buying only recycled goods, urging retailers not to sell ozone-damaging goods, or
starring a municipal yard composting program. It hints at promising political action, but the political activities being advanced mainly
are directed at motivating more people to start doing the first fifty simple things to save the earth. This weak reformist strategy even
is affirmed in the Earth Works Group’s appeal to more radical youth audiences, The Student Environmental Action Guide: 25 Simple
Things We Can Do.17 To paraphrase Marx, Earth Works environmentalism fails inasmuch as it has only thus far been recycling one
tame interpretation of the world, when the real point is to discover how to change it. The real intellectual limits of the Earth Works
Group’s tame interpretations of environmental transformation become more obvious in one of its latest works, 50 Simple Things Your
Business Can Do to Save the Earth.18 Rather than directly attacking the obvious ecological irrationalities in most businesses’
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production processes, this manual “recognizes the realities of business” by claiming that its Earth Works approach “can yield
dividends in this fiscal year—in cost savings, lower taxes, improved company image, and in increased employee satisfaction and
productivity. This is a textbook case of ‘doing well by doing good.”’19 Each business is treated mainly as “a superconsumer” that can,
like other individual consumers or private households, also contribute to ecological change by doing the same “simple things,” such
as reorganizing the office coffee pool to use ceramic mugs, recycling office paper, buying green cleaning supplies, changing to low-
energy light fixtures, fixing company toilets to use less water, composting landscape by-products, or remodeling the office with
plants, nonrain-forest wood products, and solar climate control.
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Link-Individualized Approaches
Individualized limitations on consumption allow capitalist elites to dominate the policy deliberations that
actually effect the environment
Unfortunately, the logic of resistance behind these changes is totally defensive. The Earth Works Group accepts the modes of
industrial production as they operate now, but urges that employees engage in their own environmental policing to avoid running
afoul of the prevailing legal, bureaucratic, and public relations problems that regularly befall many companies. Green is good because
it saves money, it is good public relations, and, finally, of course, it is good for the environment to boot. Rather than pushing waste
elimination, the Earth Works Group stands for waste reduction. Instead of advocating total economic transformation, it accepts weak
bureaucratic regulation of present-day polluting processes. Unable to support the total reconstitution of today’s productive forces, it
advocates piecemeal reforms to lessen, but never end, their most environmentally destructive activities. The Earth Works Group also
fails to identify the key potentialities of workers and management in modern businesses for realizing ecological changes. For
example, Earth Works notes that “if you work in an office, a workshop, a factory, you are the backbone of your company. You and co-
workers can use your collective influence to mold policy decisions.”20 This claim sounds, at first, quite impressive, but with this al-
legedly immense collective influence, it directs workers to debate making decisions about essentially insignificant choices: “Should
you throw out that piece of paper.., or recycle it? Is it too much trouble to wash out a mug so you don’t have to use a disposable cup?
Should you leave a light or copier running.., or turn it off?”21 If the backbone of corporate America is misdirected into agonizing over
policy decisions like these, then critical ecological choices about what to produce, how to produce it, when to market it, and where to
distribute it will all be left to those managers in high positions who know “it’s not possible to turn well-honed products and processes
topsy-turvy to protect the environment and still function as a business.”22 The Earth Works Group, then, winks at prevailing practices
of antiecological management, privileging the passive acceptance of corporate managers’ expertise and the legitimacy of not
troubling dedicated executives as they discharge their tough decisionmaking tasks. Instead, it pushes ineffectual window-dressing
practices on ordinary employees to green marginal aspects of their firm’s office ecologies or their company’s public image. The fact
that everyone in a company uses an ecologically correct ceramic mug and recycles office memos does not lessen the environmental
destruction that this same firm might be spreading by building gas-guzzlers, selling CFCs, mowing down rain forests, or
manufacturing plastic playthings.
Locating the most important site for changing consumption as the individual consumer ignores
institutional centers of power that ensure overall consumptive practices remain unchanged
How these hitherto unattained radical advances toward global ecological harmony will be wrought “is designed to generate the
greatest impact in the least amount of time” and, miraculously, “results are guaranteed without marching on Washington, quitting
your job, or giving away your life savings.”31 On one level, Hollander’s endorsement of Naderite public-interest lobbying tactics
ensures that his readers will learn “how to help build low-income housing, use recycled products, contribute to a food bank, invest
money in a socially responsible manner, free prisoners of conscience, pass legislation through the U.S. Congress, and encourage
world peace.”32 And, even more fortunately for today’s harried average consumer, Hollander claims, like an ad for taped foreign
language lessons or some new tummy-reducer gizmo, that “only a few minutes are needed for many of the actions that will result in
positive social change.”33 On another level, Hollander makes the ultimate radical claim for today’s socially concerned, but
fundamentally passive, consumer: the ecological revolution really can be made essentially by doing nothing more than ordinary
everyday things. In other words, you can learn how “to make the world a better place as you wheel your cart down the aisle of a
supermarket, travel on business or pleasure, select an insurance policy, open a bank account, prepare dinner, relax around the house,
and even as you soap up in the shower.”34 It may be true that “the actions of those now living will determine the future, and possibly
the very survival of the species,”35 but it is, in fact, mostly a mystification. Only the actions of a very small handful of the humans
who are now living, namely, those in significant positions of decisive managerial power in business or central executive authority in
government, can truly do something to determine the future. Hollander’s belief that thousands of his readers, who will replace their
light bulbs, water heaters, automobiles, or toilets with ecologically improved alternatives, can decisively affect the survival of the
species is pure ideology. It may sell new kinds of toilets, cars, appliances, and light bulbs, but it does not guarantee planetary
survival. Hollander does not stop here. He even asserts that everyone on the planet, not merely the average consumers in affluent
societies, is to blame for the ecological crisis. Therefore, he maintains, rightly and wrongly, that “no attempt to protect the
environment will be successful in the long run unless ordinary people—the California executive, the Mexican peasant, the Soviet [sic]
factory worker, the Chinese farmer—are willing to adjust their life-styles and values. Our wasteful, careless ways must become a thing
of the past.”36 The wasteful, careless ways of the California executive plainly must be ecologically reconstituted, but the impov-
erished practices of Mexican peasants and Chinese farmers, short of what many others would see as their presumed contributions to
“overpopulation,” are probably already at levels of consumption that Hollander happily would ratify as ecologically sustainable if the
California executive could only attain and abide by them. As Hollander asserts, “every aspect of our lives has some environmental
impact,” and, in some sense, everyone, he claims, “must acknowledge the responsibility we were all given as citizens of the planet
and act on the hundreds of opportunities to save our planet that present themselves every day.”37 Nevertheless, the typical
consumer does not control the critical aspects of his or her existence in ways that have any major environmental impact. Nor do we
all encounter hundreds of opportunities every day to do much to save the planet. The absurd claim that average consumers only
need to shop, bicycle, or garden their way to an ecological future merely moves most of the responsibility and much of the blame
away from the institutional centers of power whose decisions actually maintain the wasteful, careless ways of material exchange that
Hollander would end by having everyone recycle all their soda cans. Marjorie Lamb takes the demands of mounting a green
revolution from within the sphere of everyday life down almost to the bare minimum in her Two Minutes a Day for a Greener Planet:
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Quick and Simple Things You Can Do to Save Our Earth.38 Her manifesto speaks directly to the harried but still very guilty modern
suburbanite: “We are all busy people. Let’s face it, we don’t have the time or desire to climb smokestacks or confront whaling vessels.
But there are lots of things we can do differently every day. Without effort and with very little thought, we can make a difference to
our planet Earth.”39 This astounding revelation is precisely what every consumer wants to hear. Like ecological destruction itself,
ecological salvation is possible “without effort” and “with very little thought.” Only “two minutes a day” are needed by today’s one-
minute managers to execute the “quick and simple things” needed to save “our Earth.” To fill the bookstores at the mall with yet
another cookbook for ecological transformation, Lamb has expanded her original “Two Minute Ecologist” radio spots, first developed
for the CBC’s Metro Morning radio broadcast, into a pocketbook guide to green liberation. And, once again, she stresses the vital
importance of recycling aluminum, refusing to buy overpackaged goods, and composting kitchen/household waste. But, interestingly
enough, Lamb also honestly remarks that much of her advice is essentially remedial consumer education. Indeed, many, if not most,
of the simple hints that she, Hollander, Rifkin, and the Earth Works Group are spelling out were once widely practiced forms of popu-
lar common sense. Lamb credits “the Depression generation,” or those who grew up prior to 1945, with an ethic of thriftiness that
actually approximates many of the virtues she assigns to the coming “Age of the Environment.” On the other hand, “the baby boom
generation,” and now their offspring, have embraced all of the unsustainable habits of mass consumption that corporate capital once
encouraged but now recognize are at the root of today’s ecological crisis. In part, Lamb’s analysis is true, but it ignores how corporate
capital, big government, and professional experts pushed the practices of the throwaway affluent society on consumers after 1945 as
a political strategy to sustain economic growth, forestall mass discontent, and empower scientific authority. People did choose to live
this way, but their choices were made from a very narrow array of alternatives presented to them as rigidly structured, prepackaged
menus of very limited options. And, now ironically, all of these green guides to ecological consumption are moral primers pitched at
resurrecting—through their own green but still nicely designed plans of commodified ecological revitalization—the responsible habits
of more frugal consumers or autonomous citizens that corporate capital and the mass media have been struggling to destroy for
nearly a century.
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Green Consumerism Link – The Earth

Day Example
Consuming in a more ecologically-friendly way is just like celebrating Earth Day – ecological awareness
becomes displayed in a ritual of mass consumption, which empowers the very capitalist economics that
cause the harms of consumption
Making ecological revolution through green marketing and ecological consuming feeds directly into the organization and
administration of spectacles like Earth Day to occasionally affirm, or even permanently ritualize, the many diverse practices of green
consumerism. Just as mainstream consumer society finds its most complete affirmation in the highly commercialized festival day of
Christmas, green consumerism has been woven into the mythologies and rituals of its own extremely commercialized festival day, or
Earth Day. Arguably, the Earth Day celebration does serve to promote worthwhile environmental changes and popularize meaningful
ecological lessons among mass audiences that might otherwise ignore the concerns of new ecological movements. Yet it also feeds
directly into the same destructive logic of consumer festival days like Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Columbus Day, as
well as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, or Secretary’s Day, that corporate marketing departments seize on to
encourage consumers to make another trip to the mall to show someone that they care enough to convey their caring through more
commodities. As a specially valorized day to boost consumption by “showing you care” or “telling someone how much you love
them,” Earth Day becomes a day to mark how we can save the planet by producing and consuming spectacles about planetary
salvation. In turn, major retailers rack up huge sales of can crushers, composters, newspaper bundlers, bicycles, and green guide-
books to fulfill consumer desires to possess the correct icons for observing the day’s rituals. Otherwise, like the 1980 celebration, it is
totally ignored or marked only by a few nature lovers in total obscurity out in the woods. Ironically, what began as a festival to call
planned mass consumption into question now can survive only if its designers allow it to be packaged by contemporary corporate
capitalist society as yet another organized event based on specially planned mass consumption. Wendell Berry’s fear that
environmentalists are too cautious in their protests as they approach the earth as “nature under glass” is not a problem here. Instead,
Earth Day commodifies nature and concern for nature as still another set of carefully coded products to circulate in the contemporary
marketplace as “nature under plastic.” Most important, Earth Day, which began as a popular green resistance to unfettered capitalist
markets, in its mainstream manifestations today has ironically shifted its basic meanings. Increasingly, it takes the form of promoting
a very much fettered green capitalism as if it were, despite its artfully managed and slickly packaged commodification, an effective
style of meaningful political resistance. As James Speth, the president of World Resources Institute, observed in 1989 about the first
Earth Day in 1970, there has been a “steady and sometimes spectacular growth of worldwide public concern about environmental
degradation, and of citizen action and participation to meet these challenges.”46 Perhaps, but such mass-mediated measurements of
spectacularly growing concern do not translate into ecological revolution. Earth Days might mark new levels of “intense public inter-
est,” as marked by thousands of marchers in Earth Day parades or by pro-environmental sound bites on the nightly news, but, in
practice, most consumers’ behavior, beyond recycling soda cans or refusing to buy African elephant ivory products, is not radically
changing. In part, there only can be minor changes, because change can happen only if the products offered in the marketplace are
manufactured in a more environmentally correct manner; and, in part, there will be no radical change, because the broadly mobilized
version of green consumerism still is a very passive form of corporate capitalist consumerism. After nearly two decades of post-Earth
Day ecological consciousness, for example, the average per capita daily discard rate of garbage had risen from 2.5 pounds in 1960 to
3.2 pounds in 1970 to 3.6 pounds in 1986. By 2000, despite decades of recycling experience, this figure is expected to rise to 6
pounds a day.48 Similarly, even though ecological concern is rising, the average gas mileage of new cars declined 4 percent from
1988 to i99o, and the number of miles driven annually has continued to rise by 2 percent every year.49 Forty-seven thousand square
miles of tropical rain forest were cut down in 1979; eighty-eight thousand square miles were cut down in 1989.50 Japan more than
doubled its per capita output of carbon from fossil fuel emissions from 1960 to 1987, Saudi Arabia almost quadrupled its levels, and
the United States increased its output by almost 25 percent. Consequently, it becomes apparent that “worldwide public concern”
merely may be the contemporary consumer society’s Green Cross packaging, wrapped around many of the same old
antienvironmental goods and services.
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Individual Green Consumerism Bad

Any micro-level benefit to green consumerism is far outweighed by the ecological costs of consumption,
even if it’s in a more ecologically-friendly form
As dogmas for attaining not only personal but also planetary salvation, some of today’s most common discourses about ecological
activism in North America ironically express and unconsciously elaborate a series of unintended consequences, whose unanticipated
implications reaffirm tenets of consumption rather than conservation. In the ruse of recycling, green consumerism, rather than
leading to the elimination of massive consumption and material waste, appears instead only to be revalorizing the basic premises of
material consumption and massive waste. By providing the symbolic and substantive means to rationalize resource use and cloak
consumerism in the appearance of ecological activism, the cult of recycling as well as the call of saving the earth are not liberating
nature from technological exploitation. On the contrary, they simply are providing a spate of rolling reprieves that cushion, but do not
end, the destructive blows of an economy and culture that thrive on transforming the organic order of nature into the inorganic
anarchy of capital. The essential irony of this entire approach to ecology change by green consumerism is that it actually has been at
work daily for many years in many millions of households and thousands of firms, at least since the energy crisis of 1973, as a form of
do-it-yourself worldwatching that has sustainably developed a green consumer industry. And, after decades of careful ecological
concern, more campaigns for recycling, many days of rational shopping, and much thinking about source reduction only have left the
biosphere still ravaged by intense ecological exploitation.52 The earth is not greener or safer, but deader and more endangered. On
one level, one must acknowledge that green consumerism actually may have had a slight positive impact on the global environment.
After all, and if only for a short time, the planet probably is better off with a few more people using fewer resources at slower rates of
consumption. Yet, on another level, these marginal benefits are counterbalanced by the substantial costs of remaining structurally
invested in thoroughly consumerisric forms of economy and culture. The “greening” of product advertising, merchandise packaging,
or even certain limited technical aspects of the production cycle does nothing to alter the fundamentally antiecological qualities of
production in contemporary capitalist society. This variety of environmentalism is virtually meaningless as a program for radical social
transformation because it serves an agenda of conservative ideological containment that also is almost completely anthropocentric.
The well-being and survival of other animal species, plant life-forms, or bioregions are virtually ignored. Shoppers for a better world
enjoin themselves and others not to buy consumer products made from endangered species or rain-forest beef, but this injunction is
driven by other green consumerist needs that parallel these goals. One cannot be a happy ecotourist if there are no longer any
rhinos, hippos, or elephants in African game parks, and the rain forests probably contain exotic plants that someday will cure cancers
for ailing green consumers. When every group from the Worldwatch Institute to the American Forest Council, Greenpeace to Exxon,
the Sierra Club to the Chemical Manufacturers Association claims to be on the same ecological path to green salvation, as today’s
green consumerism handbooks or Earth Day celebrations indicate, then the most threatening specter haunting the world today is no
longer ecologism. Instead, this era of reconciliation shows how decades of rhetorical exorcism directed against radical ecologism have
successfully worked their spell by caging this surly antagonistic spirit and refracting its radical revolutionary animus out into the
ghostly moonbeams of friendly green consumerism.
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Link- Science
The application of scientific modeling and systems ecology attempt to normalize particular ways of
relating to the environment – in so doing, they reduce nature to a system of systems that can be broken
down, calculated, analyzed, and recombined.
Systems ecology and the highly mathematized natural sciences (such as atmospheric chemistry and physics) involved in global
ecosystem modelling exert a powerful influence across a wide range of environmental policy and social planning areas. The ecological
sciences are fundamental to key aspects of contemporary biopolitics: ecological discourse both problematizes numerous areas of life
and at the same time elaborates programmes of environmental intervention aimed at normalizing the social relation to nature in
particular, ecologically benign ways. The contemporary notion of the environment is constituted as inherently problematic by the
development of specialized scientific (as well as legal and moral) discourse on ecology. This specialized discourse provides what Rose
and Miller (1992) have described as ‘the intellectual machinery of government’, whereby social relations with nature are thematized
and brought into the domain of ‘conscious political calculation’ through the formation of programmes of government. Such
programmes presuppose that the real is programmable, that it is a domain subject to certain determinants, rules, norms and
processes that can be acted upon and improved by authorities. They make the objects of government thinkable in such a way that
their ills appear susceptible to diagnosis, prescription and cure by calculating and normalising intervention. (Ibid. 182)
Because of the alleged objectivity and value-neutrality of science, it and technology are open to
manipulation and use for more malignant ends. The open embrace of technology is intrinsically linked to
domination and discipline of the self, others, and over nature.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1997, Ecocritique, p. 143-
45,
Marcuse’s reading of science and technology in one-dimensional society rearticulates much of the Frankfurt School’s critique of the
Enlightenment26 Ultimately, Marcuse sees science, as it operates in contemporary advanced industrial society, in terms that
underscore its intrinsic instrumentalism. The procedures of abstraction, calculation, formalization, and operarionalization lead him to
contest “the internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori technology, and the a priori
of a specific technology—namely, technology as a form of social control and domination.”27 This inherent instrumentalism is
problematic, because the value-free objectivism of science leaves it open to adopt and serve substantive ends that are external to it.
Emerging along with modern European entrepreneurial capitalism and nationalistic statism in Europe, the inherent technological
instrumentalism of science soon integrated destructive social ends into its operations. The principles of modern science were a priori
structured in such a way that they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-propelling, productive control;
theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical operationalism. The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective
domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the evermore-effective domination
of [hu]man by [hu]man through the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral, entered into the service of
practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to both. Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology
but as technology and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of
culture.28 Caught up within these operational constraints and goals, science works so that “the liberating force of technology—the
instrumentalization of things—turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of man. “29 Humanity’s increasing control over
the environments of Nature through technological means necessarily results in a greatly increased ability to dominate human nature.
The two spheres are intimately connected inasmuch as the complex technical controls implicit in advanced technology demand that
everyone exercise greater discipline over his or her own labor and patterns of consumption. By preconditioning the behavior of
individuals, Marcuse sees technological reason introjecting its technical demands into each person’s somatic-psychic constitution,
which “becomes the psychological basis of a threefold domination: First, domination over one’s self, over one’s nature, over the
sensual drives that want only pleasure and gratification; second, domination of the labor achieved by such disciplined and controlled
individuals; and third, domination of outward nature, science, and technology.”30Science and technology become an
antienvironmental system of domination with its own subpolitics of instrumental control. This recognition is critical: Science, by virtue
of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to
domination of [hu]man—a link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole. Nature, scientifically comprehended and mastered,
reappears in the technical apparatus of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of individuals while subordi-
nating them to the masters of the apparatus.31 Consequently, a rationalizing technical hierarchy based on humans dominating
Nature merges with a disciplinary social hierarchy of humans dominating other humans in the abstract machinery of one-dimensional
society. Marcuse also sees a possibility for changing the negative trends in the scientific project. The reconciliation of science and
technology as a global system, or Logos, within a new metaphysics of liberation, or Eros, might assist science in developing
essentially different concepts of nature, facts, and experimental context. Beyond the reification of technology, which reduces humans
and Nature to fungible objects of organization, neither the worlds of Nature nor the systems of society would be the stuff of total
administration. Marcuse believes that this break would be possible if a new idea of Reason attuned to a new sensibility capable of
guiding its theoretical and practical workings could be developed. This moment, which would reverse the relationship between
existing science and a metaphysics of domination, would come with the completion of technological rationalization, or “the
mechanization of all socially necessary but individually repressive labor.”32 This moment of technological liberation also would make
possible the pacification of existence—a new social condition marked by qualitatively different relations between humans as well as
between humans and nature—if such newly freed individuals would work effectively to finally realize this emancipatory moment.
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Link- Science and Climate Models

Attempting to model and predict the environment on a global scale inevitably fails – science can’t take
into account the chaotic nature of ecological variables.
To begin with, eco-knowledges often look to a planetary scale for answers. How much more can human beings sustainably take from
nature? One can appraise this sustainability issue roughly in terms of human impact on the planet’s biosphere. Vitousek and
colleagues look at the biosphere’s net product of photosynthesis, seeing net primary production (NPP) as all energy transformed via
photosynthesis by primary producers (photosynthesizing life-forms) minus energy they use to reproduce themselves (Vitousek et al.
1986). By the mid-1980s, human beings were consuming 40 per cent of terrestrial NPP, and 25 per cent of total NPP (including
marine, aquatic and terrestrial sources). These figures, in turn, reflect not only levels of direct resource utilization, but also levels of
indirect resource degradation due to anthropogenic causes (ibid.). Two more doublings of human population, again assuming only a
1980s level of resource use, would mathematically exhaust all NPP needed by all other life-forms (ibid.). While this event may be one
or two generations away, and it would obviously be the ultimate catastrophe of sustainability, it seems apparent that we are already
at a critical juncture of sustainability. Rich communities and powerful states still have the clout to buy and/or force their way past
some of the material constraints: this is ‘the e-factor’ for Clinton and Gore. But there are millions living in deforested, desertified,
eroded and salinated zones of Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe — Rwandans, Sudanese, Chadians, Bolivians, Brazilians,
Belizians, Cambodians, Bengalis, Kashimiris, Ukrainians, Russians, Armenians — already suffering from ecologically unsustainable
development in their territorial spaces. Soon, unless nature is preserved, will everyone be a Rwandan, will every place be in Aralsk,
will everything be Love Canal? This is Secretary of State Christopher’s transnational security threat, so now the CIA, DIA, State
Department and Defense Department are developing ‘early warning systems’ to detect environmental catastrophes (e.g. Greenhouse
1995). Yet, eco-knowledge of nature is tenuous. By what rules can the environment be somehow gauged as normal or at least
subjected to normalizing criteria that will reveal year-in, year-out predictable levels of rain, soil creation, timber growth, fish
population, agricultural output or human settlement. Once these factors have been identified and tracked, ecological monitors may
watch such variables, and maybe manage the global ecosystem. But other scientific analyses indicate that there may be incredible
variations in all these ecological factors from year to year or decade by decade. Nature may well be far more chaotic, much less pre-
dictable, and not as normal as many scientists hitherto have believed. As a result, technocratic efforts to capture its energies as geo-
power in normalizing models, which artlessly assume levels of docile predictability and stable replicability in ecological dynamics,
may reduce any Strategic Environmental Initiative to administer nature to complete meaninglessness.
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Week 08
Link-Population Crunch
While the physical violence involved in classical overt limitations to population is no longer en vogue,
contemporary discourses on limits to population invoke a more insidious type of power-knowledge: one
that makes the biopolitical aspects of its operation invisible, seeking instead to cause subjects to
internalize its logic of control.
In this context, the very logic of population management is that its goals cannot be reached merely through the external imposition of
codes of appropriate behaviour. While optimal levels and standards may be the terrain of expert negotiation and statistical analysis,
efficient management (of reproduction, of eroticism) is really a question of normativity or, more precisely, the mobilization of
individual pleasure to the goals of rationality and limitation. As Singer puts it, ‘capitalism works not by opposing itself to the pleasure
principle, but by finding strategic ways to mobilize it, a form of control by incitement, not by... repression but by the perpetual
promise of pleasure’ (1993: 36). Population discourse thus involves questions of organizing pleasure in particular ways. As a form of
biopower, producing and controlling the sexuality of collective and individual human subject-bodies, it operates by enticement, not
just by repression; in the case of population limitation, voices whisper a common arriculatory thread: ‘You will enjoy your small(er)
family; you will enjoy your new-found economic prosperity; you will enjoy the process of controlling your fertility.’ This is not to say
that population management efforts have never been, or do not continue to be, repressive or coercive. Far from it: one could speak of
not-long-past trades of transistor radios for vasectomies among Indian men; one could speak of instances in which poor pregnant
women in the USA have been refused hospital obstetric treatment unless they give ‘consent’ for post-partum sterilization; one could
speak of countries in which women are currently lured into trying Depo-Provera, and are refused treatment to have the implants
removed when side-effects arise (Trombley 1988, 1996). Early population discourses, including family planning, were overtly tied to
eugenic strategies, which resulted in the elimination of reproductive rights for many poor women, women of colour, and women with
disabilities (Davis 1981, Mies and Shiva 1993). These and other gross injustices remain, and are soundly condemned by many
feminist and social justice activists, and even by some of the more enlightened environmentalists. But what is perhaps more
disturbing is the fact that population management itself remains significantly unchallenged as a goal, a discourse or a disciplinary
practice. While some authors are critical of the attribution of singular or even primary causality to population as a source of
environmental degradation, even some of the most militant critics of coercive population control measures seem relatively content
with family planning education, despite the fact that such normative ‘planning’ remains a significant instrument of control, and bears
the hallmarks of profoundly gendered, racialized and heterosexualized normativity. In many ways, contemporary family planning
measures — education, health promotion, access to birth control technologies, etc. — are much more efficient bearers of specifically
modern, rational and capitalist relations of reproduction than any bribery or threat could be, at least in part because the power
relations involved are largely invisible.
Participation in the discourses of population extends the managerial imperative of science and the project
of governmentality.
Leaving aside (for the moment only) some of the glaring conclusions that can be drawn about social inequality, there seem to be a
number of specific assumptions about human/nature relations going on in recent population—environment discourse. One is that the
only possible relationship between humans and nonhuman nature is antagonistic, as nature exists only as a ‘resource’ for human use;
more people inevitably means more degradation. Following from this, there are only two courses of action to ‘save’ nature: reduce the
number of people or reduce their consumption. Either option signals the necessity of intervention; both imply the invocation of
specific notions of natural limits (carrying capacity, etc.) as ways of drawing a line beyond which humans cannot go. A second, related
assumption is that nature’s primary appearance in human life is as a limit to human excess, including, potentially, an excess of
human freedom (especially in the context of a crisis).4 In the context of the fact that population discourse is also concerned with the
achievement of rationality and progress (both of which are discursively opposed to nature in modernity), this seems somewhat
paradoxical. But the paradox is easily explained: where the ‘ideal’ subject of population discourse is rational and has proved capable
of subordinating desire to the common good of population control (normative self-limitation), it seems that there are ‘other’ subjects
not so willing or capable. In other words, population discourse at this historical conjuncture relies on the bifurcation of the world into
two: ‘good’ ecological citizens, who have listened to and understood the call for limits and do not require (further) regulatory
intervention, and unruly bodies, who have not, might not, and/or do.5 Numerous commentators have pointed to the fact that popula-
tion management strategies differ according to who it is that is being managed. The discrepancy between white, middle-class North
American women, who are encouraged to utilize highly invasive new reproductive technologies to conceive, and poor rural women of
countries such as Bangladesh, who are often sterilized without their consent, is too glaring to ignore. The point is not only that racism
is a strong feature of population management (unsurprisingly, given the early linkages of family planning to eugenics). The point is
also, as authors such as Mies and Shiva allude to (1993: 277—95), that all people (especially women) are in some way or another
accountable to the discourse, subject to its prescriptions and prohibitions, made subjects through its normative inspirations in the
context of economic and political relations that discriminate considerably among different kinds of subjects. It is my contention that
environmentalist discourse often works to amplify both the normativity and the discrimination, by emphasizing the ‘natural
requirement’ of population limitation — the ‘natural requirement’ of the subordination of human needs to an abstract notion of
‘carrying capacity’ that passes as an ecological common good. Combined with the fact that so much is absent from population
discourse, the patina of scientific legitimacy gives the managerial imperative all the more power. And in so far as environmental
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discourse understands itself to be a continuation of rationalization and modernity,6 management plus risk science plus nature equals
a very powerful normative imperative indeed.
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Week 08
Link – Population- Resource Crunch

Discourses of sustainable limits to population play into the hands of capitalist globalization, relying on
forming subjects as rational consumers of particular population control methods
That the mode of sexual subjectivity generated in, and borne by, population-talk is intimately related to the economic and social
relations of (globalizing) late capitalism is not a stunning revelation: at the level of physical technologies, of course, family planning
and contraceptive development provide a fantastic new global market for the provision of goods and services. But at the level of
cultural technologies as well, discourses of the self associated with capitalist liberal individualism, and even particular family forms
associated with capitalist productive relations, are part of the normative package sold by the global family planning movement. As
Irene Diamond illustrates, these technologies are strongly tied together: In order to create a disciplined market that would find West-
ern contraception desirable, family planning professionals utilized enticing media images that were most always supplemented by
monetary and non-monetary incentives. Women of the South were told ‘contraceptives are a woman’s right’. And if in a particular dis-
trict an insufficient number of women became ‘acceptors’, zealous recruiters, whose own survival within bureaucratic delivery
systems depended on achieving their target goal, did not stop at tricking or compelling a woman to accept. (Diamond 1994: 73—4,
emphasis added) What I would like to suggest is that contemporary population discourses, acting largely (though never entirely)
through normative prescriptions of a particular form of managed sexual subjectivity, are part of the increasing global reach of
capitalist market economic relations. Just as biopower was intimately involved in the development of industrial capital in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too it is a foundational element in the globalization of monopoly capital at the end of the
twentieth. At one end of the spectrum is international aid tied to the implementation of coercive birth control strategies; at the other
is the even more insidious discursive linkage of (economic) well-being with small families through educational programmes sponsored
by international development agencies. Whereas the former is relatively easy to condemn (if still, unfortunately, common in some
places), the latter is the dominant discourse of organizations such as the United Nations, which are now beginning to speak the
language of liberal feminism and women’s rights. Contemporary population management strategies of education and increasing
women’s ‘rights’ of access to contraception effectively mask their imbrication in institutionalized discourses of capitalist economic
development under a layer of liberal feminist concern for women’s social position. This discourse suggests a sort of reproductive
structural adjustment; just as the politics of debt and aid force particular economic relations on countries of the South, so too the
politics of population management, especially given their transmission via particular reproductive technologies, impose particular
family and gender relations. In structural adjustment, countries are to produce themselves according to a capitalist productive logic;
in reproductive structural adjustment, women and men are to produce themselves according to profoundly normative discourses
about appropriate gender relations and family structures.
Environmentalism is not a benign discourse seeking mere harmony and life within natural limits. Rather,
discourses like that of limits to population are articulated in ways that reinforce existing axes of
domination.
In environmentalism, calls for limitation can be crude or subtle, physically violent or juridico-political, coercive or normative. Although
it is quite clear that other modes of ensuring deference to a notion of limits are in operation in contemporary environmental struggles
(economic coercion is common unfortunately), it is normativity that especially concerns me in this chapter. For while some
(unfortunately not all) environmentalists see social justice as a critical aspect of ecological politics, and thus tend to rail against
obviously coercive strategies of compliance, few speak of the ways in which environmentalism is itself a normalizing discourse, and
thus produces specific power relations, rather than eliminates them, in a (supposedly) transparent, common quest for natural
harmony. In particular, the organization of environmentalism around a central notion of limitation, as if these limits were given in
nature, tends to produce a form of ‘environmentality’ that is entirely consistent with the perpetuation of highly exploitative social
relations. Specifically, much contemporary environmentalism relies on a discourse of self-limitation and self-denial. This discourse is
omnipresent; it is apparent in everything from the ‘voluntary simplicity’ of deep ecologists to industrialized nations’ (hypocritical)
calls, via the normative prescriptions of international eco-regimes, for ‘Third World’ governments to exercise self-restraint in their
‘unruly’, ecologically destructive aspirations. The point, it seems, is to produce both individuals and nations as responsible eco-
subjects, not by overt repression or regulation, but by the invocation of a notion of ‘the common good’ in which ‘limit’ is the primary
discursive term around which people are to organize their ecological practices, self-concepts and pleasures. To the usual list of
particular limits in this general constellation (growth, consumption, affluence, etc.), I would like to add ‘limits to sex’. In my view, one
of the most disturbing sites of ‘selflimiting’ ecological wisdom lies in discourses around population. That discipline is inherent in
population-talk is neither new nor surprising; as Foucault wrote, ‘one of the great innovations in techniques of power in the
eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as
manpower [sic] or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded’ (Foucault 1976: 25).
While the ecological invocation of population discourse rests on a long tradition of regulatory practice — there are few differences
between Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich — its contemporary imbrication in North/South, gendered, racialized and heterosexualized
power dynamics suggests a particular series of inflections.
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Week 08
Link – Populations Crunch

Population discourse is an operation of the worst of capitalism and biopolitics – it creates
disciplined consumer-subjects while hiding and normalizing the power-knowledge regimes that
its operations mobilize.
Of course, given the fact that all of this is, at some level, about management, the only ‘informed’ choice that there is to be made
seems to be the choice to limit family size. Especially when one takes into account the environmental degradation that is impinging
on women’s subsistence and other activities in some parts of the world (these are the scenarios that get talked about, never the ones
where standards of living actually rise — even if only temporarily — due to increasing environmentally destructive activities), what
other choices could a ‘rational’ person make? Nafis Sadik, then executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, makes this
narrative quite explicit; given the choice, women will have smaller families. She writes: Many women, especially in developing
countries, have few choices in life outside marriage and children. They tend to have large families because that is expected of them.
Investing in women means widening their choice of strategies and reducing their dependence on children for status and support.
Family planning is one of the most important investments because it represents the freedom from which other freedoms flow. (Sadik
1994: 209) So, under the apparently emancipatory guise of liberal feminism, women (and men) in so-called developing nations are
enticed to adopt managerial-capitalist modes of sexual subjectivity, as part of their path toward well-being. Indeed, when this insight
is also viewed in light of the strong normativity of environmentalism, we see that under the banner of ‘our common future’, ecological
discourses are co-opted to the task of producing women as self-disciplining, eco-capitalist subjects (Sadik suggests that women’s
more acute experiences of environmental degradation only confirm the necessity of their rational choice to limit child bearing). In my
view, this is the key narrative: most environmental discourses on population are embedded in a normative sexuality that is intimately
involved in capitalist penetration. Population management is a form of globalizing environmentality, and that environmentality is
inextricably linked to capital. Notable in this environmentality is the fact that population discourse, and even the feminisms that
appear to be in dialogue with it, mask their status as normative sexualities that accompany liberal capitalism. As Foucault notes,
‘power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own
mechanisms’ (Foucault 1976: 86). So it is no great surprise that it is through a series of ‘disappearing tricks’ that population discourse
is made palatable. In emphasizing (particular kinds of) education, freedom, health care and standard of living, population discourse
works to seduce, to entice, and to create; these modes of subjectivation rely on hiding their workings and the normative constraints
that appear throughout them. The first disappearing trick lies in the complete absence of any overt talk about sex whatsoever in most
population discourse. Foucault speaks about the regulation of sexuality through its production in discourse (scientia sexualis), not its
banishment from discourse. I consider the absence of overt talk about sex (qua sex) entirely consistent with this characterization, in
so far as population discourse does not operate by repressing sex but by rendering it discursive in a particular way that conceals its
location in the realm of sexual activity. Sexuality is reduced to heterosexual reproduction; reproduction is reduced to the rational
behaviours of individuals in the context of complex expert negotiations around regional and global ‘carrying capacity’, a very
particular discursive existence indeed. The second disappearing trick lies in the submergence of the profound racism of population
discourse in Western-derived assumptions about rational ecological behaviour. Population is a problem of the regulation of certain
kinds of bodies, specifically exoticized, racialized bodies that are figured as unruly, uncontrolled, and incapable of submerging their
desires to the common good of sustainability. The notion of reproductive choice is not only constituted according to a very particular
definition of rational choice, but is also produced according to racist, colonialist assumptions about the self-regulatory abilities of
particular bodies and hidden under an apparently self-explanatory ‘common good’ of sustainability in which all are to participate as
willing subjects. The final — and perhaps most complete — disappearing trick involves the assumption of heterosexuality that
constitutes the entire discourse. Think of it this way: if the problem of population is simply one of ‘too many people’, then why not
encourage a greater variety of non-heterosexual, non-reproductive sexual practices? The fact that this is completely unthinkable in
the minds of most suggests that population discourse isn’t about limiting numbers of people on the planet, but about instituting a
form of ecological management through sexuality.
Regimes of population limits steer environmentalism away from any liberatory potential and
into the arena of just another fundamentalist operation of biopolitics
Environment, p. 91
All of these disappearances are part of an ecological disciplinary discourse: in the face of natural limits, the appropriate, rational
action is self-control. The problematization of population as an (for some, ‘the’) ecological question translates ‘natural limits’ into
‘sexual limits’ in a way that renders invisible the views of nature underscoring the former, the views of bodies permeating the latter,
and the racialized, gendered and heterosexualized power relations involved in both. That sexual asceticism is so strongly tied to
ecological subjectivity makes it almost impossible to argue that there may be places where resistance to sexual regulation may be
tied to resistance to ecological degradation. But that is where resistance must begin: in a non-fundamentalist environmental-sexual
ethics. As Eric Darier argues in the last chapter of this volume, ‘if environmentalism is to retain its radical and critical features, it has
to avoid becoming just another fundamentalism’. Certainly, the power effects of population discourse show what happens when
‘nature’, in the guise of natural limit, is understood as the template for human sexual conduct. The kind of sexual fundamentalism
that appears at the core of population-talk bears a rather disconcerting resemblance to other profoundly conservative normative (and
frequently naturalized) sexualities. Sexuality is translated into the erasure of sex as environmentalism includes yet another dimension
into its ‘just say no’ campaigns. And this asceticism is particularly acute in the absence of a countervailing ethical sexual practice.
Thus, to borrow again from Darier, this suggests the need for an ‘environmental ethics a la Foucault [that] implies constant self--
reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, of transforming one s life into an aesthetic of existence’ in the realm of sexual and
environmental conduct.
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Week 08
Internal Link- Subject- Object

Dichotomy
heir form of politics necessitates viewing nature as a subjectified entity
In addition to reducing a broad range of primal cultures into one complex univocal tradition, deep ecologists construct Nature as an
active subject that can teach people, if they cultivate their intuition or introspective consciousness, a special redemptive “Earth
Wisdom.”38 As Devall and Sessions maintain, “we may nor need something new, but need to reawaken something very old, to
reawaken our understanding of Earth Wisdom. In the broadest sense, we need to accept the invitation to the dance—the dance of
unity of humans, plants, animals, the earth. We need to cultivate an ecological consciousness.”39 Nature is seen as speaking,
knowing, having needs, suffering, sharing selfhood, expressing, and growing. Primal traditions are vital because they have remained
open to Nature’s subjectivity, following its wisdom and sharing in its being. Therefore, deep ecology stresses its antimodern
disposition by calling for a reinhabitation of varying bioregions in the future along the primitive lines of primal societies. The myth of
humanity’s fall from primitive grace arguably is quite false, but this is what justifies deep ecology’s antimodern, future primitive
vision of social change.
They re-establish the subject object dichotomy – in their politics, a subjectivized Nature is a blank slate
that humanity draws its collective visions of salvation upon, using it as nothing more than a means to an
end
Deep ecology’s ultimate value of self-realization claims to go “beyond the modern Western self which is defined as an isolated ego
striving primarily for hedonistic gratification or for a narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next.”51 Real selfhood, it is
claimed, derives from human unity with Nature, realizing our mature personhood and uniqueness with all other human and
nonhuman forms of being. Humanity must be “naturalized”; that is, the “human self” is not an atomistic ego, but a species-being and
a Nature-being as a self-in-Self, “where Self stands for organic wholeness.”52 Here, the essence of Nature, to a large extent, would
appear to be a projection of an idealized humanity onto the natural world. Nature is “humanized” in a myth of subjectivity to change
human behavior. The reanimation of Nature in deep ecology extends this selfhood to all natural entities—rocks, bacteria, trees,
clouds, river systems, animals—and permits the realization of their inner essence. As deep ecology depicts it, and as Georg Lukacs
would observe, Nature here refers to authentic humanity, the true essence of man liberated from the false, mechanizing forms of
society: man as a perfected whole who inwardly has overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and
practice, reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply an abstract
rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical.53 Nature in this myth of subjectivity
becomes for humanity the correct mediation of its acting that can generate a new, more just totality. Deep ecologists, however,
cannot really enter into an intersubjective discourse with rocks, rivers, or rhinos, despite John Muir’s injunction to think like glaciers or
mountains when confronting Nature. “The meditative deep questioning process” might allow humanity “an identification which goes
beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world.”54 A hypostatization of self in human species being, whales, grizzlies, rain forests,
mountains, rivers, and bacteria is no more than the individual’s identification of his/her self with those particular aspects of Nature
that express their peculiar human liberation. This ideological appropriation, in turn, is always (human) self-serving. One must ask, Is
humanity naturalized in such self-realization or is Nature merely humanized to the degree that its components promote human
“maturity and growth”? This vision of self-realization appears to go beyond a modern Western notion of self tied to hedonistic
gratification, but it does not transcend a narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next. Nature in deep ecology becomes
humanity’s transcendent identical subject-object. By projecting selfhood into Nature, humans are saved by finding their self-
maturation and spiritual growth in it. These goals are found in one’s life by in-dwelling psychically and physically in organic
wholeness, as well as in the next life by recognizing that one may survive (physically in fact) within other humans, whales, grizzlies,
rain forests, mountains, rivers, and bacteria or (psychically in faith) as an essential part of an organic whole. Nature, then, becomes
ecosophical humanity’s alienated self-understanding, partly reflected back to itself and selectively perceived as self-realization,
rediscovered in selected biospheric processes.
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Week 08
Internal Link  Militarization

The plan will be appropriated by discourses of sustainability to justify hoarding of resources by the
military
A political, economic and technical incitement to talk about ecology, environments, or nature first surfaced in the 1960s, but it has
become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this talk takes the form of general theory, because its practices have instead
been steered toward analysis, stock-taking and classification in quantitative, causal and humanistic studies. The project of ‘sustain-
ability’, whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation to Earth’s ecologies, embodies this new respons-
ibility for the life processes in the American state’s rationalized harmonization of political economy with global ecology as a form of
green geopolitics. Taking ‘ecology’ into account creates discourses on ‘the environment’ that derive not only from morality, but from
rationality as well. Indeed, as humanity faced ‘the limits of growth’, and heard ‘the population bomb’ ticking away, ecologies and
environments became more than something to be judged morally; they became things the state must administer. Ecology, then, has
evolved into ‘a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses’, as it was
recognized in its environmentalized manifestations to be ‘a police matter’ — ‘not the repression of disorder, but an ordered
maximization of collective and individual forces’ (Foucault 1976: 24—5). After 1992, this geopolitics has assumed many intriguingly
green forms.’ Discourses of ‘geo-economics’, as they have been expounded by Robert Reich (1991), Lester Thurow (1992), Edward
Luttwak (1993) and others (Kennedy 1993; McLaughlin 1993; Oates 1989), as well as rearticulations of geopolitics in an ecological
register, as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or Vice-President Al Gore (1992), both express new understandings of
the Earth’s economic and political importance as a site for the orderly maximization of many material resources. Geo-economics, for
example, transforms through military metaphors and strategic analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns
into national security issues of wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state
support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labour all become vital instruments for ‘the continuation of the ancient
rivalry of the nations by new industrial means’ (Luttwak 1993: 341). The relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-
head global competition is taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-state’s waxing or waning international
power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this context, many
believe that ecological considerations can be ignored, or at best given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest to mobilize
as many of the Earth’s material resources as possible. In the ongoing struggle over economic competitiveness, environmental
resistance can even be recast as a type of civil disobedience, which endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or
embodies treasonous acts.
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Week 08
Internal Link – Capitalism

The eco-managerialism of the affirmative is a means to commodify the environment to be
utilized as a mode of production forced upon the public. Their incentivization of
environmental sustainability furthers a forced collapse of the public and private spheres to
embody a logic of consummativity where all the needs and desires of individuals are controlled
by corporate interests to become a desire to consume
As large firms claimed a monopoly over planning purposive-rational action in the work place in the Second Industrial
Revolution over a century ago, individuals and families increasingly accepted new disciplinary definitions given by the state
and corporate capital to their individual ecological wants and private material goals. Organic needs for air, drink, food,
clothing, shelter, and productive labor, hitherto defined by the homespun crafts of the pre-capitalist or entrepreneurial
capitalist household in Earth's many bioregions, underwent rapid commercial redefinition through scientifically
engineered transformations by embedding incessantly commodified satisfactions for organic needs within everyone's
purchasing of corporate products. These rationally designed corporate interventions into the ecological reproduction of
society, in turn, enabled the aggregate planning system of corporate production "to organize the entire society in its
interest and image" in the diverse technoregions of corporate design.45 Such systems of mass production presume a
regime of mass consumption: masses of consumers consuming massed arrays of energy, information and material to
close the circulation and accumulation of capital posed by mass production.46
Few consumers, however, are aware of the frightful significance lurking in the roots of their most prized economic
labels. To consume, following from the Latin consumere, means to take up completely or lay hold of altogether. It also is to devour,
waste, destroy, squander, or devastate. Consumers make away with food, drink, land, capital, or wealth, wearing out
by use or spending without heed. Consumers exhaust exchangeable value or devour useful goods. Consumers
counterbalance producers, or those who, in keeping with the Latin producere, lead, bring forth, extend or promote things.
Producement leads to consumptiveness, the consumptuous follow from the producent. What has been brought forth must be
taken up: production presumes consumption, and consumption assumes production. As a result of this collaboration, Horkheimer
notes that
for all their activity men are becoming more passive; for all their power over nature they are becoming more powerless in
relation to society and themselves. Society acts upon the masses in their fragmented state, which is exactly the state
dictators dream of. 'The isolated individual, the pure subject of self-preservation,' says Adorno, 'embodies the innermost principle of
society, but does so in unqualified contrast to society. The elements that are united in him, the elements that clash in him--his
'properties'--are simultaneously elements of the social whole.47
Starting first in the affluent upper-class core and middle-class suburbs of the major industrial cities and then spreading unequally at
various rates of speed into more marginal market zones in the inner-city ethnic neighborhoods, racial ghettos, small towns and rural
areas in advanced capitalist states, the new consumerist forms of personality and society emerged on the diverse terrains
of corporate technoregions from within the bioregional wreckage of the pre-capitalist and bourgeois social orders.
Whether it is defined as "Americanization," "development," "modernization," or "progress," the Second Industrial
Revolution granted to the managers of corporate capital and the state power to decide the ground rules of a new
ecology.48 They planned what particular material packages and behavioral scripts could be produced and provided in
their various technoregions along a multiple spectra of quality and quantity-graded and limited-quantity alternatives to
the masses of consumers. Consumers simply exercise their "free choice" among many buying alternatives sourced
through corporate hyperecology. In turn, individuals would not look beyond these packaged material alternatives or
back to more organically-grounded bio-regions for more natural options. Hyperecologies deliver the commodified need-
satisfactions required to fulfill individual need-definitions as each consumer might have imagined them. Massed consumption by the
consuming masses is brute energy, information, and matter consumption as corporations and technoscience roughly organize it.
Through this developmental path, the individual personality becomes an integral part of the collective means of
production, and the modern family becomes yet another service delivery node in the hyperecologies of this global fast
capitalism culture.
This circuit of economic reproduction expresses the essential logic of "consummativity" that now anchors the
transnational economic system. Instead of maintaining the irreducible tension between the "public" and "private" spheres that
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Week 08
liberal economic and legal theory hold to be true for the individual contingency of rational living, the public and private have
collapsed in circuits of identity all across the coding systems of corporate-managed consummativity, while the
collective imperatives of the firm and/or the state are internalized by individuals as personalized lines of consumption
in the family, firm and mass public.49 Such linkages, in turn, allow the state and firm to more closely regulate the economic
and ecological existence of individuals inasmuch as most persons allegedly now desire the "needs" extended to them
as the rewarding reified scripts of normal behavior by the media, mass education or professional experts and as the
packages of mass-produced material goods made available by corporate manufacture and commerce. Yet, these
individual "needs" also are simultaneously required by the contemporary state and corporate firm. The aggregate
possibility for economic growth and the specific quality of commodity claims, implied by these individual needs taken
en masse, are the productive forces guaranteeing further development in today's transnational corporate system of
capitalist production.
The underlying codes of consummativity in corporate capitalism rarely manifest themselves openly. They are masked
instead as an on-going democratic social and economic revolution "rooted in the democratic alibi of universals," like
convenience, modernity, growth, utility or progress. As Baudrillard suggests, consummativity presents itself,
...as a function of human needs, and thus a universal empirical function. Objects, goods, services, all this "responds" to
the universal motivations of the social and individual anthropos. On this basis one could even argue (the leitmotiv of the
ideologues of consumption) that its function is to correct the social inequalities of a stratified society: confronting the
hierarchy of power and social origins, there would be a democracy of leisure, of the expressway and the refrigerator.50
As inchoate mass demands for a better "standard of living" illustrate, corporate capital still can pose
successfully as a revolutionary vanguard for those who want more bananas, autos, oranges, and washing
machines out of life. Speaking on behalf of deprived consumers and challenging the apparently more
oppressive stratification, inequality, and material deprivation of all other forms of precapitalist or
anticapitalist society, fast capitalism offers hyperecological promises of complete economic democracy,
social equality and material abundance through consumption. This pledge, in turn, is legitimated by the
expansive corporate collateral of new sparkling material goods, exciting cultural events, and satisfying social services.
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Week 08
Internal Link – Managerialism

The elevation of the human perspective to that of the astropanopticon makes planetary
managerialism inevitable
While many remember 1968 for the May events in Paris, a far more significant development unfolded during December on the
flight of Apollo 10 to the Moon and back. Even though this space craft did not actually land on the lunar surface, its crew
provided the first photographs and video images captured by human beings on an astronautical mission into space.
The impression made these images of a sun lit, cloud-swatched blue/green/brown ball floating in the dark cosmos is
still recasting humanity's sense of place; indeed, the quite common circulation of these and many other similar images
now constitutes a thematic center for new "astro" panoptic disciplinary discourses. Because we can see Earth from
space, like aliens arriving on Mars or Venus, our worldwatching abilities from a space craft presumably empowers such
technoscientific worldwatchers with special worldacting responsibilities to craft space on Earth by reaching for its most
optimal ecologized performance as "Spaceship Earth." At some point during the next century, human beings might, as
some astronautical scientists advocate today, terraform Mars, a Jovian moon or some asteroids. Until then, however,
environmentalists and others speaking ex cathedra from this photographically-mediated astropanopticon advance
their own unique and varied projects for terraforming the Earth.
This astropanopticon has effects: the reaffirmation of environmental vigilance in geo-economic discourses in the 1980s and 1990s
arguably is altering the behavior of some corporate and state agencies toward Nature. Because the Earth, as Al Gore asserts, is in the
balance, the raw externalization of some environmental costs to generate economic benefits is becoming less common in some
countries around the world, if not in fact then, at least, as principle. Yet, this more refined internalization of ecological debits and
credits also implicitly articulates a new understanding about Nature. One must push past the gratifying green glow emanating from
documents like the Brundtland Report or Agenda 21 in which humanity often appears ready to call an end to war against Nature in
order to launch a new era of peaceful coexistence with all the Earth's wild expanses and untamed creatures. In fact, these initiatives,
like many other visions of sustainable development, balanced growth or ecological modernization, simply underscore the validity of
Jameson's take on postmodernity. That is, our postmodern condition flows out of transnational networks of global
production and consumption, a situation in which "the modernization process is complete and Nature is gone for
good."25 Gore's Strategic Environmental Initiative culminates in the infrastructuralization of the planet.
The wild autogenic otherness or settled theogenic certainty of "Nature" is being replaced by the denatured
anthropogenic systems of "the environment." The World Commission of Environment and Development admits
humanity is unable to fit "its doings" into the "pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils" that is the Earth. The
hazards of this new reality cannot be escaped, but they "must be recognized--and managed."26 Through astropanoptic
technoscience, "we can see and study the Earth as an organism whose health depends on the health of all its parts,"
which gives us "the power to reconcile human affairs with natural laws and to thrive in the process."27 This
reconciliation rests upon understanding "natural systems," expanding "the environmental resource base," managing
"environmental decay," or controlling "environmental trends."27 As the Rio Declaration asserts, Earth's "integral and
interdependent nature" can be, and then is, redefined as "the global environmental and developmental system" in which what was
once God's wild Nature becomes technoscientific managerialists' tame ecosystems.28
The hazards of living on Earth cannot be avoided or escaped, but Earth itself can be escaped in rededicating human production and
consumption to hazard avoidance by reimagining Nature as terrestrial infrastructure. The astropanopticon's epiphany of seeing
the Earth from space--remember the Brundtland Report's opening line, "In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet from
space for the first time" has ironically become a self-fulfilling prophecy by exerting "a greater impact on thought than did
the Copernican revolution of the 16th century."29 Like those humans of our spacefaring future who will not let Mars, be
Mars, Luna, be Luna, or some other off-world, be a world-off, Earth no longer can be allowed to just be the Earth. Instead
Terra is being terra(re)formed by seeing for the first time from space its "natural ecosystems" and "environmental
resource base" which humans can see, study and manage in their quest to optimize the processes of surviving and
thriving. The Preamble to Agenda 21 reverberates the impact of these thoughts for the Brundtland Report's future historians:
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Week 08
Internal Link – Securitization

The geo-economic discourse promoted by the affirmative results in a securitization of the
environment
Discourses of "geo-economics," as they have been expounded more recently by voices as diverse as Robert Reich, Lester Thurow,
or Edward Luttwak, as well as rearticulations of "geo-politics" in an ecological register, as they have been developed by President Bill
Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, both express new understandings of the earth's economic and political importance as a
site for the orderly maximization of many material resources.6 Geo-economics, for example, often transforms through
military metaphors and strategic analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns into national
security issues of wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state
support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labor all become vital instruments for "the continuation of
the ancient rivalry of the nations by new industrial means."7 The relative success or failure of national economies in
head-to-head global competitions typically are taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-
state's waxing or waning international power as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality, and
economic prowess. In this context, many believe that ecological considerations can be ignored, or given at best only
meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest to mobilize as private property as many of the earth's material
resources as possible. This hard-nosed response is the essence of "wise use." In the on-going struggle over economic
competitiveness, environmental resistance even can be recast by "wise use" advocates as a type of civil disobedience, which
endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or embodies treasonous acts.
Geo-economics takes hold in the natural resource crises of the 1970s. Arguing, for example, that "whoever controls
world resources controls the world in a way that mere occupation of territory cannot match," Barnet in 1979 asked, first, if
natural resource scarcities were real and, second, if economic control over natural resources was changing the global balance of
power.8 After surveying the struggles to manipulate access to geo-power assets, like oil, minerals, water, and food resources, he did
see a new geo-economic challenge as nation-states were being forced to satisfy the rising material expectations of
their populations in a much more interdependent world system.9 Ironically, the rhetorical pitch of Reich, Thurow and Luttwak
in the geo-economics debate of the 1990s mostly adheres to similar terms of analysis. Partly a response to global economic
competition, and partly a response to global ecological scarcities, today's geo-economic reading of the earth's political
economy constructs the attainment of national economic growth, security, and prosperity as a zero-sum game. Having
more material wealth or economic growth in one place, like the U.S.A., means not having it in other places, namely,
rival foreign nations. It also assumes material scarcity is a continual constraint; hence, all resources, everywhere and
at any time, are private property whose productive potentials must be subject ultimately to economic exploitation.
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Week 08
Internal Link – Securitization

Viewing earth from the position of the astropanopticon results in paranoiac securitization from
all possible perceived threats
'Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and
within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the
ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns
and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better
protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but
together we can - in a global partnership for sustainable development.'30
Plainly, the Preamble to Agenda 21 could as easily be named the Terraforming Compact inasmuch as its basic sentiments sum up
"humanity's" managerial imperatives in the Earth's infrastructuralization, integrating environmental and developmental systems in
"global partnership" to better protect all ecosystems and improve living standards for all through technoscientic terraforming.
Under this terraforming horizon, what seems little more than an a pious aside in Agenda 21, in fact, reveals a great deal more. When
this document would have us recognize "the integral and interdependent Nature of the Earth," it emphasizes how the Earth is "our
home."31 Terraforming, then, is a form of globalized "home building," whose processes and progress should be monitored from two
sets of now commonly-denominated books: the registers of oikonomia as well as the ledgers of oikologos. The
infrastructuralization of the Earth reimagines it as a rational responsive household in which economically action
commodifies everything, utilizes anything, wastes nothing, blending the natural and the social into a single but vast
set of household accounts whose performativities must constantly weigh consumption against production at every
level of analysis from suburbia to the stratosphere in balancing the terrestrial budgets of ecological modernization. The
infrastructuralization of Nature through environmentalizing movements and discourses propels contemporary societies
and economies beyond the autogenic giveness of Nature into terraformative anthropogenesis, dissolving the formal
boundaries between inside/outside, Nature/Culture, or earth/economy. As Baudrillard observes, "it implies practical
computation and conceptualization on the basis of a total abstraction, the notion of a world no longer given but
instead produced--mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, that has to be constructed."32
The workings of "the environment" as a concept now bring many contemporary terraforming efforts to rescue the Earth's ecology
back to the sources of its original meanings. To note this ironic conjunction does not uncover some timeless semantic essence; it
merely reaccentuates aspects in the term's origins that accompany it from its beginnings into the present. As a word, environment is
brought into English from Old French, and in both languages "an environment" is a state of being produced by the verb "environ."
And, environing as a verb marks a type of strategic action, or activities associated with encircling, enclosing, encompassing or
enveloping. Environing, then, is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something or someone. Its first
uses denote stationing guards, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over a place or person. To environ a site or a subject is
to beset, beleaguer or besiege. Consequently, an environment--either as the means of these activities or the product of such actions--
should be treated in a far more liberal fashion.
An environmental act, even though the connotations of most contemporary greenspeak suggests otherwise, is a disciplinary
move.33 Environmentalism in these terms strategically polices space in order to encircle sites and subjects captured
within these enveloping maneuvers, guarding them, standing watch over them, or even besieging them. And, each of
these actions aptly express the terraforming programs of sustainable development. Seen from the astropanopticon,
Earth is enveloped in the managerial designs of global commerce, which environmentalize once wild Nature as now
controllable ecosystems. Terraforming the wild biophysical excesses and unoptimized geophysical wastes of the Earth
necessitates the mobilization of a worldwatch to maintain nature conservancies and husband the worldwide funds of
wildlife. Of course, Earth must be put first; the fully rational potentials of second nature's terraformations can be neither fabricated
nor administered unless and until earth first is infrastructuralized.34
This is our time's Copernican revolution: the anthropogenic demands of terraforming require a biocentric worldview in
which the alienated objectivity of natural subjectivity resurfaces objectively in managerial theory and practice as
"ecosystem" and "resource base" in "the environment." Terraforming the Earth environmentalizes a once wild piece of
the cosmos, domesticating it as "humanity's home" or "our environment." From narratives of world pandemics, global
warming, or planetary pollution, global governance from the astropanopticon now runs its risk analyses and threat
scenarios to protect Mother Earth from home-grown and foreign threats, as the latest security panics over asteroid
impacts or X-File extraterrestrials in the United States express in the domains of popular culture. Whether it is space
locusts from Independence Day or space rocks snuffing out Dallas in Asteroid, new security threats are casting their
shadows over our homes, cities, and biomes for those thinking geo-economically in the astropanopticon.
From such sites of supervision, environmentalists see from above and from without, like the NASA-eyed view of Earth from
Apollo spacecraft, through the enveloping astropanoptic designs of administratively controllable terraformed systems.35
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Encircled by enclosures of alarm, environments can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to expert managers'
disciplinary designs. Beset and beleaguered by these all-encompassing interventions, environments as ecosystems and
terraformations can be redirected to fulfill the ends of new economic scripts, managerial directives or administrative writs.36 How
various environmentalists might embed different instrumental rationalities into the policing of ecosystems is an intriguing question,
which will be explored below.
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Impact- Value to Life

Attempts to regulate and control the environment are methods of transforming earth into a
theme park for humanity. Once we sacrifice the natural unpredictability inherent to the
environment, we lose the value to life
Parker 96 (Kelly A. Parker, Pragmatism and Environmental Thought, in Environmental Pragmatism 21, 25 (Andrew
Light & Eric Katz eds., 1996).
(1) For the pragmatist, the environment is above all not something "out there," somehow separate from us, standing ready to be
used up or preserved as we deem necessary. As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, "Our own body is in
the world as the heart is in the organism".17 We cannot talk about environment without talking about
experience, the most basic term in pragmatism. All that we or any being can feel, know, value, or believe
in, from the most concrete fact ("I am cold") to the most abstract or transcendental idea ("Justice,"
"God"), has its meaning, first of all, in some aspect of an immediately felt here and now. Environment, in
the most basic sense, is the field where experience occurs, where my life and the lives of others arise
and take place. Experience, again, is not merely subjective. It has its "subjective" side, but experience as
such is just another name for the manifestation of what is. What is is the ongoing series of transactions
between organisms and their environments. The quality of experience - whether life is rich or sterile,
chaotic or orderly, harsh or pleasant - is determined at least as much by the quality of the environment
involved as by what the organism brings to the encounter. Environment is as much a part of each of us as
we are parts of the environment, and moreover, each of us is a part of the environment - a part of
experience - with which other beings have to contend. In asserting the fundamental relatedness among organisms and
environments, pragmatism commits us to treating all environments with equal seriousness. Urban and rural; wilderness, park and
city; ocean and prairie; housing project, hospital and mountain trail - all are places where experience unfolds. The world, in this
view, is a continuum of various environments. Endangered environments perhaps rightly occupy our attention first, but
environmental philosophy and ecological science are at bottom attempts to understand all the environments we inhabit. Attention to
the whole continuum of environments allows us to put into perspective what is truly valuable about each. The environments we
inhabit directly affect the kinds of lives that we and others can live. There is an unfortunate tendency to draw crassly instrumentalist
conclusions from this line of thought. I want to caution against this tendency. If environment "funds" experience, this reasoning
might go, then let us use technology to turn the whole world into an easily manageable, convenient stock of
environments that conduce to pleasant human experiences. This Theme Park: Earth line of thinking neglects our
inherent limitations as finite parts of the world, and sets us up for disaster. Repeated attempts to
dominate nature (e.g., our damming the Nile and its damning us right back, or our tragicomic' efforts to "tame" the atom)
should have begun to teach us something about the limits of human intelligence. Such attempts to dominate
nature assume that no part of the environment in question is beyond the field of settled experience. We can indeed
exert remarkable control over parts of the experienced world, remaking it to suit our purposes. This may be
appropriate, if our purposes make sense in the first place. (I know of no reason to object to the prudent use of natural gas to
heat our homes, for example.) But the very idea that the environment funds experience involves the notion that there is an ineffable
aspect of the world. It is indeed arrogant to think that we can master nature; it is moreover delusional and
ultimately self-negating. If we have our being in the ongoing encounter with environment, then to will
that the environment become a fully settled, predictable thing, a mere instrumental resource in which
there can be no further novelty, is to will that we undergo no further growth in experience. The attempt
to dominate nature completely is thus an attempt to annihilate the ultimate source of our growth, and
hence to annihilate ourselves.
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Impact – Colonialism
Ecological activism culminates in capitalist ecocolonialism where western values take priority
in deciding which habitats survive
The work of the WWF as a result is often ironically seen by its American managers as a kind of "green man's burden" spreading the
advances made by conservationists in the United States abroad because, as Train notes, "there has been almost total neglect of the
problems outside our borders until the WWF came along."93 Under the presidencies of Russell E. Train, Bill Reilly and Kathryn Fuller,
the WWF grew from 25,000 members with an annual budget of about $2 million in 1978 to a membership of 1.2 million and an annual
budget of $79 million in the mid-1990s by pushing this ecocolonialist agenda.94 The WWF has specialized in propagating its
peculiar global vision in which experts from advanced industrial regions, like the United States, Great Britain, or
Switzerland, take gentle custody of biological diversity in less advanced regions, like Third World nations, as
benevolent scientific guardians by retraining the locals to be reliable trustees of Earth's common endowments in their
weak Third World nation-states.
In many ways, the WWF is one of the world's most systematic practitioners of eco-colonialism to reshape Nature
consumption. From its initial efforts to protect Africa's big fame trophy animals in the 1960s to the ivory ban campaigns
of the 1990s, WWF wildlife protection programs have been concocted by small committees composed mostly of white,
Western experts, using insights culled from analyses conducted by white, Western scientists that were paid for by
affluent, white, Western suburbanites. At the end of the day, many Africans and Asians, living near those WWF parks where the
endangered wildlife actually roam wild, are not entirely pleased by such ecological solitude. Indeed, these Third World peoples see
the WWF quite clearly for what it is: "white people are making rules to protect animals that white people want to see in
parks that white people visit."95 At some sites, the WWF also promotes sustainably harvesting animals for hides, meat, or other
by-products, but then again these goods are mostly for markets in affluent, white, Western countries. As Train argues, these
ecocolonial practices are an unavoidable imperative. The WWF came to understand that "the great conservation challenges of today
and of the future mostly lie in the tropics where the overwhelming preponderance of the Earth's biological diversity is found,
particularly in the moist tropical forests and primarily in the developing world. Although the problems may often seem distance from
our own shores and our own circumstances, we increasingly understand that the biological riches of this planet are part of a seamless
web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."96 In mobilizing such discursive understandings to legitimize its actions,
the WWF has empowered itself over the past thirty-five years to act as a transnational Environmental Protection Agency for Wildlife
Consumption to safeguard "the Earth's biological diversity," internationalizing its management of "the biological riches of this planet"
where they are threatened in territorialities with very weak sovereignty to protect their sustainable productivity for territories with
quite strong sovereignty as parts of "a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."97
On one level, the American WWF frets over biodiversity, but many of its high Madison Avenue activities actually aim at
developing systems of "biocelebrity." From the adoption of the panda bear as its official logo to its ceaseless
fascination with high-profile, heavily symbolic animals, or those which are most commonly on display in zoos or hunter's trophy
rooms, the WWF-US has turned a small handful of mediagenic mammals, sea creatures, and birds into zoological celebrities as part
and parcel of defending Nature. Whether it is giraffes, elephants, rhinos or kangaroos, ostriches, koalas or dolphins, humpbacks,
seals, only a select cross-section of wild animals with potent mediagenic properties anchor its defense of Nature. Special campaigns
are always aimed at saving the whales, rhinos or elephants, and not more obscure, but equally endangered fish, rodents, or insects.
This mobilization of biodiversity, then, all too often comes off like a stalking horse for its more entrenched vocations of defining,
supplying, and defending biocelebrity. On a second level, however, the WWF is increasingly devoted to defending biodiversity,
because it is, as Edward O. Wilson asserts, "a priceless product of millions of years of evolution, and it should be cherished and
protected for its own sake."98 Even though it should be saved for its own safe, it is not. Wilson provides the key additional justification,
indicating implicitly how the World Wildlife Fund actually presumes to be the long-term worldwide fund of Nature as the unassayed
stock of biodiversity is saved "for other reasons," including "we need the genetic diversity of wild plants to make our crops grow
better and to provide new foods for the future. We also need biodiversity to develop new medicines....a newly discovered insect or
plant might hold the cure for cancer or AIDS."99 Wilson argues, "you can think of biodiversity as a safety net that keeps ecosystems
functioning and maintaining life on Earth."100 But, as the organization operating as the green bank with the biggest deposits from a
worldwide fund of Nature, the WWF aspires to hold many of these bioplasmic assets in ecological banks as an enduring trust for all
mankind. Fuller, is quite explicit on this critical side of the association's mission. Because "the biological riches of the planet are part
of a seamless web of life in which a threat to any part weakens the whole," the WWF must ensure the integrity and well-being of the
Earth's "web of life," giving it a most vital mission: Because so much of the current biodiversity crisis is rooted in human need and
desire for economic advancement, it is essential that we work to bring human enterprise into greater harmony with nature. Short-
sighted efforts at economic development that come at the expense of biodiversity will impoverish everyone in the long run. That is
why, in addition to establishing protected areas and preserving critical wildlife populations, WWF uses field and policy work to
promote more rational, efficient use of the world's precious natural resources."101
Faced by an extinction wave of greater pervasiveness than any confronted during recorded history, the WWF-US mobilizes the assets
of biocelebrity to leverage its limited guardianship over the planet's biodiversity, because we may see as much as one quarter of the
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Earth's biodiversity going extinct in twenty or thirty years. Even so, the WWF fails to realize how closely its defense of the
rational, efficient use of precious natural resources as third wave environmentalism may contribute to the extinction of
biodiversity. And, the conspicuous consternation of the WWF permits a focused fixation upon biocelebrities to occlude
this fact for those who truly care about Nature--as long as it is equated with rhinos, tigers, and elephants. WWF
ecotourism remanufactures Nature into consummational reserves, transforming habitat into assets, flora and fauna
into operating plant, and indigenous communities into entrepreneurial stakeholders or, even worse, underpaid site
managers, for global ecoconsummation. Nature conservation becomes a game, and everyone involved becomes a player for the
WWF. In fact, the WWF's worldwide banking powers over Nature's biological riches as interdependent mutual funds collateralizes the
ecotourism bargain. As the WWF declares, the deal is dangerous, but potentially very rewarding, inasmuch as "for many rural
communities and local and national governments, the booming travel industry is a rich resource for cash-starved economies and an
important development tool that can foster conservation by giving communities an economic stake in the nonconsumptive use of
their natural resources."102 The WWF-US believes pushing economies beyond primary and secondary sectors of production into
tertiary "nonconsumptive uses of natural resources" in the leisure and recreation business will provide jobs that offer "people financial
incentives to protect, rather than exploit or destroy, natural resources."103 From the WWF's global perspective of providing local
regulation via global conservation, these planned means of consummational appropriation are the "wise use" of Nature, because
"these jobs are often better and last longer than occupations like logging and mining because they focus on the preservation and
wise use of natural resources, not their extraction."104 From a WWF's regulationist perspective, these jobs are usually worse and
longer suffering, because they pay much less than logging or mining, and lock local economies into low-yield, low-value adding, low-
status service sector activities. Nonetheless, the ecotouristic strategy does reveal how one dimension in the WWF's vision of nature's
"wise use" works. An (un)wise (mis)use of extractive industries promoting the hyperconsumptive use of natural resources cannot be
taken seriously as "wise use." Instead, the protection of ecosystems in Nature preserves, which host low-impact sustainable
cultivation of flora and fauna in traditional economies or high-traffic flows of conscientious ecotourists, becomes the sine qua non of
"wise use" for WWF wildlife fund managers worldwide.
As coequals in the circle of life coevolving in the webs of biodiversity, human beings nobly become another animal
being responsible for other animal beings. Thus, the World Wildlife Fund, becomes the key trustee of an international
family of mutual funds for creating and operating these little wildlife worlds all over the planet. Its consummational
agenda for a transnational ecocolonialism pays out as a post-consumptive environmental reservation system where
the Earth's last remaining wilderness and wildlife become the tamelife habitats and inhabitants of exotic biodiversity.
This is pathetic, but it is where whatever was once "wild nature" is now left. The wise use of Nature boils down to containing only a
few of the most egregious instances of the unwise abuse of select charismatic megafauna by detaining a few survivors in little wildlife
worlds all over the planet. And, in the current political environment, which increasingly favors legislative moves to rollback any
serious Nature preservation initiative, even this ecocolonialist work of the WWF now can only be applauded. The WWF is caught
within the same global capitalistic economy that promotes pollution, poaching, and profit, but its consummational
good deeds advance the reproduction of global capitalism at all other unpreserved sites, shifting the role of the WWF
from that of anti-consumptive resistance on a local level to one of pro-consummational rationalization on a global
scale.
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Impacts – Turns Case

These attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in a technoregionalization of the
planet where all efforts to preserve it become commodified into methods to promote
capitalism, making the environment a second priority - this turns case
To preserve the various ecologies of the planet on a global scale, as many environmental groups assert, the
inhabitants of each human community must rethink the entire range of their economic and technological
interconnections to their local habitats, as national discourses of green geo-politics and grey geo-economics illustrate,
in terms of how they are meshed into the regional, national, and international exchange of goods and services.
Beginning this strategic review immediately poses the question of protecting all existing concrete "bioregions" in first
nature, or the larger biosphere of the planet, within which the ecologies of any and all human communities are rooted.
Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters,
plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the
"first nature" of the natural biosphere.37
The "domination of nature" is not so much the total control of natural events in the environment as much as it is the
willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building human settlements.38 The abstract "technoregions"
constructed within the human fabrications of "second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet,
within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental
transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions
create new anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately
unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon
environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost
always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows
of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second nature.40
Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second nature. Baudrillard shrewdly aspires to
be recognized as second nature's Linneaus, asserting that second nature plainly has a fecundity or vitality of its own:
Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden
mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations
of products, appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species. This pollulation of
objects is no odder, when we come to think about it, than that to be observed in countless natural species.41
Finding a rationality and systematicity in this quickening procession of products, Baudrillard believes his new technified
taxonomies for every object (products, goods, appliances, gadgets, etc.) of the system permits us to plumb the system of
objects propounded by contemporary economies of mass production/mass consumption. To do so, however, one must
push past the silences of the silent majorities, and decipher the meanings of mass consumption as the consuming
masses reveal them. Exploring consumption of objects in particular might disclose "the processes whereby people
relate to them and with the systems of human behavior and relationships that result thereform," and thereby allowing
anyone to reach "an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and
personalized."42
Here is where habitus emerges from the systems of objects and objects of systems compounded with the technosphere. Bourdieu
asserts habitus emerges out of "the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and
appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted."43 Yet,
the dual dimensionality of habitus as a structured and structuring structure parallels the properties of habitat, which
when taken in environmental terms, provides a scheme of systems generating classifiable practices and products as
well as a scheme for systems of appreciating and comprehending within and amidst specific settings. Consequently, the
habitats of second nature out on the technoregionalized ranges of anthropogenic technospheres are formed out of
habitus, or the system of distinctive signs in practices and works driving lives styled by the system of objects.
In these new spaces, terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms
of abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity,
intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption. Here one finds geo-economists
pushing for wiser uses of all biotic assets in all anthropogenic exchanges. Consumption is outsourced from many
different planetary sites by using varying levels of standardized energy, natural resources, food, water and labor inputs
drawn from all over the Earth through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets.44 Geo-economic forms of
state power and/or market clout, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the
many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation, the
hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological
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concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract
aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed world's
cities and suburbs. Yet, if this is indeed happening, then how did these patterns develop?
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Impact – Turns Case

Environmental sustainability within the capitalist system is impossible – the mitigation of
growth from regulating the environment must be made up somewhere else by inevitably more
damaging expansion, turning the case
Eckersley 04 (Robyn Eckersley, Professor in the School of Politics, Sociology, and Criminology @ University of Melbourne, 2004.
The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. Pg. 57-59)
Yet, during the 1980s and 1990s, the basic analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist welfare state was firmed in the face of the
sustainable development debate.15 James O’Connor’s ecosocialist theory of the “second contradiction of capitalism”
continued the long-standing Marxist understanding of the dynamics of capitalism as essentially contradictory and
therefore containing the potential seeds of its own destruction or transformation. This potential, O’Connor argued, is
manifested in the emergence of new social movements (notably environmental movements) that seek to challenge the destructive
tendencies of capitalism. However, the environmental demands on the state are typically deflected, ignored, or
dampened down by the capitalist state whenever they threaten the imperative of capital accumulation.16
For O’Connor, the basic dynamic of capitalism is one that continually undermines the social and ecological conditions for its own
ongoing existence, a process that he articulated in terms of two fundamental contradictions. The first contradiction of capitalism
refers to the contradiction between social production and private appropriation (the demand side), whereas the second
contradiction refers to “the conditions of production” (the supply side), which O’Connor takes to be nature, labor, and
infrastructure. Given the expansionary dynamic of capitalism and the limited supply/character of the
conditions of production, he reasons that we can expect the costs of production to increase over time.
This is exacerbated by the demands of labor, environment, and welfare movements to improve working
conditions, protect the environment, and improve social infrastructure. For O’Connor, the so-called limits to
growth do not appear as physical shortages but rather as higher costs. The contradiction arises from capital’s
standard response to the profit squeeze: to externalize costs. Yet such a response only serves to further reduce or undermine the
profitability of the conditions of production and thereby raise the average costs of production.17 The second contradiction of
capitalism is held up as providing the most likely second road to socialism, although this time around it would be ecological socialism.
O’Connor argued that the combined effect of the first and second contradictions of capitalism is falling demand (from unemployment)
and rising costs (from the limited supply of the conditions of production)— a problem that capital seeks to avoid by, for example,
investing in nonproductive financial markets, which increases the vulnerability of economies. In all, he argued that there are few
incentives for capital to be ecologically responsible in boom times, and even less so in recession or depression. The grow-or-die
rationality of capitalism makes it crisis-ridden. Against this background, the role of the state—and of policy makers
generally—is to “rationalize” the conditions of production by improving the productivity of labor,
protecting and regulating access to nature, or producing capitalist infrastructure.18 The more the state
undertakes such rationalization, however, the more the costs of production increase and the conditions
of production become socialized in the form of more coherent state environmental planning and the
technology-led restructuring of industry. But the outcome is uncertain, since the conflictual character of the pluralist
policy process in capitalist states (which also favors the powerful and tends toward messy compromises) is such that no systemic
resolution is likely. Resolving the contradictions requires integrated and coherent social and ecological planning on a
scale that is beyond the motivation and capacity of the capitalist state. O’Connor argued that not only is the policy
process too conflict ridden to achieve sufficient political unity, the bureaucratic state is also too fragmented and
democratically insensitive to carry out such a momentous task.19 Carrying forward the functionalist analysis of his early work,
such a full-scale resolution of the ecological crisis is understood to lie beyond the policy limits of the
capitalist state. While O’Connor acknowledged that capitalism has the potential to become more efficient in terms of
material energy use and waste production, he suggested that this is likely to be overshadowed by capitalism’s
attempt to “remake nature” to ensure sustainable profitability (e.g., by enlisting new technologies, such as those
used to produce genetically modified crops). In short, capitalism is not, and cannot become, ecologically sustainable
because capitalism can only expand or contract—“it cannot stand still.”20
Capitalism promotes a method of problem displacement which only mitigates symptoms,

making their impacts inevitable
John Dryzek’s analysis of the ecological potential of the liberal capitalist state is broadly similar to that of O’Connor’s, although
Dryzek was even more sceptical than O’Connor about the prospects of the state ever acting as an agent of ecological
emancipation. For example, Dryzek argued that capitalism, liberal democracy, and the administrative state work
together to compound ecological problems.21 In particular, the capitalist economy “imprisons” both liberal democracy and
the administrative state, restricting its margins of successful policymaking and “punishing” those policy makers when they seek to
step outside these margins. And within these narrow margins, the respective problem solving rationalities of liberal
democratic policy making and state administration tend toward problem displacement rather than
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problem resolution.22 More recently Drzyek has pressed further his analysis of state imperatives, using it to explain the degree
to which the inclusion of social movements in state processes of policy making is likely to be effective in terms of policy outcomes
and democratization. In effect he argues that the democratization of the state via the inclusion of civil society actors is only really
possible to the extent that the interests and claims of civil society actors accord with the state’s functional imperatives. If the
interests and claims of civil society actors do not accord in this way, then one can expect inclusion in the state to amount to
cooptation, leading to the depletion of the unrestricted interplay of critical opposition in the public sphere.23 O’Connor’s and Dryzek’s
basic analysis has been echoed by other political ecologists who have worked the familiar “contradictions” argument of critical theory
at many more levels. For example, Colin Hay has argued that there is a fundamental mismatch between the level at
which ecological contradictions are generated (based on the growth imperative of globalized capital
accumulation) and the level at which political responsibility and crisis management is allocated (the liberal
democratic nation-state).24 And it is precisely because states, acting alone, are seen as incapable of resolving
the crisis that they must develop instead “a complex repertoire of environmental responsibility-
displacement strategies.” 25 In effect, they seek ways of securing the state’s legitimacy without actually
resolving the underlying problems. Echoing Ulrich Beck’s critique of contemporary risk management practices and Martin
Jänicke’s case of “state failure,” Hay seeks to expose the limitations of “symptom alleviation, gesturing and responsibility
displacement downwards (to individuals), upwards (to supranational institutions) or side-ways (other states).”26 Whereas O’Connor
and Dryzek hold out some hope for the redeeming qualities of the critical public sphere and for the possibility of new social
movements acting back upon the state (a point I explore in more detail in chapter 6), Hay’s ecological critique of the state is more
devastating and his conclusions more pessimistic.
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Impact – Turns Case

The capitalist system precludes the possibility of an international environmental ethic
However, any deeper greening of states presupposes the alleviation of other systemic, anti-ecological
pressures on states. I refer here not to the systemic pressures that arise from a Hobbesian or Lockean anarchic system of
states per se but rather to the systemic pressures arising from the development of global capitalism, which
are increasingly being expressed through the state system in economic multilateral arrangements
covering trade, finance, debt relief, technology, and development. The biggest challenge to the
development of green states comes not from pressure generated by the state system but rather from the
competitive pressures of global capitalism. The potential for more innovative initiatives in environmental
multilateralism is therefore likely to be limited until such time as the ecological contradictions generated
by dominant economic multilateral arrangements are resolved by more reflexive, and hence more
ecologically sensitive, modernization.
Capitalism’s constant strive to produce an excess makes it impossible to save the environment
faster than it destroys it
Critiques of the capitalist welfare state in the 1970s focused on the state’s fundamentally contradictory tasks.5 On the
one hand, the state was seen as having an institutional interest in safeguarding the interests of capital.
This was not because of any ruling class conspiracy but rather because of its functional dependence on the flow of revenue
(principally taxation) that private capital accumulation provides.6 In this respect the state was understood as defending and
upholding the interests of a capitalist society, including workers, investors, and consumers, rather than merely the interests of the
capitalist class standing alone. Capitalist states typically do this by providing the necessary legal and social infrastructure for
businesses to flourish, as well all those facilities and services that contribute to the growth of capitalist society. On the other
hand, the state was posited as having to respond to public pressure to redress the negative social and
ecological “side effects” generated by private capital accumulation (including the commercial activities of state-
owned instrumentalities). If the liberal capitalist state was to be seen as representing all of society, then it had to be responsive
not only to the demands of capital but also to the demands of all those who are exploited or otherwise
harmed by capitalism’s tendency to privatize gains and socialize costs. Yet the state’s capacity to secure
its legitimacy by alleviating these problems via its welfare and protective services is typically dependent
on its also performing successfully the function of maintaining private capital accumulation. So while the
formal rules of liberal representative democracy enable this legitimation function to be discharged (to some extent), the boundaries
of successful policies are invariably set by the buoyancy of the economy. The upshot was that any concerted attempt to
regulate private investment and business activities to the point where negative ecological externalities
are eliminated or made negligible was believed to bring about a set of multiple crises, for instance,
inflation, capital strike or flight, and labor unrest. The core claim in my highly schematic account of this body of
state theory was that these contradictions—to provide for the interests of private capital and to dampen social unrest
by ironing out the negative social externalities of capitalist accumulation—cannot all be resolved simply by pursuing
more efficient or more effective economic management and administration. Rather, these tensions can only be “politically
managed” because few governments are prepared to risk serious economic dislocation or any cessation or major curbing of economic
growth in the name of environmental protection: to do so would merely hasten their political demise. The systems-theoretic approach
employed in the early work of leading theorists such as James O’Connor, Claus Offe, and Jürgen Habermas focused on the functional
interdependencies between the capitalist state and the capitalist economy. That is, the basic unit of study is not the state as an
independent or historical entity but rather the state capitalist system.7 (This may be contrasted with non-Marxist theories of the state
that approach the state as an “autonomous” organization or source of power “controlling, or attempting to control, territories and
people.”8) These functional interdependencies are examined with a view to ascertaining the policy limits and policy failures of the
capitalist state.9 Since policies are understood in terms of the functions they serve vis-àvis the broader system of which they are part,
policy failure (whether in the domains of social or environmental policy) may be understood as one particular instance of system
failure. For example, environmental policy failure can be traced to structural contradictions in the capitalist economy, which are
analyzed as giving rise to crisis tendencies.10 It is precisely this functional dependence on the processes of private capital
accumulation that makes the welfare state a “capitalist state” and sets limits to the scope and substance of state policy making.11
The welfare state is understood to be in crisis because these contradictory requirements of accumulation
and legitimation can never be resolved within the system’s own boundaries.12
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Impact- Mass Death

Capitalism devastates the Third Word and causes massive environmental destruction
Barry Weisberg, no qualification, Beyond Repair: the Ecology of Capitalism, 1971, pg. 181-182
Liberation depends more than anything upon breaking the chain of domination at its strongest link here in the United States. There
should be no illusion by any among the Left that the liberation movements of the developing countries will at some point cripple the
United States. The new array of technological and chemical warfare agents being developed by the United States could under present
conditions selectively devastate much of the Third World. At best, we in the United States must learn from the Vietnamese and other
liberation movements the lessons of courage and dedication, and most important, the lesson of hope. In an age in which much is said
about the overpowering effects of technology, the lesson of the Vietnamese people who have for a decade withstood the most
intensive technological assault of all time is a truly miraculous example of the triumph of the collective human spirit against the will
of the machine and those humans who are more machinelike in their actions that the machines they employ. If it is true, as Heidegger
and others have suggested, that technology is essentially nihilistic because it represents the ultimate expression of the will to power,
it has been demonstrated in our own day as well that the collective will to defend a life of meaning has resisted the mechanical
madness of American imperialism. Here perhaps is the most potent lesson for America today. The Vietnamese have withstood the
pressure of death only because they resisted with life. By contrast, the gallows humor of almost any New Yorker reeks of the
acceptance of a dead and decaying environment. This attitude of acceptance and resignation is manifold in the fear of the nuclear
weapons or the inability to react to the biological destruction of the environment. The acceptance of death in the modern world stems
from the ignorance of life. In other words, the failure for many in America to experience a truly human and creative environment, a
life of meaning, robs a person of understanding the meaning of death as well. What the struggle of the Indochinese people suggests
is that only the struggle to defend life can counter the imminence of death. What this entails is the creation of a language and a
program which can reach out and embrace the American public, which can serve as a source of gravity away from the banality of
American life, away from the American way of death. There must be no denying that the present moment and the one immediately
ahead are full with awesome prospects. The French poet Pierre Emanuel at an American symposium perhaps captured the
overwhelming contradiction, “America is prophet of the tension of the modern age and will have to suffer through it. America will help
humanity to rediscover the meaning and necessity of suffering in a world of change.” The prophetic tension of America is the
contradiction between what exists and what is being born, between the cry for more survival on the part of frightened liberals, and
the cry for life emanating out of the thousands of new life forms and -experiments across America. In the short run, the contradiction
between death and life can only be heightened. The division of those who rule from those who are ruled is the first step toward
liberation. That may well mean that in order to bring into being a new morning that a night of darkness more intense than anything
yet endured will cover America. As long as the bombing of Indochina continues bombs will continue to explode in America. Certain
critical installations of production, particularly chemical and petroleum sources, should be destroyed in the United States. It would be
a grave miscalculation to believe that those who rule the American colossus will abandon their positions of power. The only way that
the production of lethal agents will be terminated is if force is applied. In some cases shortterm organizing strategies may disable key
centers of production.
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Week 08
Impact- War and Colonialism

Biopolitics is the ultimate form of control which treats life as if it has no value and justifies colonialism
and war
This command to go anywhere at any time to defend the cause of survival also directs ecodisciplinarians to pursue other equally
problematic values on a more global level with the full force of state power and positive science, namely, stability, diversity, and
interdependence. A powerful nation-state is no longer empowered simply to defend its territory to protect its populations. It also must
identify and police the surroundings of all its many environments to guarantee ecological stability, biological diversity, and
environmental interdependence. Because some states are more sustainable than others, their survival imperatives can become
guidelines for environmental colonialism. So to survive, the state may choose to impose the status of a green belt, forest preserve,
nature reservation, or environmental refuge on other societies. Qates claims that the ecological ethic of stability as “a steady-state”
would notresult in stagnation. Such outcomes would, of course, offend the growth fixations of consumers and citizens living in liberal
capitalist democracies. On the contrary, he believes that this ethic would mean “directing growth and change in nondestructive ways,
generated within the standing pattern that supports life.”6’ But who directs growth and change for whom? Is there a standing pattern
that directs life? Does anyone really know enough about it to direct growth in accord with it? In practice, Global Marshall Planners in
Washington or New York could use ecological criteria to impose sustainable development of economic growth at home as they also
force ecological steady states on others abroad. If India’s millions stay on foot or bicycles, then Germany’s millions will stay in their
cars. If Indonesia keeps growing trees, then Japan can keep consuming lumber. And if Brazil’s ranchers keep turning rain forest into
cattle ranges, then U.S. suburbanites will get their cheeseburgers. Obviously, a “steadying state” designed and managed by green
bureaucrats will be needed to enforce environmentalized stable states of dynamic ecological equilibrium, which Gates identifies as
the sine qua non of stability. Ironically, then, green bureaucrats, who are directed to stabilize everyone’s fitness and health, should
restructure populations and growth by planning for sustainable patterns in timber harvesting, oil production, agricultural output, land
use, and consumer marketing to contain but not end the growth fetishism of mass-consumption capitalism. Gates concurs with Gore
and McLaughlin that all present geo-economic national economies run on a paradox: “Whatever is achieved instantly becomes
inadequate when measured against the ethic of continual consumption. Satisfaction only creates dissatisfaction, in an accelerating
cycle. ‘More’ is an unrealizable goal.”62 Since these consumerist values continually cause more and more damage, the
environmentalizing strategies of ecodisciplinary regimes must enforce a new social commitment to their opposites, namely, the
willing acceptance of “less” as the moral basis for new ecological values on a social and individual level. For survival’s sake, “the eth-
ical consciousness of earth’s human population must therefore be as ecologically well regulated as the size of the earth’s
population.”63 Protecting the whole, in the practice of environmentalizing green bureaucracies, also can become a strange
administrative credo of biophilia, or love of life, in a framework of biocentrism, or placing earth-life-nature at the core of green
thought and bureaucratic practice. If environments are to be protected, then all the life within them would, of course, anchor the
practical forms of human engagement with the world. Yet this emotional commitment to “life,” or life seen as the superorganism of
Earth in ecology, might entail a condemnation of humanity in open misanthropy by containing, destroying, or limiting some traditional
forms of human living in favor of the earth’s ecological survival. It is not that geo-environmentalists love their lives less but that they
might love other animal and plant life more—so green bureaucrats will reason as they prevent some human communities from
developing to enhance environmental survivability. Such contradictions actually make sense, because they stand for placing limits on
geo-economic excesses in those cases where the survivalist operatives of the green steady state see everyday social policies
threatening nonhuman life’s survival and stability. “Where survival of the whole seems threatened,” Gates concludes, “as in issues of
extinction and pollution, then the basic ethos of protecting the whole predominates.”64
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Week 08
Alternative Solvency
Biopolitical administration of populations depends upon the successful administration of the environment
that the population depends on. Contemporary discourses of ecological risk mobilize particular forms of
expert knowledge that are used as extensions of disciplinary power in the fight to define the proper
administration of the environment for the biopolitical state.
Foucault suggests a continuity between this modern right to life and the contemporary concern about risks to the environment. He
claims that the ‘biological risks’ confronting the human species ‘are perhaps greater and certainly more serious, than before the birth
of microbiology’ (ibid. 143). He further suggests that the economic and social conditions that, since the eighteenth century, allowed
the West a measure of relief from the struggle against famine, etc. do not necessarily apply ‘outside the Western world’, and goes on
to link the notion of modernity directly with biopower and the conditions under which it emerged: But what might be called a society’s
‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man
remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.6 (ibid., emphasis added) These comments can be seen as an
indication that Foucault’s work on biopolitics is capable of addressing the notion of ecological risk and the problem of the social
relation to nature, which are emerging as key problems for contemporary social theory. As will be discussed in another chapter, social
theorists Ulrich Beck and Klaus Eder both understand ecological threats as the result of global processes of modernization and
rationalization, which have created new ecological fields of conflict within contemporary society. Beck in particular points to a link
between the success of economic growth and the consolidation of welfare state mechanisms in providing an unprecedented level of
security for life in the West. From a different, yet not unrelated perspective, Eder emphasizes the rise of a new, post-industrial ‘politics
of class’ involving competition for the symbolic definition of the social relation to nature. These perspectives inextricably link
ecological problems with social systemic processes of modernization. One useful way of approaching Foucault’s notion of biopower is
to follow Brian Turner, who has argued that, notwithstanding his apparent hostility to systematic theorizing, Foucault’s work
nevertheless implicitly embraces a particular causal explanation of the modern world (Turner 1984: 159). Turner identifies the
‘unifying theme’ of Foucault’s work as a dual focus on the ‘rationalisation of the body and the rationalisation of populations by new
combinations of power and knowledge’, and argues that these rationalizations are the effect of increasing population densities, which
in the nineteenth century came to threaten ‘the political order of society’ (ibid. 163, emphasis added). Turner rightly emphasizes the
role which population pressures played in Foucault’s analysis of the development of biopower, pointing out that it is this factor which
stands behind the expansion and development of new regimes and regimens of control — a profusion of taxonomies, tables,
examinations, drills, dressage, chrestomathies, surveys, samples and censuses. The pressure of men in urban space necessitates a
new institutional order of prisons, asylums, clinics, factories and schools in which accumulated bodies can be made serviceable and
safe. Just as the space of knowledge experiences accumulations of new discourses, so the social space is littered with bodies and the
institutions which are designed to control them. (ibid. 160—1) The point I would stress is that not only is knowledge pivotal to
practices of power; it is also central to the constitution of the objects upon which bio power operates — that is, to the ‘making up’ of
both people and things. Biopolitics is therefore inherently linked to the development and elaboration of specific forms of expertise.
This is an issue I will return to later in the chapter. For the present, suffice it to say that the definition and administration of
populations simultaneously requires the constitution and management of the environment in which those populations exist and upon
which they depend. Such a conclusion is implicit in Foucault’s approach, although not developed, and as a consequence Foucault
does not adequately deal with the way in which the political and economic problematization of populations also gave rise, in more
recent times, to a similar problematization of nature and the environment.7 However, it is clear from Foucault’s discussions of the
biopolitical regulation of populations that this assumes not only the disciplining of individuals and populations, but also, necessarily, a
concern with the administration of ‘all the conditions of life’ as represented by the environment. For Foucault biopolitics, the task of
administering life at the level of the ‘species body’, represents the multiple points of application to the body (both individually and
collectively) of disciplines such as public health, medicine, demography, education, social welfare, etc. (Barret-Kriegal 1992: 194).
Ecology and environmental management can also be regarded as expressions of biopolitics, as these originate in, and operate upon,
the same basic concerns for managing the ‘continuous and multiple relations’ between the population, its resources and the
environment. Contemporary ecological discourse, in other words, is an articulation of what Foucault calls the ‘population—riches
problem’. This suggests a specifically ecological or environmental dimension to biopolitics, which renders more complex the way in
which we understand the body as the target and site of power. Not only are we forced to deal with the individual ‘anatomical’ body
and the social body, and the relations between these, but we must also take into account an ecological dimension in which the focus
is on the relationship between the social body and the biological species body.8 This is not to suggest that there will not be new forms
of discipline and normality directed at the body at the individual level (indeed, these would appear to be a necessary component in
ecological governmentality9), but that, as with areas of social policy such as public health, the ecological is primarily biopolitical in
nature — that is, it is manifested in specific regulatory controls aimed at the population, albeit from a somewhat different perspective.
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Week 08
Alternative – Discursive Re-Framing/Resistance

In contrast to disciplinary formulations of population discourse, we should engage in a discursive re-
framing that unmasks the operations of power hidden in population discourse itself. This strategy allows
for a space in which new subject-positions can emerge, and allows environmentalism to become
emancipatory rather than simply the Draconian extension of biopolitics
For Darier, as for Foucault, ‘resistance . . . is an illustration of the self-critical affirmation of ways of relating to the world rather than
an instrumental strategy for a teleological purpose’. The point is not to create a series of sexual norms to ‘save the Earth’, but to
engage in practices of critical self-reflection against precisely such norms — here especially those that create unproblematic, ‘natural’
linkages among sex, knowledge and nature — in order to ‘become something different from what we were made’. Resistance to eco-
sexual normativity, then, begins in questioning and discursive disruption, rather than in an easy acceptance of the assumption that
environmentalism requires ‘saying no’ to sex. It begins in a process of discursive exposure: making visible the workings of the racist,
sexist and heterosexist inflections of population discourse, making clear the assumptions of a particular sort of rational subjectivity
that accompany discourses of ‘appropriate’ global ecological citizenship for individuals and nations alike. It begins in a process of calling
into question the ‘naturalness’ of any sexual talk or practice, testing and shaking up the grounds of both calcified and emergent articulations.
Tempting though it might be, resistance to eco-sexual normativity is not a mere matter of ‘just saying yes’. Nor is an ethics made by finding or
confessing one’s ‘true~ sexuality beneath layers of repression, environmentally induced or otherwise. It cannot be a simple question of ‘doing the
right thing’ according to an abstract set of expert-derived principles. This uncertainty, this lack of a strategic or normative ethics, makes the
development of a collective response to eco-sexual normativity quite difficult. ‘However,’ writes Darier ‘as any action is situated in a specific context
of power relations, it is possible to know if — strategically and at a given time — a green act of resistance merely legitimizes the existing system of
power relations or undermines it.’ Although there may be no easy answers, and although it may not be desirable to replace an ascetic eco-sexual
normativity with (say) a hedonistic one, I do think that in this particular context a possible avenue for resistance is in the reassertion of an
overt sense of ‘polymorphous’ pleasure into environmentalist discourses, toward a multiplicity of sexual and natural discursive
articulations. While it is clear that part of the success of population discourse is its mobilization of pleasure in the relationship between reducing
reproduction and increasing living standard, it is also clear that this is a pleasure born of denial in the context of a series of other denials, a reduction
of multiple possibilities to one. So what other pleasures are possible? I alluded above to a process of questioning reproductive heterosexual
penetrative normativity as part of a strategy of resistance to the assumption that population control equates with the limitation of all sexual activity. In
this case, both heterosexuality and ascetic ecological subjectivity are called into question, separately and in their ‘natural’ articulation.
Such a questioning would create spaces for the exploration of others. Further, it might be possible to consider some contemporary
Foucauldian-inspired queer analysis and politics — specifically that which tries to ‘denature’ sexual identity — as a site from which to
incorporate a variety of different understandings of nature in sexual discourse. What might it be like to ‘try on’ different natures as part
of a process of pleasurable, creative self-understanding? Or the reverse: what might it be like to ‘try on’ different sexualities in the
interpretation of nature for ecological discourses (e.g. Sandilands 1994)? The point is not to arrive at some non-heterosexual
normative practice, but to mobilize resistances to heterosexuality with resistances to eco-normativity as a way of using each to call
into question the ‘naturalness’ of the other. Of course, this kind of anti-normative questioning does not guarantee that the planet will
be saved, in either the short or the long term. Such a quest would result in precisely the kind of ecofundamentalism that has been
generated by the articulation of ecological with population discourses. What this type of process of resistance does suggest is that
space be made for the possibility of a genuinely ethical self-transformative practice as part of the point of the environmental
movement itself. If environmentalism is to go beyond ‘just saying no’, if it is to lead to something other than a series of Draconian
codes governing ever more intimate aspects of individuals’ lives, then spaces for exploration must be allowed to flourish and
proliferate. Polymorphous sexualities and multiple natures are thus at the heart of green resistances. Where population control, despite
its claims to the contrary, fails to free humans and non-humans alike from normative constraints, self-questioning and disruption may
be more promising.
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Week 08
Alternative- Micro Resistance

Alternative- enacting micro-resistances to the dominant environmental discourses can abolish the basis
for the discourse and fracture state control
Nothing, or at least very little, necessarily remains settled forever in the economic, governmental, and social institutions of advanced
capitalist economies. Advanced urban industrial life is never necessarily the way that we find it simply because it grows in accord with
invariant laws of modernization and development. Rather, what is taken to be modern and developed represents the latest winning
political coalition or ascendent market logic prevailing over all the others that have lost these battles, if only temporarily. The
collectives behind modernity are full of alternative formations, untested possibilities, and potential innovations simply not yet
implemented as lived activities. There are few inevitabilities or necessities beyond the constant struggle over who will dominate
whom, with those in power then pretending afterward that political contingency was in fact structural inevitability. Populism today is a
complex, variegated, multidimensional phenomenon that no one analysis can fully articulate—much of it stands on the right, some of
it veers to the left, a bit of it is a step back, a piece of it strikes out ahead. This book has touched on only a few of its ecological
implications, examining how American populism in the 189os stood for one sort of social ecology against a new alternative, as well
as how the deteriorating macroenvironments of the 1990S suggest that another mode of collectivization, or a whole new social
ecology, might now emerge to restructure the megatechnical polyarchies that have operated for over a century. One might aver that
ecology is insignificant in the current scheme of things. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. One kind of human
relationship with the environment presumes collectives rooted in microecologies of independent producership, regionalistic corn-
munitarian exchange, and personal citizenship. Another entails collectives chained to a hyperecology of dependent consumerism,
globalistic corporate exchange, and personal clientage. Habitat is shaped by habitus. For ecologically minded populists to reorder the
economy and society, another set of collectives in this new social ecology, which is basically another alternative modernity potentially
quite different from the one that has prevailed for over a century, must be developed as forms of individual competence from within
the universal incompetence engendered by this failing modernity. Even this is no surefire recipe for realizing the future. Following
Marx and his warnings about the future vis--vis stock recipes for communism, each populist ecological community must ultimately
craft its own cuisine in its own kitchen, although some ingredients for the best mix—as this book concludes—should be taken from the
shelves of Marxian critical theory, localist democratic populism, and ecotechnical social ecology.
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Week 08
Representations Key
Representations and discursive framings of the environment are the only way to base actual
environmental policy – without our framework you have no means to evaluate the affirmative.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Spring 2003, Aurora Online,
http://aurora.icaap.org/2003Interviews/luke.html, accessed December 10, 2004
So 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.
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Week 08
Alternative- Ecological Revolution

Ecological revolution will change current attitudes towards capitalism and solve the impending
catastrophe
John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism, 2002, pg. 89-90
Declining civilizations, Arnold Toynbee once observed, are invariably marked by a “tendency toward standardization and uniformity”
and by a loss of “differentiation and diversity.” In that respect the current biosphere culture of global capitalism exhibits the main
symptoms of decline even as its global empire expands. It is the global expansion of this reductionist system, in fact, that threatens
its existence. Problems such as environmental destruction were at one time localized and bounded; they are no longer so. “If we
continue to act on the assumption that the only thing that matters is personal greed and personal gain,” Noam Chomsky has stated,
“the [ecological] commons will be destroyed. Other human values have to be expressed if future generations are going to be able to
survive.” Indeed, if society continues to be dominated by the narrow ethic of exploitation built into the present political-economic
system, it is only a matter of time—a few decades or a few centuries—before the ecology of the planet as a whole will have been so
compromised as to undermine the essential means of supporting life as we know it.’2 There is of course nothing inevitable about such
an outcome. “Wherever human beings are concerned,” the great biologist Rena Dubos once observed, “trend is not destiny.”
Everything depends on social struggle and the movements and organizations that people are able to build. What is needed in the
current historical conjuncture, as the Worldwatch Institute has declared, is an “environmental revolution” on the scale of the earlier
agricultural and industrial revolutions. Such an ecological revolution—if it is to succeed—will need to transcend the present biosphere
culture of capitalism and the higher immorality that it engenders, replacing it with a world of ecological and cultural diversity—a
world of more complete and universal freedom because rooted in a communal ethic and in accord with the earth and its habitat.’3
Only an ecological revolution can bring about broad based social change through the rejection
of capitalist methods of accumulation
John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism, 2002, pg. 132
A shift toward a broad movement for ecological conversion and the creation of a sustainable society also means that the partnership
between the state and the capitalist class, which has always formed the most important linchpin of the capitalist system, must be
loosened by degrees, as part of an overall social and environmental revolution. This partnership must be replaced, in the process of a
radical transformation of the society, by a new partnership between democratized state power and popular power.46 Such a shift
requires revolutionary change that must be more than simply a rejection of capitalist methods of accumulation and their effects on
people and the environment. Socialism—as a positive, not just a negative, alternative to capitalism—remains essential to any
conversion process, because its broad commitment to worldwide egalitarian change reflects an understanding of “how the needs of
the various communities can fit together in a way that leaves nobody out, and that also satisfies global environmental requirements.
Within a socialist framework, the sources of the largest-scale and most severe environmental destruction could be dealt with head-on,
in a way that has already shown itself to be beyond the capacity—not to say against the interests—of capital.”47 From an eco-socialist
perspective there is no difficulty in seeing that the rapid destruction of the old-growth forest is not about owls versus jobs but
ecosystems versus profits. Ecology tells us that the destruction of a complex ecosystem rooted in a climax forest that took centuries
and even a millennium or more to develop involves thresholds beyond which ecological restoration is impossible. We must therefore
find our way to a more rational economic and social formation, one that is not based on the amassing of wealth at the expense of
humanity and nature, but on justice and sustain-ability. Whether the issue is species extinction, death on the job, women’s control of
their own bodies, the dumping of toxic wastes in minority communities, urban decay, Third World poverty, the destruction of the
ozone layer, global warming, nuclear contamination, desertification, soil erosion, or the pollution of water resources, the broad
questions and answers remain the same. As the authors of Europe’s Green Alternative have written, we must choose between two
logics: “on the one side, economics divorced from all other considerations, and on the other, life and society. ~~48
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Week 08
Alternative- Eco- Resistance

Only a restructuring of ecology can disrupt disciplinary technologies and rationalization of
nature
This reconstruction and contestation of ecology as a new critical sensibility could revitalize political debates over the key issues of
who decides, who pays, and who benefits in the complex economic and technological relations of people with nature. A renewal of
nature, ecologically constituted and mediated as free sites for self-created being, promises to reorder the relations of the individual to
the collective, of personality to society, and of these dual social relations to nature. This ecological sensibility, then, must
reinvest individuals with the decision-making power to order their material relations to the environment
in smaller-scale, nonhierarchical, ecologically sound technical relaions between independent producers in local and regional
commonwealths. States and businesses will not act responsibly in every instance. Therefore, ecological populism must reaffirm the
responsibility of all individuals for preserving their ecological inheritance and passing it on to future generations. To confirm the
virtues of self and social discipline in living within the renewable cycles of natural reproduction, this ecological sensibility should point
to the most promising paths out of the megatechnical consumerism of corporate capitalism. Rather than encourage passivity,
dependence, and purposelessness, which social theorists have criticized the corporate technocracy for fostering and perpetuating,
the theory and praxis of ecological populism should presume greater social activity, personal autonomy, and reasonable balance to
preserve nature. With these goals the labor of competent, conscious communities could be guided to
ecologically reconstitute their social, economic, and political mediations with each other by interacting
reasonably with nature.52 Furthermore, the successful establishment of new social relations organized
along these ecological lines might radically alter the social constructions of nature in relation to society,
making nature again into a subject, not an object; an agency, not an instrumentality; and a more than
equal partner, not a dominated subaltern force. Many living and inorganic constituents of nature could be
entitled to rights and privileges as worthy of defense as many human rights and social privileges. At the
same time, no rationalizations of nature’s continued destruction could be countenanced in exchange for
the false promise of more jobs, greater prosperity, added growth, or closer technological control.
Guarantees of ecological security should in turn ramify into greater freedom, dignity, and reasonability
for the human beings whose own autonomy suffers in nature’s abusive indenturing to corporate
enterprises’ instrumental rationality.
Ecological resistance challenges corporate-economic representations and powers of activity

For centuries the industrial approach toward nature has emphasized a relation of instrumentally driven mining, the brutal
appropriation of resources with little concern for the ways in which the never-ending growth of consumption overloads and exhausts
stocks of natural resources, degrading the environment for all beings who occupy it. Shifting from these relations of “mining,” which
prevail in most contemporary technologies of mineral utilization, corporate agriculture, water usage, timber exploitation, commercial
fishing, and atmospheric pollution, to a relationship of contextually anchored minding is a pressing need. Such caring collaboration
between nature and culture, which could survive an equitable exchange between social resource utilization and natural resource
renewal, might better balance the currently unbalanced cycles of growth and decay, present consumption and future production, and
technical efficiency and ecological reasonability. A popular local culture for “minding” nature should assume human coevolution with
nonhuman life in the environment.53 As each of the following chapters asserts, these practices of nature minding also should evince
several principles: the necessity of planning for permanence rather than obsolescence; the worth of maintaining natural and social
diversity over the ill-fated imposition of a monological uniformity on nature; the importance of sustaining renewal, reusability, and
reasonability as central principles of nature-culture linkages; and the need to balance past environmental destruction against present
communal use and future ecological renewal in one common set of accounts. In developing these principles, new discursive
representations of ecology should guide local communities hoping to make the transition from economies subjected exclusively to
narrow corporate profit to ecologies rooted more closely in a broader democratic communalism.
Micro-resistances to dominant discourses of the environment can fracture hegemonic consent

for power and state control
Nothing, or at least very little, necessarily remains settled forever in the economic, governmental, and social institutions of advanced
capitalist economies. Advanced urban industrial life is never necessarily the way that we find it simply because it grows in accord with
invariant laws of modernization and development. Rather, what is taken to be modern and developed represents the latest winning
political coalition or ascendent market logic prevailing over all the others that have lost these battles, if only temporarily. The
collectives behind modernity are full of alternative formations, untested possibilities, and potential innovations simply not yet
implemented as lived activities. There are few inevitabilities or necessities beyond the constant struggle over who will dominate
whom, with those in power then pretending afterward that political contingency was in fact structural inevitability. Populism today is a
complex, variegated, multidimensional phenomenon that no one analysis can fully articulate—much of it stands on the right, some of
it veers to the left, a bit of it is a step back, a piece of it strikes out ahead. This book has touched on only a few of its ecological
-58-
Week 08
implications, examining how American populism in the 189os stood for one sort of social ecology against a new alternative, as well
as how the deteriorating macroenvironments of the 1990S suggest that another mode of collectivization, or a whole new social
ecology, might now emerge to restructure the megatechnical polyarchies that have operated for over a century. One might aver that
ecology is insignificant in the current scheme of things. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. One kind of human
relationship with the environment presumes collectives rooted in microecologies of independent producership, regionalistic corn-
munitarian exchange, and personal citizenship. Another entails collectives chained to a hyperecology of dependent consumerism,
globalistic corporate exchange, and personal clientage. Habitat is shaped by habitus. For ecologically minded populists to reorder the
economy and society, another set of collectives in this new social ecology, which is basically another alternative modernity potentially
quite different from the one that has prevailed for over a century, must be developed as forms of individual competence from within
the universal incompetence engendered by this failing modernity. Even this is no surefire recipe for realizing the future. Following
Marx and his warnings about the future vis--vis stock recipes for communism, each populist ecological community must ultimately
craft its own cuisine in its own kitchen, although some ingredients for the best mix—as this book concludes—should be taken from the
shelves of Marxian critical theory, localist democratic populism, and ecotechnical social ecology.
-59-
Week 08
A2 Permutation
They’re putting the cart before the horse- using the system to attempt to solve its symptoms
only legitimizes capitalism’s actions and serves as a way for those who have damaged the
environment to assuage their guilt
Compared to so many other environmental organizations, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) plainly is doing something
immediate and significant to protect Nature--buying, holding and guarding large swatches of comparatively
undisturbed natural habitat. Yet, it does this in accord with the consumeristic ground rules of the global capitalist
economy. Millions of acres, occupying many diverse ecosystems now are being held in trust by the Nature Conservancy. This trust is
being exercised not only for future generations of people, but also for all of the new generations of the plants and animals, fungi and
insects, algae and microorganisms inhabiting these plots of land. Beginning with the 60 acres in the Mianus River Gorge, this
organization has protected by direct acquisition and trust negotiations over 7.5 million acres of land in North America as well as
Central America, South America, and the Caribbean in over separate 10,000 protection actions. In the past forty years, on pieces as
small a quarter an acre to as large as hundreds of square miles, the Nature Conservancy in the United States has arranged for the on-
going protection of an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island.84 Given that so many ecological initiatives fail so frequently, this
string of successes cannot be entirely ignored.
Nonetheless, one must admit the Nature Conservancy's achievements are perhaps seriously flawed, even though these
flaws reveal much more about the consumption of public goods through a private property system and free enterprise economy than
they show about environmentalism. Because of what has happened to Nature, how capital operates, and where resources
for change must be solicited, the Nature Conservancy does what it does: consume land to be held "in trust: for Nature.
As a result, the tenets and tenor of the Conservancy's operations as "an environmentalist organization" are those of
almost complete compliance, and not those of radical resistance to the fast capitalist global economy. In the Nature
Conservancy's operational codes of land consumption, a triage system comes into play. Some lands of Nature are more
"ecologically significant," some regions are much more "natural areas," but some grounds are far less "protectable"
than others. The methods of the Conservancy show how it implicitly sees Nature as real estate properties inasmuch as
its chapters must constantly grade the acreages they receive--labelling some as truly ecologically significant, some as
plainly natural areas, some as merely "trade lands."85 The latter are sold, like old horses for glue or worn-out cattle for
dogfood, and the proceeds can used elsewhere to promote conservation. In seeking to preserve Nature, the Nature
Conservancy strangely oversees its final transformation into pure real estate, allowing even hitherto unsalable or
undeveloped lands to become transubstantiated into "natural areas" to green belt human settlements and recharge
their scenic visits with ecological significance.
When it asks for land to protect wildlife and create sanctuary for ecosystems. However, the Nature Conservancy tends not to
detail the ultimate cause of its concern. Protect it from what? Create sanctuary from what? The answer is, of course,
the same consumeristic economy that is allowing its members to accumulate stock, mail in donations, buy and sell
land. In many ways, the Conservancy is disingenuous in its designation of only some of its lands as trade lands. Actually, all of its
protected lands are trade lands, trading sanctuary and protection here (where it is commercially possible or aesthetically imperative)
to forsake sanctuary and protection there (where it is commercially unviable or aesthetically dispensable). It extracts a title for partial
permanence from a constant turnover of economic destruction anchored in total impermanence.86 The Conservancy ironically
fights a perpetually losing battle, protecting rare species from what makes them rare and building sanctuary from what
devastates everything on the land elsewhere with the proceeds of its members' successful capitalist rarification and
despoliation.
The Nature Conservancy necessarily embraces the key counter-intuitive quality of all markets, namely, a dynamic in
which the pursuit of private vices can advance public virtues. This appears contradictory, but it has nonetheless a very valid
basis. It agrees to sacrifice almost all land in general to development, because it knows that all land will not, in fact, be developed. On
the one hand, excessive environmental regulations might destroy this delicate balance in land use patterns. In accepting the
universal premise of development, on the other hand, it constantly can undercut economic development's specific enactments at
sites where it is no longer or not yet profitable. Some land will be saved and can be saved, in fact, by allowing, in principle, all land to
be liable to development. Hence, it needs trade lands to do land trades to isolate some land from any more trading. In allowing all to
pursue their individual vices and desires in the market, one permits a differently motivated actor, like the Nature Conservancy, to
trade for land, like any other speculator, and develop it to suit its selfish individual taste, which is in this case is "unselfish
nondevelopment." This perversely anti-market outcome satisfies the Conservancy's desires and ends, while perhaps also advancing
the collective good through market mechanisms.
Over the past two decades, The Nature Conservancy has grown by leaps and bounds by sticking to the operational objectives of
"preserving biodiversity."87 As powerful anthropogenic actions have recontoured the Earth to suit the basic material needs of
corporate modes of production, these artificial contours now define new ecologies for all life forms caught within their "economy" and
"environment." The "economy" becomes a world political economy's interior spaces defined by technoscience processes devoted to
production and consumption, while "the environment," in this sense, becomes a planetary political economy's exterior spaces
oriented to resource-creation, scenery-provision, and waste-reception.
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Natural resources exist, but Nature does not. Economic survival is imperative, but the commodity logics driving it need to be
grounded in sound ecological common sense lest the limitless dynamism of commodification be permitted to submit everything to
exchange logics immediately. Time is now what is scarce and centrally important in the highly compressed time-space continua of
contemporary commodity chains. It is no longer a question of jobs versus the environment, because fewer jobs will not resurrect
Nature. Nature is dead, and the environment generating global production assumes that jobs are necessary to define it as the space
of natural resources. Doing jobs irrationally and too rapidly, however, is what destroys these environments, making jobs done
rationally and at an apt pace ecologically acceptable. Consequently, the agendas of environmental protection must center on the
"question of the short-term vs. the long-term," and this is "what the Conservancy is all about."88
Nature, in all of its wild mystery and awesome totality, is not being preserved by the Nature Conservancy. It is, in fact, dead, as
McKibben and Merchant tell us.89 Nonetheless, its memory might be kept alive by the Nature Conservancy at numerous burial parks
all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit should be remembered by human beings in a whiff of wild fight, the scent of a stream,
or the aroma of surf. This goal may be a very well-intentioned one; but, in many ways all that the Nature Conservancy does boils
down to serving as a burial society dedicated to giving perpetual maintenance and loving care at a variety of Nature cemeteries:
Forest Glen, Mountain Meadow, Virgin River, Jade Jungle, Prairie View, Harmony Bay, Sunny Savannah, Brilliant Beach, Desert Vista,
Happy Hollow, Crystal Spring. As Nature's death is acknowledged, more and more plots are needed to bury the best bits of its body in
gardens of eternal life. Thus, the call for members, funds, and donations always will grow and grow.
This mission is even more ironic given the means whereby it is funded. Those humans, whose production and
consumption had so much to do with Nature's death, the middle and upper-middle classes, are given an opportunity to
purchase some atonement for their anonymous sins as consumers by joining the Nature Conservancy. Indeed, they
even can transfer their accumulations of dead labor, and by extension, dead nature, to the Nature Conservancy to
tend the gravesites of that which they murdered cheeseburger by cheeseburger, BTU by BTU, freon molecule by freon
molecule in their lethal mode of suburban living. Even more ironically, the hit men of these myriad murder for hire
deals--or major corporations--also are solicited by the Conservancy to pony up land, capital or donations to sustain this
noble enterprise. Economy and environment are, of course, not incompatible, because this is the circuit of maggot and corpse,
buzzard and body, grub and grave so common in today's postmodern ecology. Capital and Nature, the dead and living, are
incompatible, but the capital has won, Nature is dead. All that is left is the zombie world of economies and
environments, or the cash credits inside corporate ledgers for capital circulation and the ecological debits outside of
corporate accounting charged off as externalities. Some still think capitalism has not yet defeated Nature, but they are
deluded. Everything is environment now, nothing is Nature except perhaps the last reaches of innerspace and
outerspace where aquanauts and astronauts, riding hi-tech robotic probes, have not yet come in peace, killing
everything before them to then rest in peace.
A2 Framework
The old toolbox of realist international relations is totally inadequate when analyzing
contemporary debates over the environment – realist explanations are either too ideologically
biased or rely on too many assumptions. That makes our framework essential to actually
understanding the environment and conflicts over it.
p. 393-95
I want to assess the implications of tins rising inequality by concentrating upon its environmental dimensions, but I also want to
approach what is regarded as “the environment” quite differently by mobilizing ideas from science and technology studies. These
alternative notions can help frame the outlines of this new inequality as both an object of knowledge and subject of struggle. Such
moves must be made because most analytical tools in the disciplines of both international relations and environmental studies are
not adequate for the tasks of interpreting what is now developing around the world in the realms of technoscience and the envi-
ronment. In fact, our existing tools often occlude what needs to be analyzed, who needs to be criticized, and what must be done to
oppose powerlessness an(1 inequality. To anchor my claims, I take Fredric Jameson’s point about the postmodern condition its a point
of departure. That is, it is what remains “when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” It is a more fully
human world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature”. Ironically, as Jameson suggests,
this more fully human world is one that also rests upon the creation, maintenance, and suppression of a more fully nonhuman world.
As Bruno Latour suggests, Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of “man,” or as a
way of announcing his death. But this habit itself is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the simultaneous birth of
“nonhumanity”—things, or objects, or beasts—and the equally strange beginnings of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines. 2
This realm of nonhumanity is, in large part, what we know as “the environment,” but it increasingly is occupied by things and systems
as well as plains and animals. Sitting on the sidelines, hiding amid the action, and working behind the scenes with “modern man,”
there are all the objects and subjects—or plants, things, beasts, places, systems, and spaces—that sustain modernity and its
inequalities as they now surround everybody and everything in their workings. The Enlightenment’s national progressive order of
human actors—male and female—seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity persists. Yet it unfolds amid many other asymmetrical
transnational networks and unbalanced national niches for nonhumanity that in materially advance or retard human
Struggles for national progress. In many ways, the modern world system for commodity production and consumption
generates its own artificial and natural environments. An environment is what surrounds something, and the sweep of
global exchange now is “environizing” itself a terraformative power at the most fundamental level of operation by putting everything
that exists in built and unbuilt environments under human control. The idea is to put life itself into conformity with commodification,
subjecting objects and subjects to exchange and forcing everyone and everything to perform within the ways of the market. Whether
it is bioengineering new life forms, remixing the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, or crowding out most other organisms within
Earth’s carrying capacity, human economic exchanges are now a key environizing power that encircles, contains, and envelopes
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living and nonliving things in the human nations and environmental niches that now constitute the world’s ecosystems. The
domination of “Nature” by “Society” creates a second nature, a processed world, or a postmodern condition in which those who own
and control the material and mental means if enforcing asymmetries between different populations of humanity and aggregations of
nonhumanity are continuously forced to concretize new inequalities on this environmental scale. Far too many people and their
things, in turn, become relegated to second, third, fourth, fifth, or other developing worlds, while only a few people and their things in
the developed “first world” benefit from the costs incurred elsewhere by these world-making, or “terraformative,” powers. While
many experts in the areas of foreign affairs, international relations, or global studies stick with simplistic explanatory frameworks tied
to rational-choice notions of decision and action amid anarchic conditions, it is not clear that models of rationally calculated action are
adequate for interpreting the full range of international behavior by sates.5 Of course, countries frequently are assumed to be
unitary rational actors, and policy choices can be reinterpreted to fit models that presume rationality. Once receiving
this treatment, moreover, any behavior can be regarded as autonomous rational action by such operational definitions. Those
explanations, however, are frustrating, because they float along, at worst, with too much ideological presumption or they sit, at best,
on top of far too many operational “as if” assumptions.4 The criteria of explanation become caught within so many little
vortices of conceptual churn that essentially everything can be regarded as rationally calculated action.5
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A2 Framework
Neo-realism failingly attempts to explain inter-environmental relations in the outdated model
of an anarchic international scene, with distinct nation-states acting rationally. Instead,
contemporary environmental developments require an understanding of how the natural world
has been discursively constructed and contested in inter-environmental relations.
p. 396-97
Neorealist discourses of international relations fashion human sovereignty as the essential element for overcoming international
anarchy. Modern man becomes “the ideal of well-bounded rational identity, who would assert his master over history and who would
occupy the attentions of modern social science.” Contemporary social scientists, working in the neorealist realm, in turn, innocently
tout the enduring imperatives of para bellum in the state of nature. Indeed, the figurations of war still counterbalance the figure of
man: war continues as “an aleatory domain of history that escapes the controlling influence of man’s reasoned narratives and what is
known as dangerous, violent, and, therefore, anarchic.” Along these lines of conceptual adhesion for man/war, as Ashley notes, is the
sign of the state: the state as the modern focus of violence, with its back to the domestic space of man who legitimates it by willingly
submitting to the limitations it legislates and enforces, and turned to face the residual zone of historical indeterminacy still to be
forcefully brought tinder control in the name of reasoning man.” Consequently, man and the state accept the constraints of a
cohesive “inside” in order to survive the enduring anarchies prevailing “outside” every domestic society’s borders. 12 This accep-
tance allegedly constitutes the autonomous always already active imperative of “internationality,” which compels any domestic soci-
ety to submit to its state, directs every state to organize its society to nurture rational men as its citizens, and empowers rational
men to control anarchy through war, or preparing for war, amid anarchy-avoiding domestic Society. While Kenneth Waltz’s early Man,
the State, and War privileges the identity of “man” over the historicity of “war,” his later Theory of International Politics seems to
reverse this polarity to exalt “war” over “man” by showing the ways in which “the texture of international politics remains highly
constant, patterns recur, and events reheat themselves endlessly.” To do this, Ashley maintains that Waltz ignores the unstable but
constant elements of transversality that eventuate so much of what international and domestic politics really are. This move can be
made only outside of history, so the identity of the agency involved cannot be easily detected, much less questioned. Man, the State,
and War connected its lineage to the originary foundationalism of the Enlightenment, whose rational identity for “man” existed
separate from, prior to, and deeper than “war.” Waltz’s Theory of International Politics turns “man” into “a scriptable object” who is
“from the very outset introduced and preserved as a site, an object, and, in its determinable paradigmatic content, an effect of war.
All of this is done to reposition indeterminate forces and struggles within decidable boundaries between “inside” and “outside,’ the
“domestic” and the “international,” the “social” and the “State,” “sovereignty’ and “anarchy.” To assess the relations of nations
globally, we have been directed by IR discourse to study the division of humanity into nations and then explain the causes of human
conflict and cooperation by looking into these dynamics of national action. To comprehend interenvironmental relations, however, we
must understand why the world’s territory is divided by humanity into nations, countries, and states as well as how nonhumanity is
being separated into many distinct artificial and natural environments, which then tend to be, strangely enough, nationally
articulated, exploited, and managed. Smith accurately documents the division of labor, but he ignored the attendant ongoing “labor
of division,” such as these foundational oppositions, that it instantiates. The labors of such division, however, account for many of
today’s environmental crises and contradictions. Reassessing the global market’s environizing powers helps explain how nonhuman
forces and structures become entangled in a national/postnational/sub-national/supranational pattern of global transformation. Even
though the structures of human nationality are working to capture and control the environment as nonhuman nationality, their good,
or ill, ecological effects are mostly registered internationally. Rethinking world politics as a form of interenvironmental relations
requires us, like Latour, to jump off the familiar tracks that liberal humanism has laid down for understanding “the environment” – to
reinterpret, for example, how “the economy” or “the state” works.
Environmental problems are real, and most of them cannot be addressed adequately, much less effectively solved, without coming to
terms with the social purposes of those who misconstruct economy amid the environment around the mystified terms that are most
commonly used today. Environmental discourse must be broadened as widely as possible so that the built environment of Society and
its production processes in “second nature” are recognized as pervasive influences that should not be separated from the unbuilt
environments, or nature, or “first nature,” and its damage from by-production processes. Because states and economies both try to
capture and contain these social forces, who and/or what defines, directs, and develops that built environment and its products
clearly must he a central concern of international relations. Their interventions, however, rarely are decisive enough to succeed, even
though en tire academic disciplines, like environmental studies, green management, and applied ecology, are dedicated to guiding
their efforts.2’ To address these questions, we need to think about the constructions of interenvironmental relations as much as—or
even more than—the constructs of international relations.” At this juncture, there are so many quantitatively new, rapidly expanding
environmental trends that we face many qualitatively new conditions. Inequalities are no longer simply international in scope and
national by method; they essentially are interenvironmental in their breadth and depth. Accounting for these shifts may require
mobilizing new terms and conditions beyond those traditionally accepted in the chronicles of men, and sometimes women, for coping
with modernity. Given these goals, this analysis is imperfect, incomplete, and unfinished. At this stage of these discursive
developments, it cannot be otherwise.
Realist theories of power no longer apply to actually existing liberal-democratic capitalist nation-states.
p. 399-400
Familiar forms of international relations theorizing have marked the same trend lines since the crack-up and collapse of the Soviet
bloc. Seeing trouble ahead—or, at least, turbulence—James Rosenau regards this time as one of ‘post-international politics” in which
traditional state actors and new nonstate actors face off against each other. Similarly, Joseph Nye’s “soft power” ruminations identify
contemporary world politics as being shaped by the “diffusion of power” from state to nonstate actors. Soft power allegedly is “soft”
because in quality it is intbrmational, cultural, and/or technological. Yet these narratives of global change and characterizations of
world power are tied more to how they are not like the Cold War’s comparatively stable political order and hard-power regime rather
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than how things might actually be working on the ground today. To assess these shifts, we need to implode liberal-humanist notions of
agency and structure in search of the hybridizing influences at play in actually existing democratic consumer capitalism. Nye’s feeble
visions about the “diffusion of power” pale before more astute recognitions such as Donna Haraway’s, which provide insights into the
state’s policy obligations, domestic and foreign, dissipating in the informatics of domination.28 Five years before Rosenau’s sightings
of turbulence, Haraway was mapping its disruptive emergence in the environizing patterns of “cyborganization”: continued erosion of
the welfare state; decentralizations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power
broadly in the form of information rich /information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by
many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for
occupational mobility for women of color; growing privatization of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of
privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social
groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies. Haraway, in her approach to cyborganization,
began scrutinizing the omnipolitanization of the world’s international and interenvironmental relations.30 She also brings us a better
sense of the conflicts along today’s borders between international politics and domestic policy, globalism and ecologism, world affairs
and local environmentalism—the places where the monstrous realities of intermestic crises, antiglobal ecological movements, and
anti-ecological global counterrevolutions flash and rumble. Little of this action fits into the older comfortable tropes of IR theory. In
fact, the traditional stock of social theories for international politics miss almost of these movements on both a foundational level and
a second—order level in their methodological myopia: state-centric and reflexive idealist theories do not travel well in these
environments. Living in today’s omnipolitan order should move us to see how we are all “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine
and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” Such shifts are quite far-reaching, but we
also must accept Jameson’s assignment “to name the system” at work in the wondrous new machine and thereby begin
systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical. Not everyone may
yet understand the historicity or systematicity of global capitalism, but its cyborganizing powers over the human and nonhuman body
does reshape space, reconstitute power, and rediagram territoriality in new environized patterns rooted in deep biology, deep
sociology, deep technology.
AT Perm: “We Help People”

The affirmative’s claims of altruism are a façade- the illusion that they are liberating people
and fulfilling their desires avoids the fact that they are manipulating these very desires to
enable capitalist exploitation. Their image of endless growth is a fantasy.
Under modern corporate capitalism, the plannable life course of all individuals qua "consumers" becomes
a capital asset in that the consummative mobilization of production in any given market directly boosts
the productivity, profitability and power of corporate capital's increasingly automated industries. Within
the hyperecologies of second nature, corporate capital finds in consummativity
...the ultimate realization of the private individual as a productive force. The system of needs must wring liberty
and pleasure from him as so many functional elements of the reproduction of the system of production and the relations of power
that sanction it. It gives rise to these private functions according to the same principle of abstraction and radical "alienation" that was
formerly (and still today) the case for his labor power. In this system, the "liberation" of needs, of consumers, of women,
of the young, the body, etc., is always really the mobilization of needs, consumers, the body....It is never
an explosive liberation, but a controlled emancipation, a mobilization whose end is competitive
exploitation.51
As a result, the disciplinary managerial planning of corporate capital now can generate new hierarchies
of status, power, and privilege out of hyperecology's economic democracy of mass consumption by
developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and professional
services.52 Creating and then serving even newer modes of desire in these symbolic communities
perpetually drives the transnational market's hyperecologies of endless growth. Allegedly competing capitalist
firms increasingly produce very similar goods and services using very similar techniques and structures planned out on a massive
scale to satisfy the desires of individual subjects that their "competing lines" of products now necessarily presume will exist.
Subjectivity is encoded directly and indirectly in manufactured materiality. The increasingly homogenized object world in systems of
corporate markets concomitantly is invested with rich, heterogeneous symbolic/imaginary differentiations in order to provide
individual subjects with codes that they and others can distinguish the various relative status grades of community and personality
across and within these consumption communities as marketing codes for the system of objects.
Baudrillard observes, "the fetishization of the commodity is the fetishization of a product emptied of its concrete
substance of labor and subjected to another type of labor, a labor of signification, that is, of coded abstraction (the
production of differences and of sign values). It is an active, collective process of production and reproduction of a code, a
system, invested with all the diverted, unbound desire separated out from the process of real labor."53 Just as
exchange value once outstripped and mastered use value, so too now has sign value overcome exchange
value in contemporary corporate hyperecologies. "Fetishism is actually attached," in Baudrillard's analysis, "to the
sign object, the object eviscerated of its substance and history, and reduced to the state of marking a difference,
epitomizing a whole system of differences."54 Under the profit horizon of corporate capital, the consciousness-
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engineering industries of advertising and activism spend millions of dollars and hours to carefully construct codes that
differentiate the sign values of commodified objects. And, the varying psychodemographic means of steering
individuals to these artificially defined and symbolically differentiated manufactured goods and
packaged services--through direct mail, magazine ads, television dramas, radio give-aways, peer pressure, fashion discourse, or
public education--conduct the power of capital through the symbolic codes of consumption. The objects of the
system create and sustain the system of objects.
In these modernized spaces, "all are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical
neutralization of religion to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology--since ideology
always reflects economic coercion--everywhere proves to be the freedom to choose what always is the
same."55 By accepting such ephemeral ideologies of identity and purpose for living hyperecologically, all classes of
consumers consign themselves to "finding their salvation in objects, consecrated to a social destiny of consumption
and thus assigned to a slave morality (enjoyment, immorality, irresponsibility) as opposed to a master morality
(responsibility and power)."56 And, in internalizing the expectations of these packaged choices of imposed consumption, as they are
tied directly to "discretionary income" and "leisure time," individuals purposely accept new kinds of collective hyperecological
responsibilities. If they do not shop until they drop, shops will drop. In an important sense, individual subjects occupy the key niche in
contemporary hyperecologies as they closely control their own behavior (or serve as cultural complements of administrative
activism), and they ceaselessly consume products (or function as predictable units of production for the corporate sector).
Global fast capitalism purposely has stimulated the propagation of consumption, not primarily as the rewards for accepting a life of
material abundance in an affluent society, but rather mostly as constant investment in a new productive force. Hyperecologies are
systems of sustainable development for the objects of this system of objects. "The consumption of individuals," as Baudrillard states,
"mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it becomes a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its
process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are only these kinds of needs because the system of corporate production
needs them. And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the capital
invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested in the wage laborer. It is all capital."57 Under the
hyperecological imperatives of transnational exchange, all individuals as "consumers" become capital
assets inasmuch as their consummative mobilization directly boosts the productivity, profitability, and
power of corporate capital's increasingly globalized industries. On the horizon made by corporate capitalism's
consummative order, the social affirmation of increasing permissiveness, whose codes always accelerate the rationally
organized exploitation of desire to increase or rationalize productivity, acquires as much importance in maintaining
social cohesion under corporate capitalism as the values of ascetic self-discipline, personal frugality and individual
sacrifice once did in the productivist order of entrepreneurial capital.58
In some sense, Baudrillard's political economy of the sign explores the discontinuities or ruptures coming with the Third Industrial
Revolution supplanting the Second Industrial Revolution. After having determined how contemporary systems of objects operate,
Baudrillard illustrates how the object of the system during the Second Industrial Revolution was coping with the obscene
overproduction of cartelized, professionalized, organized, multinationalized industrial production, or the endless replication of
standardized exchange values, through orders of mass consumption. Wasteful excessive overproductive industries requires
markets organized around overconsumption, excess, and waste. The object of the system within this system of
objects is an apparent impossibility: endless growth. And, the endlessness of growth requires growing
ends without end in order to charge and center the hyperproductive engines of modern industry. Thus, all
of the enterprises tied to private property must embed their private properties in every property associated with private enterprise.
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AT Perm: “We access the case”

They’re putting the cart before the horse- using the system to attempt to solve its symptoms
only legitimizes capitalism’s actions and serves as a way for those who have damaged the
environment to assuage their guilt
Compared to so many other environmental organizations, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) plainly is doing something
immediate and significant to protect Nature--buying, holding and guarding large swatches of
comparatively undisturbed natural habitat. Yet, it does this in accord with the consumeristic ground rules
of the global capitalist economy. Millions of acres, occupying many diverse ecosystems now are being held in trust by the
Nature Conservancy. This trust is being exercised not only for future generations of people, but also for all of the new generations of
the plants and animals, fungi and insects, algae and microorganisms inhabiting these plots of land. Beginning with the 60 acres in the
Mianus River Gorge, this organization has protected by direct acquisition and trust negotiations over 7.5 million acres of land in North
America as well as Central America, South America, and the Caribbean in over separate 10,000 protection actions. In the past forty
years, on pieces as small a quarter an acre to as large as hundreds of square miles, the Nature Conservancy in the United States has
arranged for the on-going protection of an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island.84 Given that so many ecological initiatives
fail so frequently, this string of successes cannot be entirely ignored.
Nonetheless, one must admit the Nature Conservancy's achievements are perhaps seriously flawed, even though these
flaws reveal much more about the consumption of public goods through a private property system and free enterprise economy than
they show about environmentalism. Because of what has happened to Nature, how capital operates, and where
resources for change must be solicited, the Nature Conservancy does what it does: consume land to be
held "in trust: for Nature. As a result, the tenets and tenor of the Conservancy's operations as "an
environmentalist organization" are those of almost complete compliance, and not those of radical
resistance to the fast capitalist global economy. In the Nature Conservancy's operational codes of land
consumption, a triage system comes into play. Some lands of Nature are more "ecologically significant,"
some regions are much more "natural areas," but some grounds are far less "protectable" than others.
The methods of the Conservancy show how it implicitly sees Nature as real estate properties inasmuch as
its chapters must constantly grade the acreages they receive--labelling some as truly ecologically
significant, some as plainly natural areas, some as merely "trade lands."85 The latter are sold, like old
horses for glue or worn-out cattle for dogfood, and the proceeds can used elsewhere to promote conservation. In seeking to
preserve Nature, the Nature Conservancy strangely oversees its final transformation into pure real estate, allowing
even hitherto unsalable or undeveloped lands to become transubstantiated into "natural areas" to green belt human
settlements and recharge their scenic visits with ecological significance.
When it asks for land to protect wildlife and create sanctuary for ecosystems. However, the Nature Conservancy tends not
to detail the ultimate cause of its concern. Protect it from what? Create sanctuary from what? The
answer is, of course, the same consumeristic economy that is allowing its members to accumulate stock,
mail in donations, buy and sell land. In many ways, the Conservancy is disingenuous in its designation of only some of its
lands as trade lands. Actually, all of its protected lands are trade lands, trading sanctuary and protection here (where it is
commercially possible or aesthetically imperative) to forsake sanctuary and protection there (where it is commercially unviable or
aesthetically dispensable). It extracts a title for partial permanence from a constant turnover of economic destruction anchored in
total impermanence.86 The Conservancy ironically fights a perpetually losing battle, protecting rare species
from what makes them rare and building sanctuary from what devastates everything on the land
elsewhere with the proceeds of its members' successful capitalist rarification and despoliation.
The Nature Conservancy necessarily embraces the key counter-intuitive quality of all markets, namely, a dynamic in
which the pursuit of private vices can advance public virtues. This appears contradictory, but it has nonetheless a very valid
basis. It agrees to sacrifice almost all land in general to development, because it knows that all land will not, in fact, be developed. On
the one hand, excessive environmental regulations might destroy this delicate balance in land use patterns. In accepting the
universal premise of development, on the other hand, it constantly can undercut economic development's specific enactments at
sites where it is no longer or not yet profitable. Some land will be saved and can be saved, in fact, by allowing, in principle, all land to
be liable to development. Hence, it needs trade lands to do land trades to isolate some land from any more trading. In allowing all to
pursue their individual vices and desires in the market, one permits a differently motivated actor, like the Nature Conservancy, to
trade for land, like any other speculator, and develop it to suit its selfish individual taste, which is in this case is "unselfish
nondevelopment." This perversely anti-market outcome satisfies the Conservancy's desires and ends, while perhaps also advancing
the collective good through market mechanisms.
Over the past two decades, The Nature Conservancy has grown by leaps and bounds by sticking to the operational objectives of
"preserving biodiversity."87 As powerful anthropogenic actions have recontoured the Earth to suit the basic material needs of
corporate modes of production, these artificial contours now define new ecologies for all life forms caught within their "economy" and
"environment." The "economy" becomes a world political economy's interior spaces defined by technoscience processes devoted to
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Week 08
production and consumption, while "the environment," in this sense, becomes a planetary political economy's exterior spaces
oriented to resource-creation, scenery-provision, and waste-reception.
Natural resources exist, but Nature does not. Economic survival is imperative, but the commodity logics driving it need to be
grounded in sound ecological common sense lest the limitless dynamism of commodification be permitted to submit everything to
exchange logics immediately. Time is now what is scarce and centrally important in the highly compressed time-space continua of
contemporary commodity chains. It is no longer a question of jobs versus the environment, because fewer jobs will not resurrect
Nature. Nature is dead, and the environment generating global production assumes that jobs are necessary to define it as the space
of natural resources. Doing jobs irrationally and too rapidly, however, is what destroys these environments, making jobs done
rationally and at an apt pace ecologically acceptable. Consequently, the agendas of environmental protection must center on the
"question of the short-term vs. the long-term," and this is "what the Conservancy is all about."88
Nature, in all of its wild mystery and awesome totality, is not being preserved by the Nature Conservancy. It is, in fact, dead, as
McKibben and Merchant tell us.89 Nonetheless, its memory might be kept alive by the Nature Conservancy at numerous burial parks
all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit should be remembered by human beings in a whiff of wild fight, the scent of a stream,
or the aroma of surf. This goal may be a very well-intentioned one; but, in many ways all that the Nature Conservancy does boils
down to serving as a burial society dedicated to giving perpetual maintenance and loving care at a variety of Nature cemeteries:
Forest Glen, Mountain Meadow, Virgin River, Jade Jungle, Prairie View, Harmony Bay, Sunny Savannah, Brilliant Beach, Desert Vista,
Happy Hollow, Crystal Spring. As Nature's death is acknowledged, more and more plots are needed to bury the best bits of its body in
gardens of eternal life. Thus, the call for members, funds, and donations always will grow and grow.
This mission is even more ironic given the means whereby it is funded. Those humans, whose production
and consumption had so much to do with Nature's death, the middle and upper-middle classes, are given
an opportunity to purchase some atonement for their anonymous sins as consumers by joining the
Nature Conservancy. Indeed, they even can transfer their accumulations of dead labor, and by extension, dead
nature, to the Nature Conservancy to tend the gravesites of that which they murdered cheeseburger by cheeseburger,
BTU by BTU, freon molecule by freon molecule in their lethal mode of suburban living. Even more ironically, the hit
men of these myriad murder for hire deals--or major corporations--also are solicited by the Conservancy to pony up
land, capital or donations to sustain this noble enterprise. Economy and environment are, of course, not incompatible, because
this is the circuit of maggot and corpse, buzzard and body, grub and grave so common in today's postmodern ecology. Capital and
Nature, the dead and living, are incompatible, but the capital has won, Nature is dead. All that is left is the
zombie world of economies and environments, or the cash credits inside corporate ledgers for capital circulation and
the ecological debits outside of corporate accounting charged off as externalities. Some still think capitalism has
not yet defeated Nature, but they are deluded. Everything is environment now, nothing is Nature except
perhaps the last reaches of innerspace and outerspace where aquanauts and astronauts, riding hi-tech
robotic probes, have not yet come in peace, killing everything before them to then rest in peace.
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Environmental Discourse Michigan 7 Week 08 Environmental Discourse-Negative

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Environmental Discourse Michigan 7 Week 08 Environmental Discourse-Negative

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Environmental Discourse Michigan 7

Environmental Discourse- Negative............................................................................................................................................................1

Link - The plan’s discourse of necessary environmental sustainability serves as a justification

Links – Alternative Energy

Links – Alternative Energy

Link- Environmental Prohibitions

Link- Environmental Managerialism

Link- Environmental Managerialism

Link- Environmental Managerialism

Link- Environmental Managerialism

Link – Ends Focused Policy Making

The blurring of with political action and environmental discourse

, this new way of seeing Nature through

Link- Protecting Biodiversity

Green Consumerism Link – The Earth

Individual Green Consumerism Bad

Link- Science and Climate Models

Link – Population- Resource Crunch

Link – Populations Crunch

Internal Link- Subject- Object

Internal Link  Militarization

Internal Link – Capitalism

Internal Link – Managerialism

Internal Link – Securitization

Internal Link – Securitization

Impact- Value to Life

Impacts – Turns Case

Impact – Turns Case

Capitalism promotes a method of problem displacement which only mitigates symptoms,

Impact – Turns Case

Impact- Mass Death

Impact- War and Colonialism

Alternative – Discursive Re-Framing/Resistance

Alternative- Micro Resistance

Alternative- Ecological Revolution

Alternative- Eco- Resistance

Ecological resistance challenges corporate-economic representations and powers of activity

Micro-resistances to dominant discourses of the environment can fracture hegemonic consent

AT Perm: “We Help People”

AT Perm: “We access the case”

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