Anthro-OOO KAff Answers

***Anthro K Answers

Alt Answers/Permutations

Alt Fails2ac
Alt doesnt solveand if it does its worse for non-humans
Tibor Machan 4 (Tibor, Distinguished Fellow and Prof. @ Leatherby Center for
Entrepreneurship & Business Ethics @ Chapman U., Putting Humans First: Why We
Are Natures Favorite, p. 11-13)
If animals in fact did have rights as
you and I understand the concept of rightsrights that entail and
mandate a hands-off policy toward other rights possessors most of the
creatures now lurking in lawns and jungles, at the very least all the
carnivores, would have to be brought up on murder charges. This is what all the animal
Now, one can dispute Hospers, but only by averting one's gaze from the facts.

rights champions fail to heed, including Ingrid Newkirk, radical leader of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who holds that it is

This is why they allow themselves such vile

thoughts as that "the world would be an infinitely better place without
humans in it at all."'4 If the scenario is absurd, it's so not because the
concept of animal rights has been unfairly reduced to absurdity but
because there is nowhere else to go. The idea of animal rights is
impracticable to begin with; any attempt to visualize the denizens of the
animal world benefiting from and respecting rights must collapse into
fantasy willy-nilly. The concept of rights emerged with the rise of human
civilization precisely because it is needed by and applicable to human
beings, given the specifically moral nature of human beings and their
ambition to live with each other in mutual harmony and to mutual benefit.
Rights have nothing to do with the lives of wolves and turtles because of
what animal rights champions themselves admit, namely, the amoral
nature of at least the bulk of the animal world.15 Advocates of animal rights in at least one way do
admit the vast gulf between animals and humans and that humans alone are equipped to deal with moral issues. When they address
us alone about these matterswhen they accept all the carnage that is
perpetrated by other living things, including what would be infanticide
and worse if human beings were to engage in itthey clearly imply that
human beings are indeed special. They imply, first and foremost, that
people are indeed the only living beings capable of understanding a moral
appeal. Only human beings can be implored to do right rather than wrong.
Other animals just don't have the capacity for this. And so the
environmentalists don't confront them with any moral arguments no
matter how politically incorrect the animals may be toward one another.
unacceptable for us to use animals in any way at all.13

Alt Fails1ar
Their framework is exclusionary and excludes the general
public
Beth Mendenhall April 2009 undergraduate student studying Philosophy and
Political Science at Kansas State University She is also a co-president of her
universitys debate team. The Environmental Crises: Why We Need
Anthropocentrism
http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2009_spring/5Menderhall.pdf
The weakly anthropocentric view avoids the difficulties of justifying an
environmental ethic from either end of the spectrum. On one hand, it avoids
controversy over the existence of intrinsic value in non-human organisms, objects,
and ecological systems. This is one important characteristic of a nonanthropocentric
ethic like Deep Ecology finding intrinsic value in all living things.3 By intrinsic
value, I mean value that exists independent of any observer to give it value. For
example, a nonanthropocentric ethicist would see value in an animal that no human
could ever benefit from or even know about, simply because of what it is. While
possibly justifiable, an ethic that treats all living things and possibly even ecological
systems as intrinsically valuable may seem very radical to a large portion of the
public. It seems that even the philosophical community remains divided on the
issue. On the other hand, our ethic avoids making felt human desire the loci of all
value by showing how considered human values can explain the value in our
environment. In other words, what humans value, either directly or indirectly,
generates value in the environment. In this way, we avoid unchecked felt
preferences that would not be able to explain why excessive human consumption is
wrong. Avoiding these controversial stances will contribute substantially to the first
advantage of a weakly anthropocentric environmental ethic: public appeal. The
importance of public appeal to an environmental ethic cannot be overstated. We are
running out of time to slow or reverse the effects of past environmental
degradation, and we will need the support of society to combat them effectively.
Hence, the most important advantage of a weakly anthropocentric ethic over a
nonanthropocentric one is public appeal because many people feel that
nonanthropocentrism is just too radical and contrary to common sense. For many,
all value does come from humans, since they believe we are the only species
capable of rational thought. Opinions about the environment are certainly changing,
but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that most reasons given for increasing
environmental protection all reduce to anthropocentrism. For example, the 2004
book The Meat You Eat, by Ken Midkiff, explains why factory farming should be
rejected, with a focus on its detrimental effects to human health. The vegan and
vegetarian movements have increasingly focused on this angle of the factory
farming debate, perhaps because of the broader appeal of human-focused
motivations. As Midkiff says, It is simply impossible to raise animals in
concentrated operations and to slaughter these animals by the thousands without
severe health consequences among humans. By treating these animals as units of
production, the industrial methods, ultimately and inevitably, produce meats that
are unfit to eat.4 Even if this justification for ending factory farming is not one

defended by deep ecologists, isnt actual change more important? Common

justifications for species protection include parents wanting their children to know
what an elephant, or a leopard, or a panda look like, how the beauty of animals
increases human satisfaction in much the same way that an art gallery would, or
the genetic information they can provide which might cure human diseases. In fact,
almost every justification printed or aired in major news media reflects a
anthropocentric bias. For example, an April 2008 article from the BBC, entitled
Species Loss Bad for Our Health, surveys a wide range of threatened species
whose biology could hold secrets to possible treatments for a growing variety of
ailments.5 President-elect Barack Obama has consistently spoken about global
warming in terms of its impact on future human generations. In a 2007 speech at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he stressed the urgency of the issue by saying that
the polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted this is
not the future I want for my daughters.6 As for the last premise, most people agree
that human consciousness is intrinsically valuable. That is the reason why this value
needs little explanation. Even if this justification isnt perfect, I believe that the
ecological ends justify the philosophical means.

Alt fails to appeal to the public- only an anthropocentric view

can spur action
Beth Mendenhall April 2009 undergraduate student studying Philosophy and
Political Science at Kansas State University She is also a co-president of her
universitys debate team. The Environmental Crises: Why We Need
Anthropocentrism
http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2009_spring/5Menderhall.pdf
For a system of ethics to be successful, it must be both internally consistent and
widely acceptable. There is danger in getting so caught up in the first requirement
that we find ourselves defending views that most human beings would be unwilling
to accept such positions are doomed to be ignored by most outside the
philosophical community. Environmental ethics, which seek to explain the ethical
relationship between humans and the environment, are no exception. The main
point of contention among environmental ethicists revolves around the question of
anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism is the evaluation of reality exclusively in terms
of human interests and values. As a way of viewing the world, anthropocentrism has
a profound impact on our decision-making calculus. I believe that an
anthropocentric environmental ethic can be both internally consistent, and widely
accepted, by confirming the intuitions of environmentalists who seek to challenge
human destruction of the natural world. In that way, our environmental ethic can
effect more change in the way humans treat the environment, and be defensible to
a critical audience. The decision to adopt an anthropocentric environmental ethic is
one that is both pragmatic and ethical. Its practical appeal stems from its attraction
to a wide audience, while its ethical appeal is generated by its concern for those
animals, humans, and ecosystems suffering from the environmental crises.

Perm 2AC
Dont default to offense/defense a risk of the link does not
mean the 1AC forecloses a shift in species consciousness
Zimmerman, 91 (Michael E., Heideggerean Scholar Tulane Univ. Deep Ecology,
Ecoactivism, and Human Evolution published in ReVision Winter 1991 13.3. PDF
accessed July 6, 2008 p. 123-127).
Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess affirm the uniqueness of humankind and its
potential for contributing to the Self-realization of all beings. Naess (1984) discusses
humanity's potentialities for evolving into a species whose unique capacity involves
appreciating the wonder of creation: It may sound paradoxical, but with a more lofty
image of maturity in humans, the appeal to serve deep, specifically human interests
is in full harmony with the norms of deep ecology. But this is evident only if we are
careful to make our terminology clear. This terminology is today far from common,
but it may have an illuminating impact. It proclaims that essentially there is at
present a sorry underestimation of the potentialities of the human species. Our
species is not destined to be the scourge [or cancerM.E.Z.] of the earth. If it is
bound to be anything, perhaps it is to be the conscious joyful appre ciator of this
planet as an even greater whole of its immense richness. This may be its
"evolutionary potential" or an ineradicable part of it. (p. 8) Insofar as Naess speaks
of the "evolutionary potential" of humanity to become appreciators of the planet, he
has something in common with the evolutionary views of Murray Bookchin.
Bookchin (1990) argues even more emphatically (than Naess) that humanity's
evolutionary potential includes the capacity for intervening in natural
processes, even to the point of shaping aspects of evolution on Earth. Clearly,
there is room for negotiation and compromise in the hitherto somewhat
unsavory debate between deep ecologists and social ecologists in that both hold to
some version of a "progressive" and "evolutionary" view of humankind. Deep
ecologists cannot reasonably hope for a move toward nondualistic, nonanthropocentric attitudes without simultaneously affirming the notion that humankind
has the capacity for evolution to a more mature stage of con sciousness. Social
ecologists are quite right in pointing out the dangers involved in rejecting out of
hand the whole of modernity, especially its emancipatory political dimensions.

PermRoot Cause 2AC

Perm do both, but reject the negatives root cause framing
it misrepresents the intersectionality of oppression and causes
ideological backlash only the perm can successfully subvert
dominant structures
Hayward 97 Dept of Politics, University of Edinburgh (Tim, Feb.,
Anthropocentrism: A Misunderstood Problem, Environmental Values, Vol. 6, No. 1,
pp. 49-63, JSTOR)
Taking this line of argument a step further it becomes evident that antianthropocentric rhetoric is not only unhelpful, but positively counterproductive.
It is not only conceptually mistaken, but also a practical and strategic mistake, to
criticise humanity in general for practices of specific groups of humans. If the point
of anti-anthropocentric rhetoric is to highlight problems, to make them vivid in order
to get action, then misrepresenting the problem is liable to make solutions all the
harder. Something particularly to emphasise is that when radical critics of
anthropocentrism see themselves as opposed to defenders of human interests they
are seriously in error. From what has just been said about the specificity of
environmental, ecological or animal harms merely being disguised by putting the
blame on humans in general, it should be evident that those who are concerned
about such harms in fact make common cause with those concerned with
issues of social justice. The real opponents of both sorts of concern are the
ideologists who, in defending harmful practices in the name of 'humans in
general', obscure the real causes of the harms as much as the real incidence of
benefits: the harms seldom affect all and only nonhumans; the benefits seldom
accrue to all humans.5 Yet by appearing to accept the ideolo- gists' own premises,
anti-anthropocentric rhetoric plays right into their hands: by appearing to endorse
the ideological view that 'humans in general' benefit from the exploitative activities
of some, the anti-anthropocentrists are left vulnerable to ideological rejoinders
to the effect that challenging those activities is merely misanthropic. The
opposite is in fact nearer the truth, I believe, because it will more often be the case
that challenging such practices is in the interests of humans more generally.

Impact turnsSerious

Alt = Genocide
Our impact turns change how you evaluate offense/defense
their risk of a link argument is genocidal logic humans
should maintain their prejudice in favor of humans
Linker, 5 Damon, Animal Rights: Contemporary Issues (Compilation),
Thompson-Gale, p. 25-26 //BR
in virtually all of human history, only in liberal democracies-societies
founded on the recognition of the innate dignity of all members of the human racehave animals enjoyed certain minimum protections, codified in our own country in the Animal
Welfare Act. It is a no less curious fact that these same liberal democracies have
become infected over the past decades with a corrosive self-doubt, giving rise in some
educated circles to antiliberal, antiwhite, antimale, anti-Western, and now, with perfect
logic, antihuman enthusiasms. The proponents of these various but linked ideologies
march under a banner of justice and the promise of extending the blessings
of equality to one or more excluded others. Such piety is to be expected in a radical
movement seeking well-meaning allies; but it need not deflect us from the main
It is a curious fact that

focus of their aggressive passions, which the euthanasia-endorsing Peter Singer, for one, has at least

were the misanthropic agenda of the

animal-rights movement actually to succeed, the result would be an increase in
man's inhumanity, to man and animal alike? In the end, fostering our age-old
prejudice" in favor of human dignity may be the best thing we can do for animals,
not to mention for ourselves. <25-26>
had the candor to admit to. Can anyone really doubt that,

Abandonment of humanist values leaves us unable to act to

stop atrocities and threatens the survival of the universe.
Violet B Ketels 96 (Associate Professor of English at Temple University, Havel to
the Castle! The Power of the Word, 548 Annals 45, November, Sage)
The political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate
the deconstructing of humanist values. The process begins with the
cynical manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying
murderousness before which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent
"attentism"a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight as a
pacifier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child. We have let lapse our pledge
to the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust that their deaths might somehow be transfiguring for humankind.
We allow "slaughterhouse men" tactical status at U.N. tables and "cast down our eyes when the depraved roar
past."1 Peacemakers, delegated by us and circumscribed by our fears, temporize with thugs who have revived
lebensraum claims more boldly than Hitler did. In

the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea

was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were given,
repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded
into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us
to rescue. We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We
could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not
enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims perished in the cold

blankness of inhumane silence.We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in

Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the
disastrous course of history. We were heedless of the lesson of his
experience that only the unbending strength of the human spirit, fully
taking its stand on the shifting frontier of encroaching violence and
declaring "not one step further," though death may be the end of itonly
this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the
individual, of genuine peace for mankind at large.2In past human crises,
writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive
the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from
forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem more
devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the
moral dimensions of human experience."Heirs of the ancient possessions of higher knowledge
and literacy skills,"3 we seem to have lost our nerve, and not only because of Holocaust history
and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard
science. We are intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis
and content,"* monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim
proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no
disinterested knowledge.5Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the
humanist soul,"6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited Paul
de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revolutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts."7
Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of
ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.Words

collide and crack under these

new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of
what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly
dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong here
and now.The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our
subjectivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops
up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face.8Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and
statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives.
Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed
the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.Especially denying, which, in the
case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our
sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in
words; something in words must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly
disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety?Not only before but also since 1945,
the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately
reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet. The cancer that has
eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [hasj Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land.
The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvokc as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated
by Turks in 1389!9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, demands the bloody
revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic,
the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battleby widening the Kosovo
charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo.... Kosovo is the
Serbian-ized history of the Floodthe Serbian New Testament."10A cover of Siiddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was
printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eerily perverse afterbirth of violence
revisited."We

stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more

than a decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global
crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in "system, ideology
and appa-rat," pathological suspicions about human motives and
meanings, the loosening of individual responsibility , the swiftness by
which disastrous events follow one upon another " have deprived us of our
conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our

actual humanity."12 Nothing less than the transformation of human

consciousness is likely to rescue us.

Anthro k2 Solve Extinction

Species egalitarianism causes mass die-off
Timothy Luke, 97. Poly Sci, Virginia Polytechnic, Ecocritique, pg 26-27.
Deep ecologys acceptance of otherness in nonhuman life and inanimate entities in
the ecosphere is an important contribution. Deep ecologists identify a new
normative ethic of personal responsibility in caring for Nature that has basic merit.
Yet, as political philosophy, deep ecology has failed thus far to demonstrate how it
can be implemented anywhere today. Like many revolutionary programs, deep
ecology lacks a theory of the transition. There are no practicable means for
changing the everyday life of everyone in the stage of advanced industrialism into
an ecotopian community without tremendous costs. Many would agree with Snyder
that we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds. Nothing
short of total transformation will do much good.76 But, how does the United States
with 250 million people, living because of the imports and exports of transnational
corporate capitalism in and out of huge metroplexes, reinhabit its bioregions such
that the human population lives harmoniously and dynamically by employing a
sophisticated and unobtrusive technology in a world environment which is left
nature? Current world urbanism assumes an obtrusive technology that renders the
organic into the inorganic. What happens to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York? Where
do these millions go and what will they do? If their corporate agricultural or
municipal service supports are cut simply to return the L.A. Basin, Lake Michigans
South Shores, and Manhattan to Nature, then Nature does know best how to
copethese immense human populations will suffer and/or die. Deep
ecological justice is postdistributional. It defines away distribution systems with
human norms of fairness or equality as the apparatus of corrupt technoindustrial
society. By calling for biospherical egalitarianism , deep ecology extends the right of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as the freedom of self-realization) to
nonhuman life and inanimate entities so that humans, for the first time, can truly
enjoy their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in emancipated Nature.
Justice is made into an attribute of all-selves-in-Self working toward their peculiar
self-realization. Therefore, humans must alter their hitherto anthropocentric modes
of existence, out of the new sense of fairness to otherness and other humans
growing from ecosophical consciousness, to promote this new biocentric justice.

Anthro k2 Environment
Human-centeredness is key to environmental sustainability
David Schmidtz, 2k. Philosophy, University of Arizona, Environmental Ethics, p.
379-408
Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about equilibria and
perturbations that keep systems from converging on equilibria. Like economic
reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about competition and unintended
consequences, and the internal logic of systems, a logic that dictates how a system
responds to attempts to manipulate it. Environmental activism and regulation do
not automatically improve the environment. It is a truism in ecology, as in
economics, that well-intentioned interventions do not necessarily translate into
good results. Ecology (human and nonhuman) is complicated, our knowledge is
limited, and environmentalists are themselves only human. Intervention that works
with the systems logic rather than against it can have good consequences. Even in
a centrally planned economy, the shape taken by the economy mainly is a function
not of the central plan but of how people respond to it, and people respond to
central plans in ways that best serve their purposes, not the central planners.
Therefore, even a dictator is in no position simply to decide how things are going to
go. Ecologists understand that this same point applies in their own discipline. They
understand that an ecologys internal logic limits the directions in which it can be
taken by would-be ecological engineers. Within environmental philosophy, most of
us have come around to something like Aldo Leopolds view of humans as plain
citizens of the biotic community.[21] As Bryan Norton notes, the contrast between
anthropocentrism and biocentrism obscures the fact that we increasingly need to be
nature-centered to be properly human-centered; we need to focus on "saving the
ecological systems that are the context of human cultural and economic activities."
[22] If we do not tend to what is good for nature, we will not be tending to what is
good for people either. As Gary Varner recently put it, on purely anthropocentric
grounds we have reason to think biocentrically. [23] I completely agree. What I wish
to add is that the converse is also true: on purely biocentric grounds, we have
reason to think anthropocentrically. We need to be human-centered to be
properly nature-centered, for if we do not tend to what is good for people, we will
not be tending to what is good for nature either. From a biocentric perspective,
preservationists sometimes are not anthropocentric enough. They
sometimes advocate policies and regulations with no concern for values and
priorities that differ from their own. Even from a purely biocentric perspective, such
slights are illegitimate. Policy makers who ignore human values and human
priorities that differ from their own will, in effect, be committed to mismanaging the
ecology of which those ignored values and priorities are an integral part.

Eating Animals Good

The alternative leads to more animal death eating animals is
the most ethical thing to do
Pollan, 6 Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. An Animals Place,
11-10, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9500efd7153ef933a25752c1a9649c8b63&pagewanted=6. //BR
The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests''
with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that
shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows,
and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky . Steve Davis, an animal scientist at
Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly
vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually
increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops . Davis contends that if our goal is to
kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal
that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It
would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. When I talked to Joel Salatin
about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their
food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the
same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated
an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the
only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform

The vegetarian utopia

would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized
national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it
already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer , since food would need to travel farther and
grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.

it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable

agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production .
manure would be in short supply. Indeed,

If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than , say, the internal consistency
of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may
sometimes be the most ethical thing to do. There is, too, the fact that we humans have been
eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet
doing so is part of our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our digestion.
Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the
human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first
flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice

animal rights
doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands
that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way . Whether or not this is a good idea, we
of part of our identity -- our own animality. Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of

should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.''
We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it
is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

Management Good
Human management ensures long-term species survival
predation by other animals is more vicious than predation by
humans
Pollan, 6 Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. An Animals Place,
11-10, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9500efd7153ef933a25752c1a9649c8b63&pagewanted=6.
From the animals' point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great
success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived , while
their wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor does their
loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather
than ''ends,'' yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a ''means.''

Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin's caged
chickens that ''the life of freedom is to be preferred'' betrays an ignorance about
chicken preferences -- which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their
heads bitten off by weasels. But haven't these chickens simply traded one predator
for another -- weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a
bad deal. For brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably
briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear
will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. ''As a rule,'' he explained, ''animals don't get 'good deaths'

The very existence of predation -- animals eating animals -is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in animal rights circles . ''It must be
surrounded by their loved ones.''

admitted,'' Singer writes, ''that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal
Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.'' Some animal rightists train their dogs and cats to
become vegetarians. (Note: cats will require nutritional supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully calls predation

A deep Puritan
streak pervades animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our
animality, but with the animals' animality too . However it may appear to us, predation is not a
''the intrinsic evil in nature's design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom.'' Really?

matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the
herd depends on him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve. In

Chickens also depend for

their continued well-being on their human predators -- not individual chickens, but
chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would
be to grant chickens a ''right to life.''
many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological role.

Impact TurnsLol

Aliens
The rules of anthropocentrism would be justifiably applicable
to extra-terrestrial life
Huebert and Block 7 (J.H. and Walter , 2007, J.D. - University of Chicago and
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Econmics - College of Business
Administration - Loyola University, "Space Environmentalism, Property Rights, and
the Law" 37 U. Mem. L. Rev. 281, Winter, ln
Some observers, such as Roberts, believe that bodies "with the potential for
harboring biotic or prebiotic activity" present a special case for which different rules
must apply. Roberts states that where life exists or even potentially exists, we must
apply the "precautionary principle," which would place the burdenof proof on those
engaged in a "challenged activity" and prohibit development that
threatensevidence of past life or the existence of present or "potential" life. n96We
disagree.First, we note that there is no evidence that life exists or has ever existed
anywhere in the solar System except Earth. n97Further, there is a strong consensus
that to the extent that life might exist or have ever existed elsewhere, such as on
Mars or Europa, it is limited to extremely simple microscopic organisms. n98The
likelihood of sentient or even plant life existing elsewhere in the solar System
appears to be zero, and the question of life on planets outside the solar System is
very hypothetical, even for an article on space law. n99Therefore, a presumption
against the existence of actual life where no evidence to the contrary exists seems
proper.Further, space environmentalists have failed to make the case that
environmental regulations are necessary to protect whatever extraterrestrial life (or
evidence thereof) may exist. Humans are fascinated by the prospect of the
existence of any kind of extraterrestrial life. Anyone who bothers to go to space for
any purpose is likely to be interested in checking for signs of past or present life on
his property (or prospective property) before acting in a way that might destroy it.
For the intellectually uncurious, there would still be financial incentives. For
example, scientific or environmental organizations could offer prize money for
discovery of evidence[*303]of extraterrestrial life; a property owner who discovers
evidence of life could sell scientists, journalists, and others rights to access, study,
and publicize information about the discovery. Only governmental intervention (e.g.,
stripping individuals of property rights when something of scientific interest is found
on their property) is likely to cause incentives to run in any other direction.
n100
Suppose there were the proverbial "little green creatures" discovered on Mars or
on any other planet humans colonized. What rights would they have? What
obligations would we have to respect these rights? If they were smarter/stronger
than we, the shoe of course would be on the other foot. There are several options. If
they had the intelligence/ability of dogs or cats, then we would treat them as we
now do those animals. But suppose they were an intermediate between us and the
smartest of earth animals (chimps, porpoises), or had human qualities but looked
like a cross between an octopus and a giraffe. According to Rothbard, n101if they
could communicate with us, promise to respect our personal and property rights,
and adhere to such undertakings, then and only then would we be obligated to treat
them as we do each other (well, better, hopefully).

Embracing aliens leads to extinction

Leake, Writer for the Sunday Times, 10
[Jonathon, The Sunday Times, Dont talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking
4/25/10 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece
,accessed 6/21/11,HK]
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at leastaccording to
Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to
exist but thatinstead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that
can to avoid any contact.The suggestions come in a new documentary series in
which Hawking, one of the worlds leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking
on some of the universes greatest mysteries. Alien life, he will suggest, is almost
certain to exist in many other parts of the universe:not just in planets, but perhaps
in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space. Hawkings logic on
aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion
galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is
unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved. To my mathematical brain,
the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational, he said. The real
challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like. The answer, he
suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals
the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history. One scene in his
documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores
browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like
predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals
in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of
Jupiter. Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious
point: thata few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat . Hawking believes
thatcontact with such a species could be devastating for humanity . He suggests
thataliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: We only
have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something
we wouldnt want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used
up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps
become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can
reach. He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is a little too
risky. He said: If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when
Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didnt turn out very well for the
Native Americans.The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for
Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited
powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years,
during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the
filming. John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: He wanted to make
a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and
thats a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.Hawking has
suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a
series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than
450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common

phenomenon. So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but
only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect
Earth-sized bodies at such distances. Another breakthrough is the discovery that
life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can
survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.
Hawkings belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent
Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too,
suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.
Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that
aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding. I suspect there could be
life and intelligence out there in forms we cant conceive, he said. Just as a
chimpanzee cant understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of
reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.

Indigenous Peoples
Turnindigenous peoples
Eliminating divisions between human and animal causes the
conscious destruction of indigenous cultures.
Staudenmaier 4
(Peter, Ambiguities of Animal Rights, Institute for Social Ecology, http://www.socialecology.org/article.php?story=20040611140817458)
The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights thinking
carry political implications that are unavoidably elitist. A consistent animal rights
stance, after all, would require many aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable
livelihoods and lifeways completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to
communities like the Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological niche is predicated on hunting animals. An
animal rights viewpoint can only look down disdainfully on those peasant societies
in Latin America and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an
integral part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely centrally upon animals to
maintain traditional subsistence economies that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism. These are
not matters of taste but of sustainability and survival. Forsaking such practices
makes no ecological or social sense, and would be tantamount to eliminating these distinctive
societies themselves, all for the sake of assimilation to standards of morality and
nutrition propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of their own rectitude .
Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is essentially a European-derived construct, and
neglect the practical repercussions of universalizing it into an unqualified principle of human moral conduct as
such.13 Nowhere is this combination of parochialism and condescension more apparent than in the animus against
hunting. Many animal rights enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal and senseless
activity undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression
of speciesist prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as sport hunting often provides a significant seasonal

Even indigenous
communities engaged in conspicuously low-impact traditional hunting have been
harassed and vilified by animal rights activists. The campaign against seal hunting in the
supplement to the diets of rural populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan.

1980s, for example, prominently targeted Inuit practices.14 In the late 1990s, the Makah people of Neah Bay in
the northwestern United States tried to re-establish their communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray whale

The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence purposes, and

fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is not endangered and went
to considerable lengths to accommodate anti-whaling sentiment . Nevertheless, when the
in 1999.

Makah attempted to embark on their first expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd
Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay for several months. For these groups,

Many of these animal advocates embellished

their pro-whale rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and
allied themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and
dispossession.15 Such examples are far from rare. In fact, animal rights sentiment has
frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left movements .
Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to think clearly and critically
about nature, about biological politics, and about ethical complexity, this unsettling
animal rights took precedence over human rights.

affinity between animal rights and rightwing politics an affinity which has a lengthy historical
pedigree remains a serious concern.

That risks extinction.

Stavenhagen 90 (Rodolfo, Professor @ the United Nations University, The Ethnic Question pg.
73

The struggle for the preservation of the collective identity of culturally distinct
peoples has further implications as well. The cultural diversity of the worlds peoples
is a universal resource for all humankind. The diversity of the worlds cultural pool is
like the diversity of the worlds biological gene pool. A culture that disappears due
to ethnocide or cultural genocide represents a loss for all humankind. At a time
when the classic development models of the post war era have failed to solve the
major problems of mankind, people are again looking at so called traditional
cultures for at least some of the answers. This is very clear, for example, as regards
to agricultural and food production, traditional medicine,environmental
management in rural areas, construction techniques, social solidarity in times of
crises, etc. The worlds diverse cultures have much to offer our imperiled planet.
Thus the defense of the collective rights of ethnic groups and indigenous peoples
cannot be separated from the collective human rights of all human beings.

Biotech
Turnbiotech
Rejecting anthropocentrism collapses biotechnologyprevents
GMO crops
Smith 8 (Wesley, The Silent Scream of the Asparagus: Get ready for 'plant
rights.' http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2010625/posts?page=101)

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world

view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving
us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we
would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights. The intellectual elites were
the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious
discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are
human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to
individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable. Rising to the task, leading
bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient
cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn,
and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists
believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to
the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly
brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs. The
animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights
ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus,
since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what
is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being.
Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal
husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book
specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road
to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse." Eschewing humans as the pinnacle
of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused
environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward
resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness
to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep
ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth,"
requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to
under a billion. As for "plant rights," if the Swiss model spreads, it may hobble
biotechnology and experimentation to improve crop yields. As an editorial in Nature
News put it: The [Swiss] committee has come up with few concrete examples of
what type of experiment might be considered an unacceptable insult to plant
dignity. Thecommittee does not consider that genetic engineering of plants
automatically falls into this category, but its majority view holds that it would if the
genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by
interfering with their capacity to reproduce.

Biogenetic Crops save billions

Reason 2K (Ronald Bailey, Interview with Norman Borlaug: Noble Peace Price Winner and Professor at
Texas A & M University, Billions Served, Aprilhttp://www.reason.com/news/show/27665.html)

food is more abundant

and cheaper today than ever before in history, due in large part to the work of
Borlaug and his colleagues. More than 30 years ago, Borlaug wrote, "One of the greatest threats to
Despite occasional local famines caused by armed conflicts or political mischief,

mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy." As
REASON's interview with him shows, he still believes that environmental activists and their allies in international

he is confident that
agricultural research, including biotechnology, will be able to boost crop production
to meet the demand for food in a world of 8 billion or so, the projected population in
2025. Meanwhile, media darlings like Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown keep up their drumbeat of doom.
agencies are a threat to progress on global food security. Barring such interference,

In 1981 Brown declared, "The period of global food security is over." In 1994, he wrote, "The world's farmers can no
longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to our numbers." And as recently as 1997 he warned ,

"Food
scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding, much as
ideological conflict was the defining issue of the historical era that recently ended ."
Borlaug, by contrast, does not just wring his hands. He still works to get modern agricultural
technology into the hands of hungry farmers in the developing world. Today, he is a
consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico and president of the Sasakawa Africa Association,
a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. REASON Science
Correspondent Ronald Bailey met with Borlaug at Texas A&M, where he is Distinguished Professor in the Soil and
Crop Sciences Department and still teaches classes on occasion. Despite his achievements, Borlaug is a modest
man who works out of a small windowless office in the university's agricultural complex. A few weeks before the
interview, Texas A&M honored Borlaug by naming its new agricultural biotechnology center after him. " We

have
to have this new technology if we are to meet the growing food needs for the next
25 years," Borlaug declared at the dedication ceremony. If the naysayers do manage to stop
agricultural biotech, he fears, they may finally bring on the famines they have been
predicting for so long.

Space Col
Animal experimentation and exploitation is critical to NASA
zero-gravity birthing tests that are a pre-requisite to space
colonization.
Lakdawala 2K (Seema, BORN IN SPACE
3..2..1..BLASTOFF, http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/undergrad/SURE/Articles/2000_art_lakdawala.html)

Human kind has always had a need to explore, first the exploration of the new world and now as the majority
of the world has been explored and mapped, we have set our sights a bit higher. We now have a craving for the
outer limits; exploration of the solar systems of other galaxies isnt very far away. Along with
exploration comes colonization. As space exploration increases, the need for
colonization will come soon. We have already begun taking preliminary steps with
the NASA Space Station. Hopefully the Medaka fish birth and the research on zebra fish
will give us the key we need to understand how to make it possible for future
vertebrate animals to be born in space.

Belief in humanity is the vital internal link

Michael Zey, professor at the School of Business Administration at Montclair
University, executive director of the Expansionary Institute and internationally
recognized expert on the economy, society and management. Future Factor, 2004
p223-225
The formidable impediment that could conceivably prevent the species from achieving
its destiny, the barrier standing between humankind and its goals, is ourselves, or more to the point,
cultural and political influences that threaten to upend scientific progress and choke
humanitys advancement. Not everyone embraces the vision presented in this book regarding humankinds natural destiny. In fact, many vehemently and vigorously oppose any vision that posits
that mans destiny involves imposing his will and his consciousness on the world. As we enter the
twenty-first century, two major camps in this debate are engaged in a battle for the soul of the species. One side,
the expansionary, insists that humankind is destined to aggressively expand human potential and reconfigure the
universe. The other side wants to restrict humans activity within predefined parametersthey hope humankind will

This battle rages throughout many fields, in academia , in

The stakes in this war are
extremely highif the camp I label regressionary wins, I believe that our species will
cease progressing, will stagnate, and possibly will disappear. At the core of this philosophic and
learn to live in balance with nature.

the grade schools, in the media, and in the natural and social sciences.

political war is the debate over the very definition of humanness, and the place of humankind in the cosmic
hierarchy. By now you know where the expansionary philosophy places humans: humankind is at the epicenter of
cosmic activity, a uniquely gifted species endowed with a special destiny. The opponents of this vision are attacking
the idea of the centrality of humanity. They are attempting to define humanity downward, negatively comparing the
human species to other entities, including lower primates, smart machines, even supersapient aliens that
manifest intellectual and physical qualities that dwarf the capabilities of man. Our own dominant cosmology, the
Big Bang theory, conspires to undermine humankinds sense of importance. These ideas wafting through the culture

if we come to believe that humanity

is just another species, no better or worse than other beings (or machines) populating the
planet or the universe, we will deny ourselves the right to impose our will on other animals,
nature, the biosphere, or the universe. A corollary of this world view is the belief that humankind is a deeply
have real impacts in the political and cultural spheres. Obviously,

flawed species dangerous to the planet and the cosmos. Many use such suppositions as a justification, a guiding
principle, for political and social activities aimed at thwarting technological innovation and scientific research. Later

in the chapter we will examine how powerful forces will use legislative, regulatory, and other means to prevent the
introduction of such new technologies as genetic engineering, cloning, the use of nuclear power, and high-speed

If the human race is to fulfill its destiny to

vitalize the planets and beyond, and eventually create the Humaniverse, its members
must possess a strong belief in humanitys uniqueness and its special role in the
universe. They must envision humanity as a species of unlimited possibilities whose
potential is only beginning to be realized. Any ideology that undermines our belief in
our abilities, our potential, and ourselves becomes a roadblockon humanitys pathway to destiny. Unhappily,
transport. The Assault on the Idea of Humankinds Uniqueness

our educational and cultural institutions now provide the public a view of humanity that is less than complimentary.
These institutions promote whar I label equivalency, the idea that the human species is merely the intellectual
equal of a host of other entities. This notion of equivalency at one time equates us to other living species, at other
times claims that our smart machines such as robots or computers are our superiors. Last, some claim we ate the
inferiors to that which we cannot see, feel, or even prove. The belief in aliens, creatures from outer space, even the
legitimated search for them, has undermined much of our sense that we are the universe s intelligent agent. We
can only conclude from such a viewpoint that the human species possesses no unique abilities or rights relative to

a movement is afoot to establish an equivalency between the

human species and certain other species in the animal kingdom. An organized effort even
these other beings. Increasingly,

exists to have certain higher primates recategorized as sapient beings, according them legal rights that traditionally

is gradually and insidiously eroding the

distinction between humans and animals. <CONTINUES ON p230> The obfuscation of
the differences between (hum)man(s) and beast will have adecidedly negative impact
on human progress. Clearly, once the population is truly convinced that the human
being is not so much Homo sapiens but just another ape, a smart chimp, as it were, we will live
down to the expectations of our new status. Creativity and genius will simply not
emerge from individuals who have been convinced that they are the inte lecrual
equivalent of orangutans. One may argue that the Great Apes Proposal and other such movements only
have been delegated exclusively to humans. This movement

seek to raise apes to the level of humans, not lower humans to apes. My response is that the vast majority of the
public has a fairly good idea of what an ape actually is, how it lives, and what its limited capabilities are. They can
only surmise that by equating apes to men and women we are defining humanity downward! Establishing in the
legal system and the culture itself the idea that apes are our equals will wreak havoc with human progress and our
ability to reach our destiny. Why would we desire to establish a Humaniverse and imbue the cosmos with human
consciousness and intelligence, if we doubt the innate uniqueness and the superiority of humans? If we have any
hope of winning the battle for the future, the educational system and the media must communicate to the public
the scientific case for human uniqueness and superiority.

Colonization solves inevitable extinction.

Matheny 7
(Jason, PhD Student in School of Public Health @ Johns Hopkins, Risk Analysis: An International Journal, Reducing
the Risk of Human Extinction, 27:5, Wiley InterScience)
As for astronomical risks,

to escape our sun's death, humanity will eventually need to

relocate. If we survive the next century, we are likely to build self-sufficient colonies
in space. We would be motivated by self-interest to do so, as asteroids, moons, and planets have valuable
resources to mine, and the technological requirements for colonization are not beyond
imagination (Kargel, 1994; Lewis, 1996). Colonizing space sooner, rather than later, could
reduce extinction risk (Gott, 1999; Hartmann, 1984; Leslie, 1999), as a species' survivability is closely
related to the extent of its range (Hecht, 2006). Citing, in particular, the threat of new biological
weapons, Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the
next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents
that can befall life on a single planet" (Highfield, 2001). Similarly, NASA Administrator, Michael
Griffin (2006), recently remarked: "The history of life on Earth is the history of

extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end,
fundamentally about the survival of the species."

Space solves warming.

Deepak Purang, writes editorials for Streedirectory.com, 2009, Space Sunshade
May One Day Reduce Global Warming
http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/14921/gadgets/space_sunshade_may_o
ne_day_reduce_global_warming.html
Scientists have come up with new strategies to tackle the problem. Now a scientist has suggested
an ambitious idea to contain global warming. Put sunshades in space . Thats right. University
of Arizona astronomer RogerAngel suggests putting sunshades in space and has detailed his idea in a
paper Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near L1" in the Proceedings of the National

suggestslaunching a constellation of trillions of small free-flying

spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit. This spacecraft
would form a long, cylindrical cloud and would have a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10
Academy of Sciences. He

times longer. It is suggested that about 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the

This would
result in uniformly reduced sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet and
would balance the heating of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere . The use of space
shade was first mooted by James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1989. " The earlier
ideas were for bigger, heavier structures that would have needed manufacture and
launch from the moon, which is pretty futuristic," Angel said. "I wanted to make the sunshade
from small 'flyers,' small, light and extremely thin spacecraft that could be completely assembled and
cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet.

launched from Earth, in stacks of a million at a time. When they reached L1, they would be dealt off the stack into a
cloud. There's nothing to assemble in space ." Angel proposes to design lightweight flyers made of
transparent film pierced with small holes and would be two feet in diameter, 1/5000 of an inch thick and weigh
about a gram, the same as a large butterfly. He suggests using MEMS" technology mirrors as tiny sails that tilt to
hold the flyers position in the orbiting constellation. The weight of all flyers would be 20 millions tons. But
conventional rocket launch system at $10,000 a pound would be too prohibitive. His alternative would cost only
around $20 a pound. He suggests deploying a total 20 electromagnetic launchers launching a stack of flyers every
5 minutes for 10 years. The electromagnetic launchers would use hydroelectric power but even if it uses coalgenerated electricity, each ton of carbon used would reduce the effect of 1000 tons of atmospheric carbon. Once
propelled beyond Earths atmosphere the flyer stacks would be steered to L-1 orbit by solar-powered ion propulsion,
pioneered by European Space Agency's SMART-1 moon orbiter and NASA's Deep Space 1 probe. " The

concept
builds on existing technologies," Angel said. "It seems feasible that it could be developed and
deployed in about 25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars. With care, the solar shade should last about
50 years. So the average cost is about $100 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the global
domestic product." He added, "The sunshade is no substitute for developing renewable energy, the only permanent
solution. A similar massive level of technological innovation and financial investment could ensure that. "But

the planet gets into an abrupt climate crisis that can only be fixed by cooling, it
would be good to be ready with some shading solutions that have been worked out."

if

Climate change kills species and global biodiversity causing

extinction
Mike Swain, Science editor for The Mirror, a London based news publication. 7-172008, Shock at a decline in species Lexis
Almost a third of the world's wildlife has been lost in the last 35 years, a report has
revealed. Numbers of species on land, in the oceans and in rivers and lakes fell by
27 per cent between 1970 and 2005. Land animal numbers have fallen by 25 per
cent, marine species such as swordfish and hammerhead sharks by 28 per cent and
freshwater by 29 per cent according to the Living Planet Index - produced by the
WWF, the London Zoological Society and the Global Footprint Network. Report
author Jonathan Loh said the fall was "completely unprecedented" in human history,
adding: "You would have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a
decline as rapid as this." The main threats ar e pollution, habitat destruction, overexploitation, invasive species and climate change. Colin Butfield, Head of
Campaigns at WWF-UK, said: "Biodiversity underpins the health of the planet so it is
alarming that despite increased awareness we continue to see a downtrend."

Space solves scarcity just our solar system has infinite

resources
Marshall Savage, Founder of the Living Universe Foundation, 1994, The Millenial
Project, p. 292-293
Can our little solar system really support five billion billion people? The surprising
answer is yes, and easily at that. There are stores enough in the solar system to
support even very large populations for billions of years. In taking stock of the solar
system, lets restrict our inventory to a tally of the available water supplies. We
need a lot of different things, but water is the most fundamental of commodities.
Life is, after all, mostly water50 to 90%. By comparison, carbon, nitrogen, and all
other elements amount to only fractions of the mass of living tissue. Water has
many vital roles: it is a metabolite, a carrier, a diluter, a humidifier, a cleaner, and,
at least early in the next Millennium, a radiation shield. So lets make the broad
assumption that, if the solar system has enough water to support a large
population, it will have enough of everything else too. How much water does it take
to make five billion billion people? The average person contains around 40 liters
(10.5 gals.) of water.516 Five billion billion people would require 200 million cubic
kilometers of waterjust for their own bodies. To provide such a population with the
water needed for culturing algae, growing plants, cooling habitats, shielding from
radiation, and other purposes, may require hundreds of times as much. For stock
taking purposes, lets assume that the average water allotment will be the same
throughout Solaria as that required in Asgard60 tons per capita.517 This would
raise the total water demand to 300 billion cubic kilometers. The oceans, glaciers,
rivers, and springs of the Earth hold 1,326 million cubic kilometers of water.518 If all
the waters on Earth were collected into one gigantic reservoir, the pool would be
1300 kilometers across and 1000 kilometers deep. This amount of water forms a
useful measure of one ocean mass. Total water demand by the end of the Third
Millennium could equal 226 ocean masses. Where can it all possibly come from? As

it happens, our solar system is richly endowed with this remarkable mineralthe
stuff of life.519 The oceans of Mother Earth justifiably impress us, but they contain
only a fraction of the water available in the solar system. The moons of Jupiter alone
contain many times as much water as there is on Earth. For example, Callisto, the
size of the Planet Mercury, is about half ice, and contains forty times as much water
as there is on Earth. Europa and Ganymede hold similar reservoirs. (See Plate No.
12.) Water can also be formed chemically from elemental hydrogen and oxygen,
which are both abundant. Finally, the Oort cloud holds another huge supply of water
and other useful materials.520 Not counting the Oort comets, the moons and other
small bodies of the solar system contain just about exactly 300 billion cubic
kilometers of water. It is an interesting coincidence that this is just the quantity the
human population will require by the year 4000 A.D. What is true of water is equally
true of all the other elements and compounds needed to support the Solarian
civilization. Jupiter alone weighs two and a half times as much as all the other
planets combined. Even a very large civilization could not exhaust this store house
in billions of years.

Transhumanism
Speciesism is key to Transhumanism
CALVERLY 6 (David; Center for the Study of Law, Science and Technology
Arizona State University, Android Science and Animal Rights, Does an Analogy
Exist? Connection Science, 18:4, December)
Even more fundamentally, there are concerns that arise at the earliest stages of
development of a machine consciousness. The endeavour itself is replete with moral
and ethical pitfalls. If the same logic as urged for animal rights, or for the rights of
foetuses, is applied to a machine consciousness, some of these issues could have
the potential to curtail radically the development of a conscious entity. If part of the
process of developing a machine consciousness is an emergent learning process
(Lindblom and Ziemke 2006), or even a process of creating various modules that
add attributes of consciousness such as sentience, nociception, or language, in a
cumulative fashion, some could argue that this is immoral. As posed by LaChat
(1986: 7576), the question becomes Is the AI experiment then immoral from its
inception, assuming, that is, that the end (telos) of the experiment is the production
of a person? . . . An AI experiment that aims at producing a self-reflexively conscious
and communicative person is prima facie immoral. Must designers of a machine
consciousness be aware that as they come closer to their goal, they may have to
consider such concerns in their experimentation? Arguably yes, if human
equivalence is the ultimate goal. Failure to treat a machine consciousness in a moral
way could be viewed as a form of speciesism (Ryder 1975). The utilitarian
philosopher J. J. C. Smart (1973: 67) has observed if it became possible to control
our evolution in such a way as to develop a superior species, then the difference
between species morality and a morality of all sentient beings would become much
more of a live issue.

Transhuman focus means we address existential risks those

outweigh
Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University, The Transhumanist FAQ- A
General Introduction, Version 2.1 (2003), google.
Yes, and this implies an urgent need to analyze the risks before they materialize and
to take steps to reduce them. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial
intelligence pose especially serious risks of accidents and abuse. [See also If these
technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned? What can be done to
reduce the risks? ] One can distinguish between, on the one hand, endurable or
limited hazards, such as car crashes, nuclear reactor meltdowns, carcinogenic
pollutants in the atmosphere, floods, volcano eruptions, and so forth, and, on the
other hand, existential risks events that would cause the extinction of intelligent
life or permanently and drastically cripple [halt] its potential. While endurable or
limited risks can be serious and may indeed be fatal to the people immediately
exposed they are recoverable; they do not destroy the long-term prospects of
humanity as a whole. Humanity has long experience with endurable risks and a

variety of institutional and technological mechanisms have been employed to

reduce their incidence. Existential risks are a different kind of beast . For most of
human history, there were no significant existential risks, or at least none that our
ancestors could do anything about. By definition, of course, no existential disaster
has yet happened. As a species we may therefore be less well prepared to
understand and manage this new kind of risk. Furthermore, the reduction of
existential risk is a global public good (everybody by necessity benefits from such
safety measures, whether or not they contribute to their development), creating a
potential free-rider problem, i.e. a lack of sufficient selfish incentives for people to
make sacrifices to reduce an existential risk. Transhumanists therefore recognize a
moral duty to promote efforts to reduce existential risks.

Misc/A2 Their Stuff

Inevitable
Anthro inevitable and good
Beth Mendenhall April 2009 undergraduate student studying Philosophy and
Political Science at Kansas State University She is also a co-president of her
universitys debate team. The Environmental Crises: Why We Need
Anthropocentrism
http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2009_spring/5Menderhall.pdf
As humans, it is probably impossible to escape a human-centered ethic to guide our
decision making. Our subjectivity means we can only experience the world from one
perspective, and this perspective colors everything we do. Our self preservation
instincts lead us to value ourselves above the rest of the world. What person would
reasonably kill themselves, or their children, friends, and neighbors, to save an
ecosystem? Or two ecosystems? Though some radical environmentalists have
chained themselves to trees and bulldozers, this is generally a statement to express
the direness of the environmental situation, instead of an actual bodily sacrifice.
Would the same environmentalist give their life to save two gorillas, or two
earthworms? We are all responsible for the world, but we are first and foremost
responsible for ourselves. More than that, our subjectivity means that one deep
ecologist will observe value in the world differently than the next. Even those who
subscribe to the idea that objective deliberations are possible, admit that we can
rarely access them.7 Believing we can have knowledge of intrinsic value that we
cannot access in any meaningful way would require the adoption of moral realism,
the idea that we can have knowledge of objective moral facts. The problem with this
view is the lack of a perceptual capacity that would enable us to know moral facts
the way we can see colors and hear music. Moral realism has been debated for
thousands of years, and endangered species, degrading environments, and the
human species do not have time to wait for philosophers to settle this esoteric
question. Even if it could be settled, broad appeal is another matter.

Anthropocentrism is inevitable humans still have to weigh it

as a value.
-

Intrinsic value is crafted to convince people to care about nature no way to

necessarily make it trump human needs
Not all human interests become subservient doesnt rule out the aff impacts
Ruling out anthropocentric goal generates an absurd and impossible position

Light, George Mason University Center for Global Ethics

director, 2002
[Andrew, Metaphilosophy, July 2002, Vol 33, No4, Contemporary Environmental
Ethics from Metaethics to Public Philosophy Wiley, p.438, accessed 7-10-12, TAP]

First, the, perhaps, externalism of this approach (or motivational rationalism),

entailed in the thought experiment that Katz and Oechsli propose whereby we first
assume the existence of a justified moral theory in order to test its veracity in a
policy setting, is both practically and theoretically unsound.10 How the mere
justification of a nonanthropocentric theory would motivate dismissal of competing
claims by humans for satisfaction of their needs is never made clear. Given that a
nonanthropocentric theory would not eliminate the rational concern of moral agents
about their own welfare, at the very least, some minimal model of moral psychology
should be required of such a theory to make the thought experiment plausible.
Human interests still exist even if a nonanthropocentric theory has been justified ,
and as with contemporary cases of moral dilemmas faced by agents even when
they recognize competing moral claims of other humans on them, we can easily
imagine that humans who had recognized the valid justification of
nonanthropocentric natural value would still feel the reasonable tug of competing
claims to protect human welfare and would conceivably decide contrary to the
nonanthropocentric calculus. Additionally, in theoretical terms, no reason is offered
here why the interests of nature recommending preservation of the rainforest
would necessarily trump the interests of humans for development. This is simply
assumed by Katz and Oechsli. After all, a nonanthropocentric theory does not
necessarily reduce all human interests to a subservient position in relation to
nature. Even if strong second-order principles were justified in this hypothesized
nonanthropocentric theory that provided reasons for resolving conflicts of value, the
application of those principles would not in this case ensure that natural welfare
would trump considerations of human welfare. Every nonanthropocentrist who has
taken seriously the question of conflicts of value in a nonanthropocentric approach
acknowledges that in many cases human interests will still trump nonhuman
interests where these interests directly come into conflict (see Eckersley 1998 for a
helpful discussion). If this were not true, nonanthropocentrism would quickly
degenerate into an absurd position (see Lynch and Wells 1998).

Link Turn Trick

It is better to accept the inevitability of human-centric value;
claims to transcend that system of value do more to reinforce
unstated premises of human value, making the challenging of
speciesist behavior more difficult
Hayward 97
[PhD, Department of Politics at Edinburgh University, Anthropocentrism: a
Misunderstood Problem, Environmental Values, p. asp//wyo-tjc]
The aim of overcoming anthropocentrism is intelligible if it is understood in terms of
improving knowledge about the place of humans in the world; and this includes
improving our knowledge about what constitutes the good of nonhuman beings.
This kind of knowledge is significantly added to by objectivating science. There may
also be a role for other kinds of knowledge for instance, kinds characterised by
empathetic imagining of how it might be like to be a member of another species
(Cassano,1989); but here one must always becautious about unwittingly projecting
human perceptions on to beings whose actual perceptions may be radically
different, since this would be to reintroducejust the sort of error that characterises
ontological anthropocentrism.The need for caution is all the clearer when it comes
to attempting to gain anon-anthropocentric perspective in ethics. Indeed, it may be
that anthropocentrism in ethics, when properly understood, is actually less
harmful than harbouring the aim of overcoming it. At any rate, a number of the
considerations advanced in this article would tend to suggest this view. I have
noted: that the ethical impulsewhich is expressed as the aim of overcoming
anthropocentrism is very imperfectlyexpressed in such terms; that there are some
things about anthropocentrism which are unavoidable, and others even to be
applauded; furthermore, the things which are to condemned are not appropriately
called anthropocentrism at all; that the mistaken rejection of anthropocentrism
misrepresents the fact that harms to nonhumans, as well as harm to some groups of
humans, are caused not by humanity in general but by specific humans with their
own vested interests. Forthese reasons, I suggest that discussions of environmental
values would be better conducted without reference to the equivocal notion of
anthropocentrism.

Their ethical strategy destroys ambiguity while polarizing

values towards the ecosystemthis dogmatic ethic not only
incorrect, but impedes the creation of coalitions which are
capable of creating a new ethicturns their arg by reinforcing
speciesism
Hayward 97
[PhD, Department of Politics at Edinburgh University, Anthropocentrism: a
Misunderstood Problem, Environmental Values, p. asp//wyo-tjc]

The argument so far would suggest that the aim of completely overcoming
anthropocentrism in ethics is at best of rhetorical value, since all it does is draw
attention to problems which are in fact better conceptualised in narrower and more
precise terms. I shall now argue, though, thateven as rhetoric the
criticalemployment of the term can be unhelpful, and evenpositively
counterproductive. Proposals for the rejection of anthropocentrism are unhelpful
because they cloud the real problem they think to address . The problem has to do
with a lackof concern with nonhumans but the term anthropocentrism can all too
plausiblybe understood as meaning an excessive concern with humans.4 The
latter,however, is not the problem at all.On the contrary, a cursory glance around
the world would confirm that humans show a lamentable lack of interest in the
wellbeing of other humans. Moreover, even when it is not other humans
whoseinterests are being harmed, but other species or the environment, it would
generally be implausible to suggest that those doing the harm are being
humancentred.To see this, one only has to consider some typical practices which
areappropriately criticised. Some examples would be: hunting a species to extinction; destroying a forest to build a road and
factories; animal experimentation. In the case of hunting a species to extinction, this is not helpfully or appropriately seen as anthropocentrism since it
typically involves one group of humans who are actually condemned by (probably a majority of) other humans who see the practice not as serving human
interests in general, but the interests of one quite narrowly-defined group, such as poachers or whalers. A similar point can be made regarding the
destruction of the forest for those who derive economic benefit from the destruction oppose not only the human interests of indigenous peoples whose

. The case of
animalexperimentation, however, brings to the fore a feature which looks as if it
couldmore plausibly be said to be anthropocentric: for if we suppose that the
benefitsof the experimentation are intended to accrue to any and all humans who
mightneed the medicine or techniqueexperimented, then there would seem to be a
clear case of humans benefiting as a species from the use and abuse of other
species. But the if is importanthere. A reason why I am inclined to resist calling this anthropocentrism isthat the
benefits may in fact not be intended or destinedfor humans generally, but only for
those who can afford to pay to keep the drugcompany in profit. As in the other two
cases, it is unhelpfulto cover over thisfundamental point and criticise humanity in
general for practices carried out bya limited number of humans when many others
may in fact oppose them. Thereis in any case no need to describe the practice as
anthropocentric when it is quiteclearly speciesist it is not the concern with human
welfare per se that is the problem here, but the arbitrary privileging of that welfare
over the welfare of members of other species. So a reason why critiques of
anthropocentrism areunhelpful is that the problems the term is used to highlight do
not arise out of aconcern of humans with humans, but from a lack of concern for
non-humans. I earlier explained why this lack of concern is not appropriately termed anthropocentrism; I now add the further consideration
thatpractices manifesting a lack of concern for nonhumans very often go hand in
hand with a lack of concern for other humans too. Taking this line of argument a
step further it becomes evident that anti-anthropocentric rhetoric is not only
unhelpful, but positively counterproductive .It is not only conceptually mistaken, but
also a practical and strategic mistake, to criticise humanity in general for practices
of specific groups of humans.If thepoint of anti-anthropocentric rhetoric is to
highlight problems, to make them vivid in order to get action, then misrepresenting
the problem is liable to makesolutions all the harder. Something particularly to
emphasise is that when radicalcritics of anthropocentrism see themselves as
opposed to defenders of humaninterests they are seriously in error. From what has just been said
environment is thereby destroyed, but also the interests of all humans who depend on the oxygen such forests produce

about the specificity of environmental, ecological or animal harms merely being disguised by putting the blame on humans in general, it should be evident

. The real
opponents of both sorts ofconcern are the ideologists who, in defending harmful
practices in the name of humans in general, obscure the real causes of the harms
as much as the realincidence of benefits: the harms seldom affect all and only nonhumans; the benefits seldom accrue
to all humans.5Yet by appearing to accept the ideologistsown premises, antianthropocentric rhetoric plays right into their hands: by appearing to endorse the
ideological view that humans in general benefit from the exploitative activities of
some, the anti-anthropocentrists are left vulnerable to ideological rejoinders to the
effect that challenging those activities is merely misanthropic. The opposite is in
fact nearer the truth, I believe, because it willmore often be the case that
challenging such practices is in the interests ofhumans more generally.
that those who are concerned about such harms in fact make common cause with those concerned with issues of social justice

Anti-anthropocentric rhetoric reinforces a more dominant

frame of human value because they reify ideological
opposition to respect for non-human life
Hayward 97
[PhD, Department of Politics at Edinburgh University, Anthropocentrism: a
Misunderstood Problem, Environmental Values, p. asp//wyo-tjc]
Anthropocentrism, widely used as a term of criticism in environmental ethicsand
politics, is something of a misnomer: for while anthropocentrism canintelligibly be
criticised as an ontological error, attempts to conceive of it as anethical error often
involve conceptual confusion. I point out that there is no needfor this confusion
because a more appropriate vocabulary to refer to the defectsthe ethical antianthropocentrists have in mind already exists. My argument isnot just about
semantics, though, but engages directly with the politics ofenvironmental concern:
blanket condemnations of anthropocentrism not only condemn some legitimate
human concerns, they also allow ideological retorts to the effect that criticisms of
anthropocentrism amount to misanthropy. My argument, therefore, is that a more
nuanced understanding of the problem of anthropocentrism allows not only a more
coherent conceptualisation of environmental ethics but also a more effective
politics. The article has five main sections. The first notes the paradox that the
clearest instances of overcoming anthropocentrism involve precisely the sort of
objectivating knowledge which many ecological critics see as itself archetypically
anthropocentric. The second section then notes some ways in which
anthropocentrism is not objectionable. In the third section, the defects associated
with anthropocentrism in ethics are then examined: I argue, though, that these are
better understood as instances of speciesism and human chauvinism. In order to
explain why it is unhelpful to call these defects anthropocentrism, I note in section
four that there is an ineliminable element of anthropocentrism in anyethic at all,
and in the fifth section that the defects do not typically involve aconcern with
human interests as such anyway. Because of this last point, I also argue, the
rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism is not only conceptually unsatisfactory, it is
counterproductive in practice.

Rejecting anthropocentric only reinforces a new hierarchy

that turns the k.
Lewis, George Washington University geography and regional
science professor, 1992
[Martin, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism http://books.google.com/books?
id=cMThEEHW2JYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, p.18, accessed 710-12, TAP]
In marked contrast, the decoupling perspective endorsed here seeks to separate
human activities from nature both in order to protect nature from humanity (for
natures sake) and to allow continued technological progress (for humanitys sake).
This entails acknowledging a profound division between humankind and the rest of
nature, a distinction that many greens allege is itself at the root of the ecological
crisis. Yet the radical environmentalists who condemn this example of dualistic
thinking merely substitute for it their own parallel gulf, one separating modern(or
technologically oriented) human beings from nature. This in turn entails positing a
radical discontinuity in human development, a dualism of human nature separating
moderns from primals(or primitives). As I shall argue at length in this works
conclusion, such a division of humankind is, in the end, both bigoted and empirically
unsupportable. We would be better of admitting that while humankind is indeed of
nature, instrinsically creative human nature is a phenomenon not found in natures
other creations. In a Promethean environmental future, humans would accentuate
the gulf that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world precisely in order to
preserve and enjoy nature at a somewhat distant remove. Our alternative is to
continue to struggle within nature, and in so doing to distort its forms by our
inescapably unnatural presence.

Humans > Animals

Obviously animals shouldnt be degraded, but humans are
ethically superior
Linker, 5 Damon, Animal Rights: Contemporary Issues (Compilation),
Thompson-Gale, p. 23-25 //BR
That such arguments have found an audience at this particular cultural moment is
not so hard to explain. Our popular and elite media are saturated with scientific and
quasi-scientific reports claiming to prove the basic thesis of the animal-rights
movement. Having once believed ourselves to be made in the image of God, we
now learnfrom the human genome project, the speculations of
evolutionary psychologists, and numerous other sources-that humankind, too,
is determined by genetic predispositions and the drive to reproduce. We are
cleverer than other animals, to be sure, but the difference is one of degree, not of
kind. As Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote on the editorial page of the New York Times,
"Again and again, after starting from an ancient premise of radical differences
between humans and other creatures, scientists have discovered profound
similarities." But have they? Genetics and evolutionary biology may be,
indeed, extremely effective at identifying the traits we share with other species. But
chemistry, for its part, can tell us about the ways in which we resemble chunks of
charcoal, and physics can point to fundamental similarities between a man and all
the matter in the universe. The problem with these observations is not that they are
untrue. It is that they shed no light whatsoever on, or rather they are designed to
obfuscate, what makes humanity unique as a species-the point on which an answer
to the likes of Peter Singer and Steven Wise must hinge. For his part, Singer
commits the same error that John Stuart Mill found in the system of Jeremy
Bentham: he makes no distinction among kinds of pleasure and pain. That animals
feel emotions can hardly be doubted; but human beings experience life, even at its
most "animalistic" level, in a way that fundamentally differs from other
creatures. Thus, Singer can account for the pain that humans and animals alike
experience when they are hungry and the pleasure they feel when they eat, but he
cannot explain, for example, a person's choice to starve himself for a cause. He
understands that human beings, like animals, derive pleasure from sex and
sometimes endure pangs of longing when they are deprived of it, but he cannot
explain how or why, unlike animals, some choose to embrace celibacy for the sake
of its noble purity. He is certainly attuned to the tendency we share with animals to
fear and avoid pain and bodily harm, but he is incapable of understanding a man's
willingness to face certain death on the battlefield when called upon to do so by his
country. Still less can he explain why stories of such sacrifice sometimes move us to
tears. In much the same way, the evidence adduced by Steven Wise to suggest that
primates are capable of forming rudimentary plans and expectations fails to
demonstrate they are equal to human beings in any significant sense. Men and
women use their "autonomy" in a world defined not by the simple imperatives of
survival but by ideas of virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong.
Modern scientific methods, including those of evolutionary psychology, have so far
proved incapable of detecting and measuring this world, but that does not make

any less real the experience that takes place within it. Western civilization has
tended to regard animals as resembling things more than human beings precisely
because, like jnanimate objects, and unlike the authors of the real Magna Carta,
animals have no perception of morality. Until the day when a single animal
stands up and, led by a love of justice and a sense of self-worth, insists that the
world recognize and respect its dignity, all the philosophical gyrations of the
activists will remain so much sophistry. Putting Human Interests First None of this,
of course, exempts human beings from behaving decently toward animals, but it
does provide a foundation, when necessary, for giving pride of place to the interests
of human beings. This has particular relevance for biomedical research. Among the
most vociferous critics of the USDA's capitulation to the animal-rights movement
were the nation's leading centers of medical science. The National Association for
BiOlnedical Research estimated that the new regulations would cost universities
alone as much as $280 million a year. Nor is the issue simply one of dollars. As
Estelle Fishbein, counsel for Johns Hopkins University, recently argued in
the SHOULD ANIMALS HAVE THE SAME STATUS AS PEOPLE? Journal of the American
Medical Association, Genetic research promises to bring new therapies to
alleviate human suffering from the acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome, Parkinson's disease and other neurological diseases, and virtually all
other human and animal diseases. However, the promise of this new era of medical
research is highly dependent on the ready availability of mice, rats, and
birds. 2S Far from being a mere administrative hassle, she concluded, the new
regulations would "divert scarce grant funds from actual research use, distract
researchers from their scientific work, and overload them with documentation
requirements. II Serious as this threat is, a still more troubling one is the effect
that the arguments of animal-rights proponents may have, in the long term, on our
regard for human life itself. Peter Singer's apPOintment at Princeton caused a stir
not because of his writings about animals but because of his endorsement of
euthanasia, unrestricted abortion, and, in some instances, infanticide. But all of his
views, as he himself maintains, are of a piece. The idea that "human infants and
retarded adults II are superior to animaLs can only be based, he writes, on "a barefaced-and morally indefensible-prejudice for members of our own species. II In much
the same way, Steven Wise urges us to reject absolute demarcations between
species and instead focus on the capacities of individual humans and individual
apes. If we do that, we will find that many adult chimpanzees and bonobos are far
more "human" than newborn and mentally disabled human beings, and thus just
as worthy of being recognized as IIpersons." Though Wise's inference is the opposite
of Singer's-he does not wish to deprive underdeveloped humans of rights so much
as to extend those rights to primates-he is playing the same game of
baitand- switch: in this case projecting the noblest human attributes onto animals
while quietly limiting his sample of human beings to newborns and the mentally
disabled. When raising animals to our level proves to be impossible, as it inevitably
must, equal consideration can only be won by attempting to lower us to theirs. <2325>

Humans are ethically superiorseveral reasons

Newmyer, 6 Stephen, Professor of Classics @ Duquesne, Animals, Rights, and
Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics, p. 53-54 //BR
What could rightly be considered the logical final stage in the argument
for according justice to animals is reached in the work of Steven M. W1se.
An attorney who specializes in animal rights law, Wise has argued, in his
book Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, that creatures
possessing what he terms "practical autonomy" are entitled to "liberty rights."
Creatures with practical autonomy are those that can desire, try to fulfill their
desires, and demonstrate self-sufficiency to the extent that they can understand, if
only dimly, that they want something and are trying to secure it.26 Wise
numbers chimpanzees, bonqbos and dolphins among such creatures. These are
creatures with highly develdped consciousness, which allows them the "liberty
rights" of immunity to any form of enslavement or torture. It is clear that
Wise's position has been influenced by the thought of such figures as Singer and
Regan among philosophers, and Griffin among ethologists, but he ventures
beyond their conclusions to argue that highly conscious animals qualify for
legal personhood, an assertion that even the boldest ethologists are hesitant
to countenance. Wise's conclusion is highly controversial, "Judges must
recognize that even using a human yardstick, at least some nonhuman animals are
entitled to recognition as legal persons."27 With this assertion, Wise has reached
the outside edge of any debate on justice toward animals, far beyond rhe
tentative explorations of animal rights philosophers who hesitate to assert what
the interests of animals might be. In the final chapter of his work Animal Minds and
Human Morals, Sorabji offers a valuable critique of some of the ethical theories
discussed above, in parricular those of Singer and Regan, both of whose approaches
he faults as "one-dimensional," although together their work constitutes the two
main streams of thought on animals in recent years.28 In neither case, Sorabji
notes, is rationality a paramount consideration. For Sorabji, the mere satisfaction
of preferences, as Singer expounds the principle, is inadequate as the foundation of
a moral system governing human treatment of animals, and he rejects as well
Regan's absolute reliance on a doctrine of inherent value that allows for no
degrees.29 Sorabji envisions an ethic in which what he terms
"multiple considerations"30 figure, including kindness and gratitude, along with a
regard for relationships, a requirement that recalls the Stoic doctrine of oikeiotes
that worked so strongly against animal interests through the ages. Our
examination of ethical theories developed in the post-Regan era and bolstered by
the findings of neuroscience suggests that philosophers are in fact moving in the
direction that Sorabji envisions, as they abandon the monolithic approach of
earlier decades that relied heavily on the criterion of rationality in animals, and
they answer in the affirmative DeGrazia's question of whether animals matter
in their own right and have interests that humans must respect. Benevolence
and kindness now enter into ethical discussion of justice toward animals. <53-54>

A2 Intrinsic Value to Nature

Nature has no value outside what humans impose upon it.
Edward Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at
Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, 10-15- 2004, The Flawed Doctrine of
Natures Intrinsic Value, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/04/041015-17.htm
Edward Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at
Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, 10-15- 2004, The Flawed Doctrine of
Natures Intrinsic Value, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/04/041015-17.htm
Many environmentalists contend that nature has an intrinsic value, in and of itself,
apart from its contributions to human well-being. They maintain that all created
things are equal and should be respected as ends in themselves having rights to
their own actualization without human interference. Ecological egalitarians defend
biodiversity for its own sake and assign the rest of nature ethical status at least
equal to that of human beings. Some even say that the collective needs of
nonhuman species and inanimate objects must take precedence over mans needs
and desires. Animals, plants, rocks, land, water, and so forth, are all said to possess
intrinsic value by their mere existence without regard to their relationship to
individual human beings. Environmentalistserroneouslyassign human values and
concern to an amoral material sphere. When environmentalists talk about the
nonhuman natural world, they commonly attribute human values to it, which, of
course, are completely irrelevant to the nonhuman realm. For example, nature is
incapable of being concerned with the possible extinction of any particular
ephemeral species. Over 99 percent of all species of life thathave ever existed on
earth have been estimated to be extinct with the great majority of these perishing
because of nonhuman factors. Nature cannot care about biodiversity. Humans
happen to value biodiversity because it reflects the state of the natural world in
which they currently live. Without humans, the beauty and spectacle of nature
would not exist such ideas can only exist in the mind of a rational valuer.
These environmentalists fail to realize that value means having value to some
valuer. To be a value some aspect of nature must be a value tosome human being.
People have the capacity to assign and to create value with respect to nonhuman
existents. Nature, in the form of natural resources, does not existindependently of
(hu)man. Men, choosing to act on their ideas, transform nature for human purposes.
All resources are man-made. It is the application of human valuation to natural
substances that makes them resources. Resources thus can be viewed as a function
of human knowledge and action. By using their rationality and ingenuity, men affect
nature, thereby enabling them to achieve progress.
Mans survival and
flourishing depend upon the study of nature that includes all things, even man
himself. Human beings are the highest level of nature in the known universe. Men
are a distinct natural phenomenon as are fish, birds, rocks, etc. Their proper place in
the hierarchical order of nature needs to be recognized. Unlike plants and animals,
human beingshave a conceptual faculty, free will, and a moral nature. Because
morality involves the ability to choose, it follows that moral worth is related to
human choice and action and that the agents of moral worth can also be said to

have moral value. By rationally using his conceptual faculty, (hu)man(s) can create
values as judged by the standard of enhancing human life. The highest priority must
be assigned to actions that enhance the lives of individual human beings. It is
therefore morally fitting to make use of nature.
Mans environment
includes all of his surroundings. When he creatively arranges his external material
conditions, he is improving his environment to make it more useful to himself.
Neither fixed nor finite, resources are, in essence, a product of the human mind
through the application of science and technology. Our resources have been
expanding over time as a result of our ever-increasing knowledge.
Unlike
plants and animals, human beings do much more than simply respond to
environmental stimuli. Humans are free from natures determinism and thus are
capable of choosing. Whereas plants and animals survive by adapting to nature,
men sustain their lives by employing reason to adapt nature to them. People make
valuations and judgments. Of all the created order, only the human person is
capable of developing other resources, thereby enriching creation. The earth is a
dynamic and developing system thatweare not obliged to preserve forever as we
have found it. Human inventiveness, a natural dimension of the world, has enabled
us to do more with less.

( ) Intrinsic value claims are relativistic nonsense.

MurrayBookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology, 1990, p. 183-4
The results of this desystematization of thinking are often ludicrous when they are
not simply cruel, or even vicious. If all organisms in the biosphere are equally
worthy of a right to life and organic fulfillment, as many biocentrists believe, then
human beings have no right, given the full logic of this proposition, to stamp out
malaria and yellow-fever mosquitoes. Nor does the logic of this proposition give
humanity the right to eliminate the AIDS virus and other organic sources of deadly
illness. It hardly helps us to learn that the notion of "biocentric equality," to re-word
the language of Bill Devall and George Sessions, the authors of Deep Ecology, is
hedged by a qualifier like we have no right to destroy other living being without
sufficient reason. A qualification like sufficient reason is ambiguous enough to
divest the entire notion of its logical integrity.Logic, in fact, gives way to a purely
relativistic ethics. What may be a sufficient reason for Devall and Sessionsall
their well-meant and desirable intentions asidemay be very insufficient to a
large array of people whose well-being, indeed whose very survival under the
present system, conflicts sharply with the authors views.

( ) We have to make hard choices. The aff is moral escapism

Julian Simon, Scarcity or Abundance?, 1994, p. 42
Still, the question exists: How should decisions be made, and sound policies
formulated, with respect to the danger of species extinction? I do not offer a
comprehensive answer. It is clear that we cannot simply save all species at any
cost, any more than we can save all human lives at any cost. Certainly we must
make some informed estimates about the present and future social value of species

that might be lost, just as we must estimate the value of human life in order to
choose rational policies about public health services such as hospitals and surgery.

A2 Link of Omission
Dubbing people anthropocentric because they didnt talk
about animals makes the creation of an effective
environmental movement impossible, and isnt accurate
Lewis 92 Professor of Environment
Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for
International Studies at Duke University. Green Delusions, 1992 p17-18
Nature for Natures SakeAnd Humanity for Humanitys It is widely accepted that
environmental thinkers can be divided into two camps: those who favor the
preservation of nature for natures sake, and those who wish only to maintain the
environment as the necessary habitat of humankind (see Pepper 1989; ORiordan
1989; W Fox 1990). In the first group stand the green radicals, while the second
supposedly consists of environmental reformers, also labeled shallow ecologists.
Radicalsoften pull no punches in assailingthe members of the latter camp for their
anthropocentrism, managerialism, and gutless accommodationismto some,
shallow ecology is just a more efficient form of exploitation and oppression
(quoted in Nash 1989:202). While this dichotomy may accurately depict someof the
major approachesof the past, it isremarkably unhelpful for devising the kind of
framework required for a truly effective environmental movement. It incorrectly
assumes that those whoadopt an anti-anthropocentric view (that is, one that
accords intrinsic worth to nonhuman beings) will also embrace the larger political
programs of radical environmentalism. Similarly, it portrays those who favor reforms
within the political and economic structuresof representative democracies
asthereby excluding all nonhumans from the realm of moral consideration. Yet no
convincing reasons are ever provided to show why these beliefs shouldnecessarily
be aligned in such a manner. (For an instructive discussion of the pitfalls of the
anthropocentric versus nonanthropocentric dichotomy, see Norton 1987, chapter ir.)

A2 Morality
Morality fails to apply across animalia other animals wont
respect morality
Duckler 8 PhD in Biology
Geordie, ARTICLE: TWO MAJOR FLAWS OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, PhD in
Biology, JD from Northwestern, 14 Animal L. 179
Another example of ethical conflict created by the animal rights position is
that the entireanimal world must be seen to be inherently immoral
because the new "rights" will never berespected between and among
animals other than humans. n89God help the activist who tries valiantly to
hold long onto the argument that it is morality that demands legal rights
for animals: A basic biology text would stop them absolutely cold at the
early chapter describing the majordivision of all [*198] life into
prokaryotes and eukaryotes. n90 If activists gleaned their information from a
college science lesson instead of from a religious tome, they would find that
prokaryotes engage in immoral acts: Throughout earth history, prokaryotes
have created immense global "crises of starvation, pollution, and
extinction" n91that make human parallels appear trivial in comparison.
Prokaryotes destroyother organisms by the great multitude , routinely
transfer genetic material freely from individual to individual, fool around
with genetic engineering, create "chimeras" at a level that our most illadvised laboratory technicians could only dream about, and fundamentally
alter the biotic and abiotic world in doing so. n92

A2 Root CauseRacism/Sexism
Equating speciesism with racism/sexism is offensive and
absurd
NICOLL and RUSSELL 1 (Charles, Prof. Integrative Biology @ UC Berkeley,
and Sharon, Dept. Physiology-Anatomy @ UC Berkeley, in Why Animal
Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research, Ed. Paul and
Paul, p. 161-162)
Some advocates for animals, including Singer, do not believe that animals deserve
to have rights in the same sense that we accord tern to humans.5 Instead, they
argue that because animals meet their criteria of "moral relevance," they are
entitled to equal moral consideration with human beings. If we are willing to exploit
animals in any way, we should be willing to do likewise to people since humans are
not more "morally relevant" than animals. When we regard animals to be less than
our moral equals, we are practicing a kind of interspecies discrimination that these
advocates call "speciesism," an attitude they analogize to types of intraspecies
discrimination such as sexism and racism. Richard Ryder claims credit for coining
the term "speciesism" in 1970.51 In 1985 the term was defined in the Oxford
English Dictionary as "[d]iscrimination against or exploitation of certain animal
species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind's superiority."52
Singer has stated that [s]peciesism ... is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of
the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of
other species."53 To support the correctness of their opinion about the immorality
of speciesism, animal activists claim that it is comparable to discrimination on the
basis of sex or race. We object strongly to this kind of equation. To quote Cohen
again, "[t]his argument is worse than unsound: it is atrocious."54 Sexism and racism
are not justifiable because normal men and women of all racial and ethnic groups
are, on average, intellectually and morally equal, and their behavior can be judged
against the same moral standards. Animals do not have such equivalence with
humans. To deny rights or equal consideration on the basis of sex or race is immoral
because all normal humans, regardless of sex, ethnicity, or race, can claim the
rights and considerations that they deserve, and they know what it means to be
unjustly denied them. No animals have these abilities. Speciesism, as defined by
Ryder and Singer, is a normal kind of discrimination displayed by all social animals,
but racism and sexism are widely considered to be morally indefensible practices.
By equating racism and sexism with speciesism, Ryder and Singer degrade the
struggle to achieve racial and sexual equality.55 In addition to having this ethical
problem, the concept of speciesism is also biologically absurd; we consider this
below.

***OOO K Answers

Turns/Impact D

Humans Good
The critique fails to account for human consciousness its
irreducible
Cole, 2013 - Ph.D. Duke University, Guggenheim Fellow @
Princeton University
[Andrew, 2013, The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
Minnesota Review, Number 80, ProjectMUSE]//SGarg
These newer areas, however, may just as well avoid talking about consciousness ,
because the term itself is distorted by its history of usage , an accretion of error, and so forth. I can
sympathize with the distaste for consciousness, because it admits philosophical frustration and forces you into
Kantianism. It is a mind bender to take that old Kantian lesson that consciousness is always consciousness of something and write it from the point of view of objects.

What would you write? Well, you would write

something about withdrawn objects , as Harman does, just as Kant would write of things-inthemselves with the key difference being that philosophers who absorb the Kantian lesson know the limits of their
discourse, whereas those who flout that lesson take off into flights of pure reason, speculating about the inte- rior
life of objects and getting inside the heads of things. (The other key difference for Harman, of course, is Heidegger,
whom Harman needs to revise because he does not help with this one Kantian funda- mental: Heidegger admits
that human attention and awarenessthat is, what constitutes a subject are special aspects of human consciousness needing philosophical analysis.) The Kantian problem remains in place :

if there is something that

cannot be thought, then maybe it cannot be thought. You cannot write your way any
closer to the object, circle the wagons of indirection and allusion around it as you may. Until such a time as
there is a materialist, realist, or let us just say scientific explanation for the necessity of the conscious
experience of, say, the color red to accompany the reception of electromagnetic radi- ation in the cones of your
eyeball, the problem of consciousness qua consciousness will remain on the table. And until the universe demands
that we extend this idea and pose a hard problem of thingsand I credit Harman for attempting to offer one in his
critique of Chalmers (Harman 2009b, 26869, 272)there

will always be irreducible

consciousness, always be idealism, always be objects and subjects infi- Cole 115
nitely variously positioned in relation to one another. Talk of thingly consciousness
as vitality or voice will not indicate much of anything but a philosophers love of
language, consumer goods, and entertain- ing thing-examples like hailstones and
tar, aardvarks and baseball. Nor will objects be seen as they wish to be seen in the
more specialized attempts by some speculative realists to suggest that objects
perceive their secondary qualitiesthis being just one result of the critique of the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities (Meillassoux 2008). For its refusal to find these problems to be problems at all,
then, speculative realism amounts to what Hegel called dogmatic realism, which cannot help but posit the

Speculative realists will tell you that

after Descartes everything went off the rails in the history of philosophy, obviously
because his res cogitans was the wrong thinking thing! Which makes it all the more strange
that they do not focus intensely on philosophy and thought of the period before
Descartes but after the Greeksa focus that would make instantly visible the medieval mystical
objective as the real ground of the subjective (1977, 127).

discourses upon which such an investigation into objects is founded, a discourse that is funda- mentally, even

Could these medieval tradi- tions issue another call, then a call
for the reassessment, if not adjust- ment, of the disciplinary language of speculative
realism and the cognate philosophies, their modus procendi et loquendi? Will that
call be heard?
beautifully, logocentric.

The critique is rendered moot fails to take into account

multiple perspectives
Cole, 2013 - Ph.D. Duke University, Guggenheim Fellow @
Princeton University
[Andrew, 2013, The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
Minnesota Review, Number 80, ProjectMUSE]//SGarg
My point is not to reassert the importance of Tradition over a glossy and emergent
countermovement. It is to say that when any new philosophy proclaims its
wholesale departure from prior philosophical explorations, it is always the Middle
Ages and medieval thought that take the hardest hit, andpredictablyit is usually medievalists who assume the
task of making corrections to the exciting new narrative. In this case, however, critiques of objectoriented ontology and specula- tive realism, of actor-network theory and vitalism,
have yet to emerge from the field of medieval studies , apart from the essays collected in this
issue of minnesota review. Perhaps when the thrill of object-oriented ontology wanes in this
field, some medievalists will not limit them- selves to the application of its ideas
and the mimicking of its lyricism in the reading of medieval texts and will instead show
what it means for a new philosophy to be built almost entirely on the exclusion of the Middle Ages.8 To wit, when
these new philosophies exclude the Mid- dle Ages, they foreclose the possibilities of
generous readingthe practice of reading-with even the unlikeliest and most unmodern of thinkersand
the opportunities to develop a broader conception of 116 the minnesota review what the
speculative realist project even is, what it can do, what its limits are. The deconstructive
lesson about the identity of thought and being perhaps now looks pat, but as speculative realists sever this Par-

and being is taken as its own category irrespective of thought, there

remains consciousness, and the questions of its basis will always be asked, even
when you believe you are thinking about something else entirely.
menidean nexus

Speaking of reality beyond human experience is impossible

and useless.
Arendt in 63.
Hannah Arendt (political theorist, visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Prinston, and
Northwestern Universities; first woman lecturer at princeton; taught at the
University of Chicago, the New School in Manhattan, fellow at Yale, and Wesleyan
University Center for Advanced Studies and more), The Conquest of Space and the
Stature of Man,originally published in Between Past and Future in 1963 but
republished in 2007 at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-ofspace-and-the-stature-of-man.
The goal of modern science, which eventually and quite literally has led us to the
moon, is no longer to augment and order human experiences (as Niels Bohr,5 still
tied to a vocabulary that his own work has helped to make obsolete, described it); it
is much rather to discover what lies behind natural phenomena as they reveal
themselves to the senses and the mind of man. Had the scientist reflected upon the
nature of the human sensory and mental apparatus, had he raised questions such
as What is the nature of man and what should be his stature? What is the goal of
science and why does man pursue knowledge? or even What is life and what

distinguishes human from animal life?, he would never have arrived where modern
science stands today. The answers to these questions would have acted as
definitions and hence as limitations of his efforts. In the words of Niels Bohr, Only
by renouncing an explanation of life in the ordinary sense do we gain a possibility of
taking into account its characteristics.6 That the question proposed here makes no
sense to the scientist qua scientist is no argument against it. The question
challenges the layman and the humanist to judge what the scientist is doing
because it concerns all men, and this debate must of course be joined by the
scientists themselves insofar as they are fellow citizens. But all answers given in
this debate, whether they come from laymen or philosophers or scientists, are nonscientific (although not anti-scientific); they can never be demonstrably true or
false. Their truth resembles rather the validity of agreements than the compelling
validity of scientific statements. Even when the answers are given by philosophers
whose way of life is solitude, they are arrived at by an exchange of opinions among
many men, most of whom may no longer be among the living. Such truth can never
command general agreement, but it frequently outlasts the compellingly and
demonstrably true statements of the sciences which, especially in recent times,
have the uncomfortable inclination never to stay put, although at any given
moment they are, and must be, valid for all. In other words, notions such as life, or
man, or science, or knowledge are pre-scientific by definition, and the question is
whether or not the actual development of science which has led to the conquest of
terrestrial space and to the invasion of the space of the universe has changed these
notions to such an extent that they no longer make sense. For the point of the
matter is, of course, that modern scienceno matter what its origins and original
goalshas changed and reconstructed the world we live in so radically that it could
be argued that the layman and the humanist, still trusting their common sense and
communicating in everyday language, are out of touch with reality; that they
understand only what appears but not what is behind appearances (as though
trying to understand a tree without taking the roots into account); and that their
questions and anxieties are simply caused by ignorance and therefore are
irrelevant. How can anyone doubt that a science enabling man to conquer space
and go to the moon has increased his stature? This sort of bypassing the question
would be very tempting indeed if it were true that we have come to live in a world
that only the scientists understand. They would then be in a position of the few
whose superior knowledge entitles them to rule the many, namely, all nonscientists, laymen from the scientists point of viewbe they humanists, scholars, or
philosophersall those, in short, who raise pre-scientific questions because of
ignorance. This division between the scientist and the layman, however, is very far
from the truth. The fact is not merely that the scientist spends more than half of his
life in the same world of sense perception, of common sense, and of everyday
language as his fellow citizens, but that he has come in his own privileged field of
activity to a point where the nave questions and anxieties of the layman have
made themselves felt very forcefully, albeit in a different manner. The scientist has
not only left behind the layman with his limited understanding; he has left behind a
part of himself and his own power of understanding, which is still human
understanding when he goes to work in the laboratory and begins to communicate
in mathematical language. Max Planck was right, and the miracle of modern science

is indeed that this science could be purged of all anthropomorphic elements

because the purging was done by men.7 The theoretical perplexities that have
confronted the new non- anthropocentric and nongeocentric (or heliocentric)
science because its data refuse to be ordered by any of the natural mental
categories of the human brain are well enough known. In the words of Erwin
Schrdinger, the new universe that we try to conquer is not only practically
inaccessible, but not even thinkable, for however we think it, it is wrong; not
perhaps quite as meaningless as a triangular circle, but much more so than a
winged lion.8

The rest of the biological world is exceptionally violent - what

makes humans unique is our ability to engineer peace.
Goodall & Wrangham 13 - *has directed the scientific study of
chimpanzee behavior at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania
since 1960, **Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard
University (Jane, Richard, January 4th, 2013, We, Too, Are Violent Animals
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578220002834225378.
html)

Where does human savagery come from? The animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff,
writing in Psychology Today after last month's awful events in Newtown, Conn.,
echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh
aggression, he wrote, is "extremely rare" in nonhuman animals, while violence is
merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only
we could "rewild our hearts," he concluded, we might harness our "inborn goodness
and optimism" and thereby return to our "nice, kind, compassionate, empathic"
original selves. If only if it were that simple. Calm and cooperative behavior indeed
predominates in most species, but the idea that human aggression is qualitatively
different from that of every other species is wrong. The latest report from the
research site that one of us (Jane Goodall) directs in Tanzania gives a quick sense of
what a scientist who studies chimpanzees actually sees: "Ferdinand [the alpha
male] is rather a brutal ruler, in that he tends to use his teeth rather a lota
number of the males now have scars on their backs from being nicked or gashed
by his caninesThe politics in Mitumba [a second chimpanzee community] have
also been bad. If we recall that: they all killed alpha-male Vincent when he
reappeared injured; then Rudi as his successor probably killed up-and-coming young
Ebony to stop him helping his older brother Edgar in challenging himbut to no
avail, as Edgar eventually toppled him anyway." A 2006 paper reviewed evidence
from five separate chimpanzee populations in Africa, groups that have all been
scientifically monitored for many years. The average "conservatively estimated risk
of violent death" was 271 per 100,000 individuals per year. If that seems like a low
rate, consider that a chimpanzee's social circle is limited to about 50 friends and
close acquaintances. This means that chimpanzees can expect a member of their
circle to be murdered once every seven years. Such a rate of violence would be
intolerable in human society. The violence among chimpanzees is impressively
humanlike in several ways. Consider primitive human warfare, which has been well
documented around the world. Groups of hunter-gatherers who come into contact

with militarily superior groups of farmers rapidly abandon war, but where power is
more equal, the hostility between societies that speak different languages is almost
endless. Under those conditions, hunter-gatherers are remarkably similar to
chimpanzees: Killings are mostly carried out by males, the killers tend to act in
small gangs attacking vulnerable individuals, and every adult male in the society
readily participates. Moreover, with hunter-gatherers as with chimpanzees, the
ordinary response to encountering strangers who are vulnerable is to attack them.
Most animals do not exhibit this striking constellation of behaviors, but chimpanzees
and humans are not the only species that form coalitions for killing. Other animals
that use this strategy to kill their own species include group-living carnivores such
as lions, spotted hyenas and wolves. The resulting mortality rate can be high:
Among wolves, up to 40% of adults die from attacks by other packs. Killing
among these carnivores shows that ape-sized brains and grasping hands do not
account for this unusual violent behavior. Two other features appear to be critical:
variable group size and group-held territory. Variable group size means that lone
individuals sometimes encounter small, vulnerable parties of neighbors. Having
group territory means that by killing neighbors, the group can expand its territory to
find extra resources that promote better breeding. In these circumstances, killing
makes evolutionary sensein humans as in chimpanzees and some carnivores.
What makes humans special is not our occasional propensity to kill strangers when
we think we can do so safely. Our unique capacity is our skill at engineering
peace. Within societies of hunter-gatherers (though only rarely between them),
neighboring groups use peacemaking ceremonies to ensure that most of their
interactions are friendly. In state-level societies, the state works to maintain a
monopoly on violence. Though easily misused in the service of those who govern,
the effect is benign when used to quell violence among the governed. Under
everyday conditions, humans are a delightfully peaceful and friendly species.
But when tensions mount between groups of ordinary people or in the mind of an
unstable individual, emotion can lead to deadly events. There but for the grace of
fortune, circumstance and effective social institutions go you and I. Instead of
constructing a feel-good fantasy about the innate goodness of most people and all
animals, we should strive to better understand ourselves, the good parts along with
the bad.

Politics Good
We can have politics, but only after ontology. At this point, we
are hardly political at all - it eliminates the possibility for an
event.
Galloway 12 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York
University (Alexander, http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-tograham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/, A response to Graham Harmans
Marginalia on Radical Thinking, June 3rd 2012)

I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from
the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt have called depoliticization and neutralization. It
shows Harmans anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this
an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being
badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the
state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the
confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to
which the state will go to hold on to power. Thats a classic case of liberal
neutralization (dont rock the boat, we just need to go along to get along, this
is the best of all possible worlds, ontology shouldnt be political, etc.). This is thus
not a political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the
sight of blood. But such palpitations of the sensitive bourgeois heart, no matter
how reformed, do not a politics make. By contrast, Badious position is so useful
today because he says that its all about the *first* antagonism, not the last. To be
political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the
state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the
situation. The political is always trenchant in this sense, always a cutting or
polarization. Hence the appeal of Badious theory of points which forces all of the
equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or
go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how
resistance is primary vis-a-vis power. For his part Harman essentially argues the
reverse in this interview: ontology is primary (OOO is not the handmaid of anything
else), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab
Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but its
still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where. If youre still skeptical
just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of
Harman, the revolution would never have happened. Thats political
neutralization in a nutshell. In other words there is no event for Harman. And
here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacems recent characterization of Tristan Garcias
ontology, modeled closely after Harmans, as essentially a treatise on Being
Without Event.

Separating ontology from politics causes pure passivity.

Galloway 13 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York
University (Alexander, Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp.
347-366, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668529, The Poverty of Philosophy:
Realism and Post-Fordism)
In order to address these important questions I will expand the field of view and make some observations about
philosophical realism.9 In this context, realism means quite simply that an external world exists independent of
ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefsalthough it is often also taken to entail the less simple
epistemological thesis that we have direct and verifiable access to knowledge about that external world. In the
wake of Kantianism and subsequent to phenomenology and structuralism, realism had essentially gone extinct in
the continental tradition, despite having healthy offshoots in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially
philosophy of science. But things began to change around 2002. In that year Manual De Landa published a book on
Gilles Deleuze, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, stating in no uncertain terms I am a realist; in the same

Harman published his first book, which proposed a realism around a so-called objectoriented philosophy Perhaps the most influential of the recent realist texts has been Meillassouxs book
year

After Finitude, which advocates that one move beyond what Meillassoux calls correlationism and reconcile thought
with the absolute. For Meillassoux correlationism means that knowledge of the world is always the result of a
correlation between subject and object. By correlation we mean the idea according to which we only ever have
access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other,

Under the system of correlationism, subjectivity and

objectivity are forever bound together. Thus, one might naturally put figures like Immanuel Kant
Meillassoux writes.11

in this camp with his highly mediated model of subject and object. Phenomenology is also a key entry in the history
of correlationism, as well as much of the French philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, obsessed as
they were with the inability for man to move beyond the prison house of language. Postmodernism is considered to
be a high water mark for correlationism, particularly the notion, often attributed rightly or wrongly to postmodern
thinkers, that the subject is ultimately at the mercy of ideology and spectacle, behind which there exists no
absolute truth or reality.

For correlationism human subjectivity always has a crucial

role to play; the real world doesnt exist, or if it does we cannot have direct
access to it. Meillassoux pits himself firmly against the long tradition of correlationism in continental
philosophy. For Meillassoux the real world exists, and it can be known. He endorses a so-called Copernican
revolution wherein the anthropocentrism of correlationism is displaced in favor
of a system in which reality is at the center, and the human is but one
element in the network of the real. Levi Bryant and others have called this a
flat ontology comprising a single plane, the real, within which exists human In the opening
chapter of After Finitude, titled Ancestrality, Meillassoux lays out the basic stakes of what a noncorrelationist
position might look like by making reference to the Kantian trap that has gripped Western philosophy for some time:
Thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is in itself to the world as it is for us. . . . We
cannot represent the in itself without it becoming for us, or as Hegel amusingly put it, we cannot creep up on
the object from behind so as to find out what it is in itself (AF, pp. 34). Meillassoux does not so much creep up on
the object but posit a historical time scale outside the cognition of the human, a historical time prior to humanity
altogether. Thus he speaks of the ancestral realm and the arche-fossil: ancestral claims are claims about
things before the existence of man and therefore prior to what the phenomenologists call the givenness of human
experience; the arche-fossil is the trace that allows someone to make ancestral claims. For example, radiological
decay is an arche-fossil that allows a scientist to date prehistoric fossils. Meillassoux culminates these
provocations by asking what if anything correlationism can say about such ancestral claims; the facts in question
technically would fall prior to the subjectobject relation as such and hence prior to the model proposed by
correlationism. If human thought had a beginning, what to think of history prior to human thought? Science
emerges as something of a trump card, as Meillassoux poses the following question to his correlationist opponents:
how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm? (AF, p. 26;
emphasis removed). The opening section of the book also stresses the importance of mathematics. He describes an
enigma in which mathematics is granted the ability to speak about the historical past in which humanity was
absent: how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world where humanity is absent. . . . This is the enigma
which we must confront: mathematics ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past
where both humanity and life are absent (AF, p. 26); but also earlier Meillassoux brings in mathematics during his

discussion of primary qualities: all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can
be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself (AF, p. 3; emphasis removed). (I will return to the
question of mathematics in a moment, but it is worth identifying it explicitly here.) Meillassouxs use of the
ancestral realm thus allows him to open up a space for a purely real world, a world that has never had a human
eye gaze upon it or a human mind think about it. To

think ancestrality is to think a world

without thought, he writes, a world without the givenness of the world (AF, p. 28). The phrase
givenness of the world is a reference to how phenomenology talks about presence. It refers to the way in which
the world is given into perception by a thinking being. Our task, by way of contrast, writes Meillassoux, consists
in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of
subsisting without being given. The holy grail for Meillassoux is therefore existence without givenness. He
understands the absolute as something capable of existing whether we exist or not (AF, p. 28). How should we
evaluate Meillassoux and his intervention into contemporary philosophy?13Afew issues spring to mind, all
concerning Meillassouxs relationship to politics and history. I will address two criticisms first in relatively vague
terms, then move to a third, more pointed critique. First is the question of metaphysical necessity itself, be it in the

All of these things were at

some time or another the antagonist of what one calls critical theory in the broadest
sense, that is to say the practice of sociocultural critique invented by Karl Marx in the middle of the
form of essentialism, the absolute, a natural reality, or universal truths.

nineteenth century and practiced in various ways by the Frankfurt school, structuralism and poststructuralism,
semiotics, cultural studies, and certain kinds of queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory up through the end
of the twentieth century. In much of this work, essence and truth themselves are the antagonists, to be replaced by
constructed identities and contingent worlds. (Recall how Marx and Friedrich Engels, in part two of the Communist

With the new speculative realism, and perhaps also in

a different way with Harmans object-oriented philosophy, one risks switching from a
system of subjective essentialism (patriarchy, logocentrism, ideological apparatuses) to a
system of objective essentialism (an unmediated real, infinity, being as mathematics, the
absolute, the bubbling of chaos). Is it time to trot out the old antiessentialist
arguments from our Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial forebears?
Isnt Meillassouxs metaphysical essentialismhis support of the universality of contingency (which in its
impotent universality becomes meaningless), his pursuit of the absolute, his endorsement of a pure
realjust as repugnant as other brands of metaphysical
essentialism? Thus we must confront directly the fundamental provocation of the new philosophical
realism. For, contra the tradition of materialist critical theory since Marx, much of todays realism
claims that ontologies should not be political; it claims that ontological
speculations must be separated from political ones. Such choruses are being heard more
Manifesto, promised to do away with truth!)

and more frequently today. I have no doubt that many of the figures associated with todays philosophical realism

And the argument is often heard that

the uncoupling of the ontological from the political is a neutral act in and of
itself and in so doing casts no aspersion as such on the political project. One
would view themselves as politicized souls of some caliber.

simply can do metaphysics over here, while doing politics over there. Furthermore, promulgators of such arguments
often laud the uncoupling as a feature of realism, not a liability, because it allows the political to persist inside its
own autonomous sphere, unsullied by the nitty-gritty questions of Being and appearing .

Yet the
uncoupling of the ontological realm from the political realm is not entirely
neutral, for it arrives less as an innocuous attempt to tidy up the cluttered
landscape of philosophical discourse (so that ones talk of Being will not
be tainted by ones talk of politics) than as an ideological strategy bent unwittingly or not
on the elimination of competing discourses. Recall what must be discarded when overturning correlationism. One

must also throw out social

constructivism and the various fields that rely on a
socialconstructivist methodology including much of second- and
must discard phenomenology certainly, but one

third-wave feminism, certain kinds of critical race theory, the

project of identity politics in general, theories of postmodernity, and
much of cultural studies. Phenomenology has a politics, to be sure: beyond the ravages of modern
life, the return to a more poetic state of being guided by care and solicitude. Social constructivism has one too:
throw out the violence of patriarchy, logocentrism, and all the rest. Have no illusions, this is what is at stake with
the recent return to the absolute evident in theoretical discourse from Meillassoux to Badiou, and even evident in
other authors such as iek and Susan Buck-Morss.14 To be sure, certain of these theorists understand the stakes
and therefore scaffold their newfound universalism with a robust and often militant political theoryBadiou and
iek, one shall re- member, are in no uncertain terms advocating communism, and Buck- Morss herself has a

The question becomes more

pressing however when a philosopher uncouples Being from politics
in order to withdraw from the project of political critique altogether.
robust political consciousness. Fading violets they are not.

TurnBad Ecology
The division between nature and Mortons conception of
ecology is inevitable. It is the erroneous nature of humanity to
criticize the perception of a system created by humanity
without first challenging its anthropocentric roots
Ben Woodard May 8 2010 PhD student in Theory and Criticism at the University
of Western Ontario cofounder of the online collective Speculative Heresy, which
serves as the American center and textual archive for Speculative Realism and Non
Philosophy http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/why-ecology-cannotbe-without-nature/
Timothy Mortons Ecology without Nature is a fairly disappointing text. In many
ways it reads like notes on postmodern theory which vaguely concern nature or,
more specifically the aesthetics of nature. As Paul has noted here Mortons
classification of nature leaves something to be desired as he calls nature
transcendental (14) and furthermore that nature is by its nature juridical and
normative (via the use of natural). Mortons text does not seem to do much work
beyond the posthumanities which has been done better by others and it would
seem that a serious aesthetic engagement with nature should address how
aesthetic concerns override nature as that which we are in and made of. The recent
struggle over constructing an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound is a perfect
example of over aestheticizing nature. The construction was resisted primarily on
aesthetic grounds simply because the swinging blades would disturb the view of
wealthy landowners. The construction was also fought by local tribes as potentially
threatening burial sites. The primary opposition collapses aesthetic concerns with
anti-industrialization creating a false choice between developing clean power and
preserving nature. This choice relies on the natural versus the unnatural. The divide
between the natural and the unnatural is rooted in the denaturalization of thought
where the emergence of thought itself may be purported to be the advent of such a
split. Thought is not however a de-naturalized or denaturalizing event, it is natures
attempt to become an object to itself. Simply put thought is still natural. This very
split however, orbiting the advent of thought, is subsumed under the dual treatment
of Pierre Hadot between the Promethean and the Orphic, between nature as that
which we tie to the rack and that which we deify. This division is self evident even in
cultural examples as brainless as Camerons Avatar where the Promethean and the
Orphic battle one another. As long as nature ocillates between transcendence and
substance (and is neglected as process) as it is doomed to be according to Morton,
there is no chance of understanding the posthumanaties without the specter of
anthrocentrism.

TurnNature Good
Our Ecocriticism is key to challenge the conception of Natures
Effect of real ideological belief And runs in opposition to
postmodernism.
Morton, 7Timothy, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice
University, Ecology Without Nature, p. 17-18
Some will accuse me of being a postmodernist, by which they will mean that I
believe that the world is made of text, that there is nothing real. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The idea of nature is all too real, and it has an all too real
effect upon all too real beliefs , practices, and decisions in the all too real world.
True, I claim that there is no such "thing " as nature, if by nature we mean some
thing that is single, independent, and lasting. But deluded ideas and ideological
fixations do exist. "Nature " is a focal point that compels us to assume certain
attitudes . Ideology resides in the attitude we assume toward this fascinating obj
ect. By dissolving the object, we render the ideological fixation inoperative. At least,
that is the plan. The ecocritical view of "postmodernism," for which " theory" is a
shibboleth, has much in common with the English dislike of the French Revolutionindeed, it is in many ways derived from it. 35 " Theory," goes the argument, is cold
and abstract, out of touch. 36 It forces organic forms into boxes that cannot do
them j ustice. It is too calculating and rational. "Postmodernism " is j ust the latest
version of this sorry state of affairs . Of course, the English position against the
French was its own abstraction, a self-imposed denial of history that had already
happened- the beheading of Charles I, for instance.Academics are never more
intellectual than when they are being antiintellectual. No self-respecting farmer
would comport himself or herself quite like Aldo Leopold or Martin Heidegger. What
could be more postn10dern than a professor reflexively choosing a social and
subjective view, such as that of a farmer ? What could be more postmodern than
ecocriticism, which, far from being naive, consciously blocks its ears to all
intellectual developments of the last thirty years, notably (though not necessarily all
at once ) feminism, anti-racism, antihomophobia, deconstruction ? Just as the
Reagan and Bush administrations attempted a re-run of the 1 9 5 0s, as if the 1 9
60s had never happened, so ecocriticism promises to return to an academy of the
past. It is a form of postmodern retro.If ecocritics dislike what I say, however, so will
post-structuralists. Post-structuralism-criticism that acts as if the 1 9 60s had
occurredhas its own views of nature, though it may not name it so baldly. It is j ust
that these views are supposedly more sophisticated than previous ones. There is
still the basic search for something " in between" categories such as subj ect and
object, fact and value. There exists a class divide between the enjoyment-objects of
ecocritical-conservative and post-structuralist-radical readers . If ecocritics prefer
Aldo Leopold's almanac style, complete with cute illustrations, post-structuralists
tend to go for the latest compilation al bum by an ambient techno DJ. It may not be
Beethoven, but it is still polite at a cocktail party or art opening, if not more so.
Leopold and The Orb are really two sides of the same coin, according to ecocritique.
Whether they are highbrow or middlebrow, installation or pastoral symphony,

artworks exhibit what I call ecomimesisJ a rhetorical form described in detail in

Chapter 1, and ex-plored throughout this book. Thunderbird o r Chardonnay, retro o
r futuristic, it's all the same ecomimesis. Postmodernism is mired in aestheticism. It
freezes irony into an aesthetic pose. When I suggest that we drop the concept of
nature, I am saying that we really drop it, rather than try to come up with hastily
conceived, " new and improved " solutions, a new form of advertising language. This
is about what you think "without" means in the title of this book. Derrida's profound
thinking on the "without," the sansJ in his writing on negative theology comes to
mind. Deconstruction goes beyond j ust saying that something exists, even in a "
hyperessential " way beyond being. And it goes beyond saying that things do not
exist .. '!? " Ecology without nature " is a relentless questioning of essence, rather
than some special new thing. Sometimes the utopian language of a writer such as
Donna Haraway rushes to jerry-build ideas like "natureculture." 38 These nonnatures are still nature, based on hopeful interpretations of emerging ideas across
disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, and anthropology, ideas that turn out
to be highly aesthetic. Chapter 1 focuses on a set of alternatives to traditional ideas
of nature that lie just to the side of it. Assuming that nature itself is too soft a target
these days, I analyze possible ways of thinking the same idea bigger, wider, or
better under the general heading of " ambience." To get properly beyond
postmodernism's pitfalls, genuinely critical To get properly beyond postmodernism's
pitfalls, genuinely critical ecocriticism would engage fully with theory. If we consider
the non theological sense of nature, the term collapses into impermanence and
history- two ways of saying the same thing. Life-forms are constantly coming and
going, mutating and becoming extinct. Biospheres and ecosystems are subj ect to
arising and cessation. Living beings do not form a solid prehistorical, or
nonhistorical ground upon which human history plays. But nature is often wheeled
out to adjudicate between what is fleeting and what is substantial and permanent.
Nature smoothes over uneven history, making its struggles and sufferings illegible.
Given that much ecocriticism and ecological literature is primitivist, it is ironic that
indigenous societies often refer to nature as a shape-shifting trickster rather than as
a firm basis . The final word of the history of nature is that nature is history. "
Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical." 39

TurnWorld-Making Good
Even if theyre right that there was never one stable world,
that doesnt make the process of world-making a bad one
Morton throws the baby out with the bathwater and makes
ethical action impossible
Mitchell, 13PhD, Dr. Audra, Professor of Politics @ NYU, Apocalypse then:
worldliness after the end of the world, Nov 18, Worldly IR,
http://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/apocalypse-then-worldliness-after-theend-of-the-world/. //BR
Whats more, he works hard to dissolve one of the few concepts that could form a
basis of an ethics for the end of the world. He focuses much of his attack on the
concept of world, one of the few ideas powerful enough to harness human
attachment and care on a large scale and to translate these affects into ethical
action. In fairness to Morton, he uses the term world in a highly specific and welldelineated way albeit one which is almost the diametric opposite from my own
understanding of it. Morton adopts a Heideggerian notion of world as sphere to
which humans have privileged (if not exclusive) access. World, from this
perspective, is a reified object which floats in a metaphysical void, immune to the
extrusions of other objects and to change. This is, from my viewpoint, an extremely
limiting notion of world. I prefer the non-metaphysical (and post-Heideggerian)
conception of world developed by Jean-Luc Nancy (see my previous post on this
topic). Nancy also believes that (the) world is being destroyed, or at least
exhausted, by the processes of globalization and the over-saturation of meaning.
But at the same time, he is concerned with understanding how a new world can
emerge without metaphysical grounding. Like Morton, Nancy suggests that the
event (like the object) ultimately withholds itself or withdraws, leaving a strange
absence of presence. It is from this nothing that world cultivates itself, as a form
of creation-as-being. World from this perspective, is being-with, or the direct
relation of beings to one another. It has no outside, no metaphysics and no
teleology. It is also the condition of being-toward that is, the co-constitution of
plural beings rather than a metaphysical plane in which beings are separated. This
seems to be very much in line with the object-oriented ontology that Morton
espouses. For me, a world is an instantiation of the conditions of worldliness
discussed here just as, for Morton, what we see of hyperobjects are instantiations
of conditions like viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation and phasing. In other
words, there are conceptions of world that seem to fit very well with Mortons
notion of hyperobjects. But I dont want to gloss over Mortons rejection of world as
a matter of a difference in rhetoric or interpretation . When Morton says that the
world has ended, he is certainly referring to the notion of a metaphysical world.
This is also the case in Nancys work. But Nancy also urges humans should address
themselves to (not produce) a new world emerging in the wake of this ending. If I
understand him correctly, Morton argues that humans should do away with worlds
and world-making altogether in other words, that world can only be a
metaphysical concept. This, I think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Certainly, we can and should do away with the idea that there is a stable,
unchanging world, a separate ontological plane reserved for humans. But can we
really exist without the notion of attachment to and care for other beings that
shapes non-metaphysical notions of world? I think not. One of the main reasons is
that, even if we are able to grasp, at least to some extent, other temporal and
physical scales (whether macro or micro), we still experience ourselves, along with
other living beings, in a meso-level in which we perceive some degree of stasis or
consistency. In other words, even if we can try to see our lives from the perspective
of a planet (like the fictional Melancholia), we cannot actually live in that spatiotemporal scale. Instead, we live in a scale that allows, and also forces, us to overlap
with the lives of other beings. This means that we can experience attachments to
other beings, even if these attachments are temporary. Simply because these
beings (and we) will not exist in the future does not mean that we should not care
for them as they are now. This is akin to saying that we should love in the full
knowledge that we will lose the beings we love, or that they will change irrevocably.
In other words, we should not try to save the world by attempting, in vain, to arrest
change, or by denying finitude from behind the windshields of fantasy worlds. But
there is nothing wrong with remaining attached to our world(s) in a melancholy way:
that is, caring for them in the full knowledge that they are finite . From this
perspective, it is crucial to hold onto a sense of worldliness at the end of the world.
This enables us to avoid the two horns of apocalyptic reasoning: the reactionary and
futile desire to capture the world in a freeze frame; and the nihilistic attitude that
nothing matters unless it is forever. Instead, we need an ethics of care for finite
and dying worlds, and for the attachments between beings that constitute them. At
the end of the day (world?), it is these attachments that save us from falling into the
paralysis that grips Justine in Melancholia. She spends a great deal of the film inert,
unable to eat, move or think. She even plunges into a dark mood in which she
claims that no one will mourn the Earth or the evil life that it fostered. In short,
she is aware of her conditions but can not find a way to be within them. I worry that
banishing world as a concept will produce precisely this mood. Thats why its
interesting to follow Justines arc throughout the film. At various points, she tries to
merge with the Earth, whether by lying naked in the moonlight or immersing herself
in a creek. And at the end of the film, as Earth is pulled into Melancholias
gravitational field, she mourns the planet to which she initially denies any
attachment. This is reflected in the tears running down her face in the final scene,
and the force with which she grips the hands of her sister and nephew. Despite her
attitude of fatalistic acceptance and her rejection of redemption, she faces the end
of the world by building a small world the magical cave. She co-constitutes this
tiny world with her loved ones along with some sticks, soil, trees, grass and air
which are just as integral to the magical cave as the humans that sit inside it. In so
doing, she makes one final attempt to co-constitute a world in the face of absolute
finitude. I suspect (although I may be wrong) that Morton would see this as a
collapse into the fantasy of world-building in the face of terror. But I think its
something quite different. Justine creates this world, and fully experiences it,
knowing fully that it will not save her or anyone/thing else. It is an ethical act
without instrumentalism, without an end. It is an expression of love for, and in, an
ending world. This, from my perspective, is an attitude that can ground ethics in the

face of radical finitude. Only with a melancholic sense of the world, and love for it,
can humans confront the enormity of the challenges that face them without being
paralyzed by fear or nihilism.

TurnMorton = Hierarchies
Mortons ecology without nature naturalizes social hierarchies
which materialize themselves in the domination of the nonhuman world
Laurence Coupe 26 AUGUST 2010 senior lecturer in English, Manchester
Metropolitan University. He is editor of The Green Studies Reader (2000) and author
of Myth (2009). http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/413200.article
About 15 years ago, the poet Gary Snyder published an article titled "Is Nature
Real?". In it he made a heartfelt complaint: "I'm getting grumpy about the slippery
arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectuals trying to knock nature and
knock the people who value nature and still come out smelling smart and
progressive." He had in mind those literary theorists and philosophers who, having
discovered the joys of deconstruction, think they are being ever so clever in
declaring nature to be nothing more than a cultural construct. As a Zen Buddhist,
Snyder is fully aware that the standard human experience of nature is riddled with
illusion. But in all his writings, he has always insisted that it would be absurd to infer
that there is no such thing as nature; Zen, after all, involves learning to live at one
with it. It might be said that post-structuralist thinking attempts something similar
to the Buddhist exposure of illusion, but it falls far short of it when it merely results
in a high-handed denial of the more-than-human world (here I use David Abrams'
phrasing). I am afraid to say that this is what seems to happen in the course of
Timothy Morton's new book, The Ecological Thought. Let me say that I do appreciate
what Morton is attempting to do: that is, correct our unthinking attitudes to nature or Nature, as he calls it - to make us think more carefully about the way we reify,
consume or idealise it. But alas, the effect is far more deconstructive than
reconstructive: "In the name of ecology, we must scrutinize Nature with all the
suspicion a modern person can muster. Let the buyer beware." Morton's case for a
natureless ecology is not aided by the fact that he has such difficulty in defining it.
"Ecology has to do with love, loss, despair and compassion. It has to do with
depression and psychosis ... It has to do with reading and writing ... It has to do with
sexuality." That is from the introduction, but after nearly 80 pages we are none the
wiser: "The ecological thought is about people - it is people." Nor does it get much
clearer by the final page, I'm afraid. If we can trace a thesis, it is that, as far as
nature is concerned, we should move from a Romantic-style piety towards a
postmodern scepticism. In other words, we must abandon our loyalty to our local
place and embrace the wider sphere of global space. It is perplexing, however, that
Morton should invoke Buddhism to convey this sense of space: he shows no
knowledge of Snyder's well-informed Buddhist ecology, but seems to rely on the
odd insight gleaned from a fortnight's holiday in Tibet. Philosophically, in fact, he is
much closer to Marxism than to Buddhism. Hence his agitprop denunciation of
ecological thinkers such as Arne Naess and James Lovelock: "Deep ecology, which
sees humans as a viral blip in the big Gaian picture, is nothing other than laissezfaire capitalism in a neofascist ideological form." If such pronouncements make one
wince, at least Morton's political leanings mean that he feels obliged to address the

ideas of the most important reinterpreter of Marxist theory of the 20th century,
namely Theodor Adorno. But again, it is worrying that Morton seeks to draw on that
philosopher's specific insights while discounting the central importance he gave to
the concept of nature. It was Adorno who insisted that "domination over nature is
paid for with the naturalisation of social domination" (to use Simon Jarvis' succinct
summary). And it was Adorno who memorably declared: "Art is not nature, but
wants to redeem what nature promises." There is an interesting book to be written
about Adorno's importance for ecological thought, but it would not be one dedicated
to the idea that you can have ecology without nature. While I am sure that many
readers will benefit from the challenge of reading Morton, I hope they then go back
to Adorno. If they also go back to Snyder, so much the better.

A2 Agency Impact
They makes commodity fetishism natural by assigning agency
for objects its overly empirical analysis precludes an analysis
of the social forces that produce it
Wolfe, 2k12
Ross, University of Chicago, On Commodities and the False Liberation of the Object,
June 19th, 2012,http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/on-commodities-andthe-false-liberation-of-the-object/
Utisz hits the nail on the head when he mentions Object-Oriented Ontologys
obsessive mania to avoid anything that even remotely resembles
anthropocentrism. For the movements adherents, human beings are just one
kind of object leading an unprivileged existence within a more inclusive democracy
of objects, to use Bryants terminology (though Im not quite sure how inhuman
objects can constitute a demos). So while Object-Oriented Ontology is quick to
attribute the category of agency, a faculty usually reserved solely for
human subjects, to non-human objects (Latours actants), itis slower to admit
the qualitative difference of human agents from the rest of nature. A microcosm
of this tendency appears in Levi Bryants post concerning his rather opaque concept
of wilderness ontology, in which he collapses the distinction between human and
non-human architectural enterprises. [T]here is, in a wilderness
ontology, no categorical distinction between the natural and the cultural, the
human and the natural, asserts Bryant. There is just a flat field
where, occasionally, human creations happen to populate this field in
much the same way that we occasionally come across the marvelous
architectural feats of termites on the African and Australian
plains. The astounding difference between anthills or termite mounds, which
are the blind product of natural social instinct, and a modern skyscraper, a
profoundly unnatural, geometricized conglomeration of synthetic materials like
ferro-concrete and glass, designed by an architect or team of architects all traces
of this qualitative difference disappear within a shapeless mass of
equivocation. And this is what returns us, circuitously, to the problem of
commodity fetishism in the first place. For one of the most pernicious features
of the commodity is its tendency to naturalize its own existence within the collective
consciousness of society. The existing social relations it engenders are reified into a
bizarre sort of second nature, wity its own set of seemingly immutable laws and
forces. Or, as Lukcs explained it: [M]en are constantly smashing, replacing, and
leaving behind the natural, irrational, and actually existing bonds, while, on the
other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality that they have created and
made, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable
necessity as was the case earlier with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the
social relations which appear in this form). And this is what separates the
speculative realist approach of Object-Oriented Ontology from the critical
realist approach of Marxism. There is nothing in the positiveconstitution of the
commodity would suggest that there is anything peculiar about it; in enumerating

its objective qualities, the social matrix that engendered it is nowhere to

be found. The analysis thus undertaken rises no higher than the level of the
empirical, extracting only the metaphysical properties from the datum of
immediate experience. By contrast, the ruthlessly critical essence of Marxism
presumes a radically anti-empirical approach to the study of reality. Nothing is as it
immediately seems. For only through a rigorous dialectical investigation is
one able to discover the quasi-theological roots of the commoditys
existence. Through this method the underlying category of socially congealed
labor-time is exposed, which allows for the possibility of exchange and a
potential equivalence between otherwise fundamentally different objects
of use. The physical immediacy of the commodified object conceals its dark
origins in the web of social relations, contained within its value-dimension. In
the case of commodity fetishism, a social relation between people becomes
objectified as a permanent state of affairs that exists independent of their own
activity, as just the way things are. Or, as Lukcs put it, a relation between
people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a phantom
objectivity, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing
as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between
people. Bryant thus rightly quotes a passage from Adorno that confirms this
totalizing logic of homogeneity within capital and in the commodity fetish in
particular: The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract
universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle
of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle
there would be no barter; it is through barter that non-identical individuals and
performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle
imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total.

Only human liberation is tangible-anything else is abstract

Wolfe, 2k12 Ross, University of Chicago, On Commodities and the False
Liberation of the Object, June 19th,
2012,http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/on-commodities-and-the-falseliberation-of-the-object/
The liberation of anything non-human is a
decidedly abstract notion. Unlike their non-human animal counterparts, humans are
able to sublimate their primordial drives and urges in order to pursue rational
action. As Freud famously pointed out, this formed the entire basis for any further
possibility of civilization. For despite his animal origins, the first seeds of selfconsciousness and free will were gradually awakened in the mind of man. The
natural instincts that drove him mindlessly toward the satisfaction of this or that
primitive desire were gradually suppressed,and sacrificed so that man might
cultivate the earth and himself along with it. This is taught not only by Hegel in his
dialectic of the master and the slave, but also (as mentioned) by Freud, who saw
that the redirection or sublimation of these natural instincts toward conscious ends
was a prerequisite for society. Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous
feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical
activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized

life, wrote Freud. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that
sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by
civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third
place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook
the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much
it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some
other means?) of powerful instincts. Humans, who can approximate or aspire
toward the ideal of Kantian freedom, self-governing rational autonomy, apart from
pathological drives,instincts, and inclinations, are therefore uniquely poised to take
hold of the emancipatory opportunities offered by society. Human liberty is thus a
concrete, real thing, easily intelligible to anyone. By contrast, concepts such as
animal liberation or (in the present case) the liberation of objects are hopelessly
abstract. For what sort of rights or freedoms might an animal possess, slavishly
following its most base instincts? Even more difficult to grasp is how objects might
ever be liberated from their commodity form. This liberation, should it be called
such at all, would not be a liberation for the objects themselves, but for the society
that utilizes them.

A2 Root Cause/Human Violence

The Atmospheres of difference society creates underpins our
understanding of the environment and forecloses nature as
space of political strategies.
Morton, 7Timothy, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice
University, Ecology Without Nature, 166-168)
The second type of distraction is critical absorption .69 This form is enabled by two
phenomena: synesthesia and the inherent emptiness of the perception dimension.
Children's toys are good examples of synesthetic things, evoking a range of
responses from eyes, ears, touch, and smell all at once. Food is profoundly
synesthetic. It goes in our mouths while we look around the table. The synesthetic
manifold makes it impossible to achieve the distance nece ssary to objectify and
aestheticize the object. Far from generating the smoothness of the Wa gnerian total
work of art, where music, theater, and other media are fused together to create a
compelling phantasmagorical sheen, synesthesia makes clear that experience is
fragmented and inconsistent. Benj amin's argument about art in our times works its
way through the aesthetic dimension all the way to the perceptual level. Aesthetics
derives from perception (Greek aisthanesthai "to perceive"). But the history of the
aesthetic has been the story of how bodies, and especially nonvisual sense organs,
have been relegated and gradually forgotten, if not entirely erased. Benjamin claims
that "the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points
of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They
are mastered gradually by ha bit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation." "
Reception in a state of distraction" would be more akin to walking through a
building than to contemplating a canvas.70 Perceptual events only appear in
difference to one another. Phenomenology has delineated how perception involves a
dynamic relationship with its obj ects. Current neurophysiology is developing a
quantum theory of perception, borrowing the Gestalt idea of the phi phenomenonthe way the mind j oins up strobing, flickering images to obtain the illusion of
movement. But instead of confirming a holistic world in which object and subj ect fit
each other like a hand in a glove, the reduction of perception to a sequence of dots
enables us to demystify it. The perception dimension is effectively devoid of
independent, determinate conceptual contents. In his project for an aesthetics of
nature, Gernot Bohme has suggested that " atmosphere " is inherently differential.
By moving from one atmosphere to another we become aware of them.?1 This is
not rigorous enough. Since atmosphere, as Bohme allows, is a phenomenological
thing-since it involves consciousness as well as an object of some kind, which is
itself a m anifold of bodily sensation and events happening outside the body-then it
is inevitably not only spatial but also temporal. A shower of rain is atmospherically
different if you stand in it for two hours, as opposed to five minutes. The " same"
atmosphere is never the " same " as itself. This is a matter not of ontological nicety,
but of political urgency. The notion of atmosphere needs to expand to include
temporality. Climate ( as in climate change) is a vector field that describes the
momentum of the atmosphere-the rate at which the atmosphere keeps changing. A

map of atmospheric momentum would exist in a phase space with many

dimensions. The neglect of temporality in thinking a bout the weather is why it is
practically impossible to explain to people that glo bal warming might result in
pockets of cooling weather. Even more strictly, atmosphere is subj ect to the same
paradox as identity-it does for the weather what identity does for the idea of self.
For something to resemble itself it must be different-otherwise it would j ust be itself
and there would be no resem blance. Identity means " being the same as" oneself
(Latin idemJ "the same as " ). Since an atmosphere requires a perceiver, j ust as a
text requires a reader, its identity is always a matter of resem blance. The re-mark,
which differentiates between what is inside and outside its frame, also appears
onthe inside o f the frame. A cloud o f flower scent is only " an " atmosphere
(consistent and unique) because an act of framing differentiates itself from the
other smells that are pervading the vicinity. In this respect, the am bient stasis we
were examining in Chapter 1 is yet another example of an illusion of something
lying " in between"-a moving stillness. Even conventional visual art, which is read
over time, is not utterly still. Perception is a process of differentiation. It involves
Derridean diffhanceJ that is, both differing and deferment. There is a quality of "to
come " built into hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, smelling. Perception appears
utterly direct: this is a red ball; that is a quiet sound. But a process by which objects
of sense perceptions differ from each other, like words in a text, underpins this
directness. Our capacity to " make things out" is also an ability to hold things in a
beyance; we can't tell what something " is " yet; we need to keep looking. Thinking
like this retains aesthetics as a basis for ethics, but in a paradoxical way.72
Curiously, the emptiness of perception guarantees that perceptual events are not j
ust nothing. A certain passion and desire are associated with perception. In the
perception dimension, belonging has dissolved into longing. Unless we are rigorous
about perception and the philosophy and politics of distraction, it is likely that
distraction will become a political version of the " new and improved " syndrome.
We could regard distraction as a special aesthetic appreciation, hovering nicely in
between aestheticizing objectification and tuning out altogether. Any critical bite
would be lost. This is urgent, since art is now being produced that wants to
internalize distraction. Ambient music is music you do not have to listen to front and
center. You cannot take in an installation like a painting on a wall. And, at the level
of ecology, we are being asked to bathe in the environing ocean of our surroundings
as a means to having a better ethical stance toward species and ecosystems. "
Automated" critique-sitting back, relaxing, and letting the system do it for you-is j
ust ignorance, the first kind of distraction. At some level, respecting other species
and ecosystems involves a choice . This choice is saturated with contingency (it is
our choice) and desire (we want something to be otherwise ) . There is no place
outside the sphere of this contingent choice from which to stand and assess the
situation-no " nature " outside the problem of global warming that will come and fill
us in on how to vote. Ecology has taken us to a place of " no metalanguage," in the
strong Lacanian sense. Even the position of knowing that cannot exist outside the
dilemma we are facing. This is elegantly summed up by Bruno Latour, writing on the
1 9 9 7 Kyoto meetings to tackle global warming: "Politics has to get to work without
the transcendence of nature."73 To dissolve the aura, then, is rigorously to
interrogate the atmosphere given off by ecomimesis. In Romantic, modern, and

postmodern hands, ecomimesis is a "new and improved " version of the aesthetic
aura. By collapsing the distance, by making us feel "embedded" in a world at our
fingertips, it somehow paradoxically returns aura to art with a vengeance. If we get
rid of aura to o fast, the end result is abstract express ionist eco-schlock that would
look good on the wall of a bank. But what would a slow-motion approach to aura
look like ? We could start by ruthlessly standing up to the intoxicating atmosphere
of aura . Seeing it with clear, even utilitarian eyes, lyrical atmosphere is a function
of rhythm: not just sonic and graphic rhythm (the pulse of marks on the page and
sounds in the mouth), but also the rhythm of imagery, the rhythm of concepts . The
juxtapositions in Wo rdsworth and Blake set up complex rhythms between different
kinds and levels of framing device. If atmosphere is a function of rhythm then it is
literally a vibe: a specific frequency and amplitude of vibration. It is a material
product rather than a mystical spirit-it is as mystical as a heady perfume or narcotic
fumes.

Alt Answers

Alt FailsNo Political Spillover

Policy action is key to solving the impact of the K
Bennett, 2012 Professor of political science, John Hopkins
University
[Jane, Spring 2012, Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton New Literary
History, Volume 43, Number 2, Muse]//SGarg

the distinction between objects and things is ir- relevant for his
purposes, perhaps because he does not want to restrict himself unduly to the (weird)
physicality of objects or to the power that they exhibit in (relatively) direct, bodily
encounters with us. I am more focused on this naturalist realm, and here I find the term thing
or body better as a marker for individuation, better at highlighting the way certain edges within
Harman says that

an assemblage tend to stand out to certain classes of bodies. (The smell and movement of the mammal to the tick,
to invoke Uexkulls famous example.13) Thing

or body has advantages over object, I

think, if ones task is to disrupt the political parsing that yields only active (American,
manly) subjects and passive objects. Why try to disrupt this parsing? Because we are daily confronted
with evidence of nonhuman vitalities actively at work around and within us . I also do so because the
frame of subjects and objects is unfriendly to the intensified ecological awareness
that we need if we are to respond intelligently to signs of the breakdown of the
earths carrying capacity for human life.

The alt fails and refuses to craft a political strategy

Catriona Sandilands November/December 2010 Professor and Canada
Research Chair in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University (Toronto).
She is co-editor (with Bruce Erickson) of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics,
Desire (2010) and, for 2011, President of the Association for Literature, Environment
and Culture in Canada (ALECC). Ecology without Politics?
Although I understand that Morton's intent is not programmatic, however, one claim
leaves me unconvinced: the idea that the radical openness to ecological uncertainty
that is the book's primary creative intent is also to serve "as an operating system
for politics: it doesn't tell you what to do, exactly, but it opens your mind so you can
think clearly about what to do." I agree entirely with Morton that the optimism of
environmentally inflected consumer capitalism, with its easy light bulb solutions and
how-to guides, is in desperate need of the kind of melancholic, uncomfortable,
sometimes downright miserable questioning that Morton's dark ecology demands.
But politics is not simply "what to do" (no lesser a recent thinker than Hannah
Arendt has argued precisely that aesthetic relationships form an essential basis for
political deliberation), and there is something unsatisfying in Morton's assertion that
a position of openness to the strange stranger will provide the "clarity" necessary to
guide ecological politics. What, then, does a "dark" politics actually mean, other
than what turns out to be quite a comfortable, rationalistic understanding of the
relationship between ecology and politics ("if we see nature correctly, we will act
appropriately")? Is there something more profound, for example, to the idea of
aesthetic appreciation as a general evolutionary trait than simply its dislodging of
human presumptions of contemplative superiority? Is it enough simply to reimagine

"ways of being together that don't depend on self-interest"? I think not; I think
ecological politics demands not only The Ecological Thought but also The Ecological
Debate. Politics does not emerge only from thinking ("in the future, we will all be
thinking the ecological thought"), but also from the challenges to thinking, even
ecologically correct thinking of/from "the mesh," with which the Other presents us,
always. That's what politics is about.
The kernel of a transformative ecological politics is, however, definitely present in
this work. Meditate with it. Get frustrated with it. Revisit The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner because of it. But read it. [End Page 11]

Alt FailsDoesnt Get Cap

Object oriented ontology is incapable of understanding the
social organization of commodities under productive forces it
is the enactment of labor that makes the commodity exist.
Wolfe, 2k12 Ross, University of Chicago, On Commodities and the False
Liberation of the Object, June 19th,
2012,http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/on-commodities-and-thefalse-liberation-of-the-object/
In other words, if I may draw some conceptual distinctions of my own, ObjectOriented Ontology does emphatically deny that the existence of objects is
dependent on their relation to human cognition, to their mental representation by a
subject. However, it would be preposterous to assert that objects exist
independently of the objective forces of the social relations of production. An
object that has been subsumed beneath the commodity-form could not
appear in such a form were it not for these shadowy relations 0f
production that take place behind the backs of these objects, to
paraphrase Hegel. Even in precapitalist modes of production, when the
preponderance of the commodity-form was not as yet total, the appearance
of objects that were the products of human labor would clearly be the result of
relations of production specific to that social formation. The mark of their artifice
would be inscribed in their objectivity. And so again, the existence of certain
objects could not appear external to the productive relations that gave them their
shape and constitution.This point does not seem to be controversial, and I believe
that most Object-Oriented Ontologists would gladly concede it. However, I should
like to make the further claim commodities do not exist independently of their
relation to cognition, either. In fact, it is only through their social recognition
as commodities that they can function as such, as essentially fungible and
equivalent to one another. This recognition alone provides the key to how
commodities can function as fetishes, how they are able to reify the
conditions of the present into the seemingly timeless conditions that
obtain in all societies, past and present. For it is only through their
transfiguration into objects of ideology that qualitatively multiform objects, each
unique in the aspect of their utility, can be reduced to quantitatively uniform
equivalencies. The overarching thought-forms of society, the ruling ideologies,
allow (among other things) objects to be represented t0 the social subject as
commodities available in their quantifiable immediacy. Of course,it is through the
general social acceptance of this representation as empirically valid that
allows capitalist society to sustain itself, not as some sort of illusory veil
pulled over the eyes of the masses, but as an historically specific reality.
In his dialectical unmasking of this ideological fetishization, Marx notes that [t]he
categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this [relative] kind.
They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the
relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social
production, i.e., commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the

magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of
commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of
production. And it is precisely this representationalist aspect of commodity
fetishism that so constantly eludes the grasp of Object-Oriented Ontology.
Vigorously denying the legitimacy of correlationist philosophies, which hold that
the objects of experience arrive to the subject only in the form of
representation, Object-Oriented Ontology is unable to make sense of how the
phenomenon of reification or commodity fetishism takes place. Their realism is
such that it simply tries to bypass the eidetic apprehension of reality. This allows
for their unfettered speculation into the constitution of the real, without having to
bother with troublesome socio-epistemological questions of how subjects perceive
and misperceive the world. In fact, it is unclear whether or not the contemplative
subject of post-Cartesian philosophy vanishes entirely. This point is brought up in a
brilliant comment by the poster Utisz, who highlights not only the methodological
quandaries involved when Object-Oriented Ontology is forced to deal a counterintuitive concept like commodity fetishism, but also the superficial way in which
Marxist theory has been appropriated by members of the OOO movement. His
comment, which seems otherwise to have been ignored, runs as follows: I think this
would hold water if any of those who actually put forward OOO were that interested
in Marx and showed any desire to acquaint themselves with debates within Marxism
1850-2011 or were by any stretch of the imagination political activists. They seem
more interested in fighting anthropocentrism and riffing on a strange
combination of Leibniz, Whitehead and Arne Naess. Id recommend reading a
figure like Naess this is the sort of thing were really dealing with here. Of course
theres an orientation to things in Marx (critically not speculatively so, theres
the rub) as there was to objects in Hegel (critically and speculatively). But no
analysis of things in todays world can with any responsibility ignore or downplay
their relation to labour or to the subject respectively. A better approach would
be: no object-orientation without equal subject-orientation (the subject, yes,
scandalously different from rocks and flowers and bacteria), no speculation
without critical self-reflection, awareness of contradiction, paralogism,
etc. Object-orientation is forever caught in a dualism flailing around trying
to battle a supposed privelege of subject over object by merely plumping
enthusiasticaly for the other. Abstrakte Negation. No Glasnost for me, Im afraid.

Links to cap
John Bellamy Foster 2000 professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and
also editor of Monthly Review Marxs Ecologypage 1
The argument of this book is based on a very simple premise: that in order to
understand the origins of ecology, it is necessary to comprehend the new views of
nature that arose with the development of materialism and science from the
seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Moreover, rather than simply picturing
materialism and science as the enemies of earlier and supposedly preferable
conceptions of nature, as is common in contemporary Green theory, the emphasis
here is on how the development of both materialism and science promoted-indeed
made possible ecological ways of thinking. The overall discussion is structured

around the work of Darwin and Marx-the two greatest materialists of the nineteenth
century. But it is the latter who constitutes the principal focus of this work, since the
goal is to understand and develop a revolutionary ecological view of great
importance to us today; one that links social transformation with the transformation
of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological. The key
to Marx's thinking in this respect, it is contended, lies in the way that he developed
and transformed an existing Epicurean tradition with respect to rnaterialism and
freedom, which was integral to the rise of much of modern scientific and ecological
thought. In this Introduction, I will attempt to clarify these issues by separating at
the outset the questions of materialism and ecology-although the whole point of this
study is their necessary connection-and by time with a coherent picture of the
emergence of materialist ecology, in the context of a dialectical struggle over the
definition of the world.

Perm2acNature
Permutation do both Nature as a intersection between Space
and Place is good poltical to challenge capitalism.
Morton, 7Timothy, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice
University, Ecology Without Nature, 83-86
In The Communist ManifestoJ Marx and Engels state that under the current
economic conditions, "National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more
and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there
arises a world literature."1o If this idea is to mean more than people from several
countries writing the same thing in the same ways, it must include the idea that
writing in general can, under certain circumstances, meditate upon the idea of
world as such. This capacity to imagine a world is not unconnected to the
globalization of specific kinds of misery. It eventually becomes possible to sing a
song called "We Are the World," and wince about it, or to see the many levels of
painful irony within the phrase " United Nations."Ecology has reminded us that in
fact we are the world, if only in the negative. In material historical terms,
environmental phenomena participate in dialectical interplay ins ofar as they bring
an awareness of environmental negatives such as global warming, the Asian "brown
cloud," and toxic events such as Chernobyl. Such phenomena were already visible in
the Romantic period in the form of global epidemics such as yellow fever. Alan
Bewell's penetrating ecocritical study R o manticism and Colonial Disease shows
how such forms inspired writers to make ethical, political, and aesthetic accounts of
"miasma," a biological word that had regained the ethical charge given it in classical
Greece.ll Far from needing filling out with some positive "thing " such as "nature" or
the ecofeminist/Lovelockian image of Gaia, this negative awareness is just what we
need.Environmental Romanticism argues that globalization has undermined any
coherent sense of place. At least, that is an argument within Romantic and
ecocritical thinking. Such thinking aims to conserve a piece of the world or
subjectivity from the ravages of industrial capitalism and its ideologies . Place, and
in particular the local, have become key terms in Romantic ecocriticism's rage, as
impotent as it is loudrhetorical affect is in direct proportion to marginalization.
Moreover, this impotent rage is itself an ironic barrier to the kind of genuine (sense
of) interrelationship between beings desired, posite d, and predicted by ecological
thinking. Place and the local, let alone nation, entail subject positions-places from
which Romantic ideas of place make sense. For this reason, it is all the more
important to consider deeply the idea of place, and in general the Romantic attitude
to nature prevalent today. The fact that metabolic processes create dynamic
conditions that change both organism and environment means that nothing in
ecosystems remains the same. Materialism puts paid to "nature," itself an early
materialist term. Ulrich Beck has observed that the logic of unintended
consequences plays out in industrial society such that, despite class differences,
risk becomes increasingly democratic. Radiation is ignorant of national boundaries.
In a bitter irony, the equality dreamt of in the 1790s has come to pass-we are all
(almost) equally at risk from the environment itself. Nationality and cl ass affiliations
aside, we share the toxic legacy of Chernobyl. And no matter where in the world

capitalism puts its industry, giving rise to the recent illusion of a "post-industrial"
landscape, all societies are affected. No wonder ambient poetics has arisen to point
out utopias and dystopias that lie just beyond our reckoning. While nature writing
claims to break down subject-o bj ect dualismin the name of a brighter day, "highly
developed nuclear and chemical productive forces" do just the same thing. They
"abolish the foundations and categories according to which we have thought and
acted to this point, such as space and time, work and leisure time, factory and
nationstate, and even the borders between continents." Ironically, this is happening
at a moment when sciences of "nature without people " make it difficult to imagine
how we might address this abolition.]2 "Modernization " itself, observes Beck, "is
becoming reflexivej it is becoming its own them e." 1 3 The Frankfurt School had
already given voice to this . Ernst Bloch asserted that "where technology has
achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature ... the coefficient of known,
and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately." 14 One
name for this is postmodernism, but another name is ecology. The melancholy truth
of high postmodernism is that all its talk of "space," all the environmental
multimedia installations , are just the same as the lowbrow eco-schmalz that high
environmental art wants to eschew (the art of place rather than space ). They are
identical because, under current economic conditions, not only is there no placeJ but
there is also no space. Contemporary capitalism seeks to "annihilate space by time
"-and then to collapse time itself.15 When we consider it thus, the postmodern
insistence on space is a high-cultural denial, a mystification rather than a
theoretical breakthrough, flat-out contradicting obj ective conditions rather than
expressing them.Henri Lefebvre pioneered the idea that capitalism produced certain
kinds of space and spatiotemporal relations .16 Cap italism does not simply
construct ideas about sp ace; it creates actually existing, concrete spaces. In the
category of spaces unique to capitalism, Rem Koolhaas's "junkspace" is distinctive .
17 Space itself becomes one of the things that capitalism discards in its furious
progress, forever revolutionizing itself. Th us, "Junkspace is best enjoyed in a state
of postrevolutionary gawking." 1 8 So we are not just dealing with the kinds of
supermodern "non-place " analyzed by Marc Auge, who calls them "immense
parentheses." ]9 (Note the similarity to De Quincey's trope of parenthesisJ which the
previous chapter noted as a figure of ambience .) Concrete parenthesis is not just a
case of vast airports, but also of abandoned airports. Marx describes how capitalism
affects not only people, but also tools and buildings: Tools, machines, factory
buildings and containers are only of use in the labour process as long as they keep
their origin al shape, and are readyeach morning to enter into it in the same form.
And j ust as during their lifetime, tha t is to say during the labour process, they
retain their shap e independently of the product, so too after their death. The mortal
remains of machines, tools, workshops etc . , a lways continue to lead an existence
distinct from tha t of the product they helped to turn o ut. . . . The instrument
suffers the same fate as the man.20 " Empty" space-space that capitalism has left
relatively undeveloped- is intrinsic to capitalism, since the laws of capital may
dictate that a vacant lot is more profita ble over a certain span of time than one that
has been developed. Plot is a potential space, a limbo waiting to generate value.
Capitalism moves onto this empty stage, with its phantasmagoric carnival, leaving j
unkspace in its wake. Consider the idea of a ghost town. The leavings of capitalism

have a haunting quality, if there is not enough political will, or hard money, to relate
to them.2l But even when things get fixed up nicely, a certain erasure and silence is
evident, a heaviness like Levinas's there is) or a Raymond Chandleresque sense of
atmosphere as clue. Yves Klein's International Klein Blue, hanging in galleries
around the world as slabs of pigment made of precious stone suspended in a
commercial medium on canvas, is a perfect metaphor for, and not so metaphorical
embodiment of, the utopian face of abstract value, a space that " bathes " us in
potential paradise.22 Before and after the work of capital, there persists a curious
silence and absence marked by traces of misery and oppression.As Marx puts it, in a
pithy sentence that accounts for pastoral poetry and even nature writing and
ecocriticism: " First the labourers are driven from the land, and then the sheep
arrive."23 Capitalism modernizes agricultural space. The way the land appears
unoccupied is not a relic of an ancient prehistoric past, but a function of modernity:
"The last great process of expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil
is, finally the so-called 'clearing of estates', i.e. the sweeping of human beings off
them."24 Works such as Oliver Goldsmith's " The Deserted Village " mark this
process. The earth, air, and waters are so much potential space, as frontiers of
progress; in the wake of progress, they are so much j unkspace. Koolhaas: " Air,
water, wood: All are enhanced to produce . . . a parallel Walden, a new rainforest.
Landscape has become J unkspace, foliage as spoilage: Trees are tortured, lawns
cover human manipulations like thick pelts . . . sprinklers water according to
mathematical timeta bles."25

Our understanding nature as both a space and Place creates

aesthetic understanding of nature that run runs in opposition
to current Ecological criticism
Morton, 7Timothy, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice
University, Ecology Without Nature, 170-173
Instead of running away from Heidegger, left scholarship should encounter him all
the more rigorously in seeking to demystify place, in the name of a politics and
poetics of place . We must put the idea of place into question; hence an ecological
criticism that resists the idea that there is a solid metaphysical bedrock (Nature or
Life, for instance ) beneath which thinking cannot or should not delve. In the rush to
embrace an expanded view, the plangent, intense rhetoric of localism, the form of
ecological thinking that seems most opposed to glo balization and most resistant to
modern and postmodern decenterings and deconstructions, must not be allowed to
fall into the hands of reactionaries. Ins tead, the central fixations upon which
localism bases its claims must be examined. A left ecology must "get" even further
"into " place than bioregionalism and other Romantic 10calisms.81 Only then can
progressive ecocriticism establish a firm basis for exploring environmental justice
issues such as environmental racism, co lonialism, and imperialism. This basis is a
strong theoretical approach. If we restrict our examination to the citation of
ecological "content"-listing what is included and excluded in the thematics of the
(literary) text-we hand over aesthetic form, the aesthetic dimension and even
theory itself, to the reactionary wing of ecological criticism. The aesthetic, and in a
wider sense perception, must form part of the foundation of a thoroughly

transnational ecological criticism. If we do not undertake their task, virulent codings

of place will keep rearing their ugly heads. Place need not be a thing. It is with the
idea of thing that Heidegger's meditation on the work of art as a special place
begins. Heidegger tries to de-reify the idea of the thing. The work of art tells us
something about the nature of the thing. It is an opening, a "place " where
phenomena become available to us; a sense of the "thingliness" of things covered
over or denied in the notion of the thing as formed matter (ahumble things gather
together the entire environment, the social and natural place, of the peasant
woman. Heidegger's description opens the shoes to the "earth " (the things that are
not worked on by or with human hands), and to the "world" (the historical/cultural
dimension in which the shoes are used and gain significance). Similarly, the Greek
temple, a product of the "world " of Greek cultural/historical proj ects, opens the
space it inhabits such that we perceive the " earth," the stoniness of the stone, the "
breadth" of the sky.82 In another essay, it is the bridge that makes possible the
riverbank as a specific place.s3 Poetry is place, for Heidegger. In some deep sense,
it actually saves the earthsets it "free into its own presencing." s4 Heidegger turns
the shoes inside out to reveal the environment in which they come to exist. But
why, anachronism aside, did he choose a dirty pair of peasant shoes rather than,
say, something like a box-fresh pair of sneakers made in a sweatshop and worn in
the projects ? The environmentalness of the shoes is a function of modern capitalist
society despite Heidegger's best efforts to disguise this fact2. There is an
ideological flavor to the substance of Heidegger's description. It is a form of
Romanticism: countering the displacements of modernity with the politics and
poetics of place. The gesture is always aware of its futility. It is a cry of the heart in a
heartless world, a declaration that if we j ust think hard enough, the poisoned rain
of modern life will come to a halt. Meyer Shapiro's argument that these are a city
dweller's shoes undermines the lyrical heft of the passage, which does appear tied
to a heavy investment in the primitive and the feudal. But even on Heidegger's own
terms, the shoes are distinctly modern, in their very primitivism.85 derivation,
claims Heidegger, from the status of eq uipment), or the thing as a perceptual
manifold of substance and accidence. Heidegger's reading of the peas ant shoes
poetically renders the way in which these Romantic environmentalism is a flavor of
modern consumerist ideology. It is thoroughly urban, even when it is born in the
countryside. The poet who told us how to wander lonely as a cloud also told us for
the first time what it felt like to be lonely in a crowd. Wordsworth's descriptions of
London are among the most " environmental" of his entire oeuvre.86 So Heidegger
tries to re-establish the idea of place. He goes so far as to state that we could not
have space without place: the sureness of place enables us to glimpse the openness
of space itself.S? Heidegger finds an answer to the question of place . This is ironic,
since his idea of place is one of the most open and seemingly nonreified ones we
could imagine. Indeed, for Heidegger, place is the very opposite of closing or
closure. Place is the aperture of Being.ss Heidegger, however, closes the very idea
of openness. Place becomes a component of fascist ideology. The shoes are not
randomly chosen. Heidegger could have used a pho- Imagining Ecology without
Nature . 1 73 tograph of a dam, but the peasant shoes are the ideological fantasy
obj ect of a certain regressive strain in nationalism. Urban modernity and
postmodernity are already included even in pastoral/idyllic evocations of place, both

inside and outside the artwork. Edward Thomas 's "Adlestrop," which allows us to
reflect upon the ambient sounds of the English countryside, is enabled by a train j
ourney. When the " express train " stops " unwontedly" at the eponymous station,
when, in other words, the "world " of the train ( in Heidegger's language ) is
interrupted, the passengers are able to sense the earth. The express train
necessarily traverses the space between cities. Notice the first wrinkle in the
Heideggerian view. The earth actually interrupts the world-Heidegger's term is " j
ut"-so that the more world we have, the more earth j uts through; thus giving rise to
the problem of the ambiguous role of technology. S9 Cities are present in the
negative, even in this little Edwardian poem about an overlooked place. Art
simultaneously opens up the earth and carves out a world in that earth. Heidegger
tends secretly to side with technology rather than Being, despite his stated
intentions. In fact, we could parody his view by declaring the obvious truth that the
environment (earth) has become more present precisely because humans have
been carving it up and destroying it so effectively. What remains of earth, on this
view, is really a ghostly resonance in the artwork itself. Perhaps all the
environmental art being produced both in high art and in kitsch (from experimental
noise music to Debussy for relaxation), is actually a symptom of the loss of the
existing environment as noncultural, nonhistorical earth. Heidegger, the philosopher
engrossed in deep ecological assaults on modern times, turns out to work for the
other side. As Avital Ronell brilliantly demonstrated, the Heideggerian call of
conscience, that which reminds us of our earthbound mission, is imagined as an alltootechnological telephone call.90

Perm2acObjects
Perm solves a system of considering objects and relations
makes for a better understanding
Bennett, 2012 Professor of political science, John Hopkins
University
[Jane, Spring 2012, Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton New Literary
History, Volume 43, Number 2, Muse]//SGarg

perhaps there is no need to choose between objects or their rela- tions. Since
everyday, earthly experience routinely identifies some effects as coming from
individual objects and some from larger systems (or, better put, from individuations within
material configurations and from the complex assemblages in which they participate), why not aim for a
theory that toggles between both kinds or magnitudes of unit? One would then
understand objects to be those swirls of matter , energy, and incipience that hold themselves
together long enough to vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate
momentum of the throbbing whole. The project, then, would be to make both
objects and relations the periodic focus of theoretical attention , even if it is impossible to
But

articulate fully the vague or vagabond essence of any system or any things, and even if it is impossible to give
equal attention to both at once.3 This is, I think, just what those passe philosophers Deleuze and Guattari do in A
Thousand Plateaus.

One of their figures for (what I am calling) the system dimension is

assemblage, another is plane of consistency . The latter is characterized by Deleuze and
Guattari as in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matter. 4 Neither
assemblage nor plane of consistency qualifies as what Harman describes as a rela- tional wildfire in which all
individual elements are consumed (191).

My point, in short, is that despite their robust attempts

to conceptual- ize groupings, Deleuze and Guattari also manage to attend carefully
to many specific objects, to horses, shoes, orchids, packs of wolves, wasps, priests,
metals, etc. Indeed, I find nothing in their approach inconsis- tent with the object-oriented philosophers claim
that things harbor a differential between their inside and outside or an irreducible moment of (withdrawn-from-view)

The example of A Thousand Plateaus also highlights the point that not all
theories of relationality are holistic on the model of a smooth organism . There are
interiority.

harmonious holisms but also fractious models of systematicity that allow for heterogeneity and even emergent
novelty within. These ontopictures are formally monistic but substantively plural. The whole
can be imaged as fractious and self-diversifying process of territorializations and deterritorializations (Deleuze and
Guattari) or as creative process (Bergson, Whitehead) or as some combination thereof (the various new
materialisms).5 Or take the model of relationality that William Connolly, following William James, calls protean

in contrast to both methodological individualism and organic holism,

connectionism figures relations as typically loose, incomplete, and themselves
susceptible to potential change. . . . The connections are punctuated by litter circulating in, between,
connection- ism:

and around them. Viewed temporally . . . connectionism presents a world in the making in an evolving universe
that is open to an uncertain degree.6

Perm solves viewing objects as isolated from systems is

rendered philosophically and politically moot
Bennett, 2012 Professor of political science, John Hopkins
University
[Jane, Spring 2012, Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton New Literary
History, Volume 43, Number 2, Muse]//SGarg

I find such attempts to do justice both to systems and things, to acknowledge the
stubborn reality of individuation and the essentially distributive quality of their
affectivity or capacity to produce effects, to remain philosophically and (especially)
politically productivefor consumerist culture still needs reminding of the fragile,
fractious con- nectedness of earthly bodies. Harman rejects the very framing of the issue as
things-operating-in- systems, in favor of an object-oriented picture in which aloof objects are positioned as the sole

yet, in the quo- tation below from Aesthetics as First

Philosophy, Harman, against that object-prejudice, finds himself theorizing a kind
of relation communicationbetween objects. He tries to insulate this object-to- object
encounter from depictions that also locate activity in the relation- ships themselves
or at the systemic level of operation, but I do not think that this parsing attempt
succeeds. To be honest, I dont quite see why it is worth the trouble, though it does testify to the purity of
locus of all the acting. And

Harmans commitment to the aloof object: The real problem is not how beings interact in a system: instead, the
problem is how they withdraw from that system as independent realities while somehow communicating through

some
dimensions of bodies are withdrawn from presence, but see this as partly due to the
role they play in this or that relatively open system. In the text quoted above, Harman goes on
the proximity, the touching without touching, that has been termed allusion or allure. I concur that

to defend the view that communication via proximity is not limited to that between human bodies. I like this point!
Morton makes a similar, antianthropocentric claim when he says that What spoons do when they scoop up soup is
not very different from what I do when I talk about spoons. . . . [N]ot because the spoon is alive or intelligent
(panpsychism), but because intelligence and being alive are aesthetic appearancesfor some other phenomenon,
including the object in question (215). By engaging in what Bruno Latour might call a horizontalizing of the

Morton and Harman allow their ecological sympathies to come to the

fore, sympathies which, in Harmans case, might not be so appar- ent given his
philosophers concern to always include objects of thought in the category of
objects. In the following quotation, however, Harman concerns himself explicitly with earthy,
ordinary objects: If it is true that other humans signal to me without being fully
present, and equally true that I never exhaust the depths of non-sentient beings
such as apples and sandpaper, this is not some special pathos of human
finitude. . . . When avalanches slam into abandoned cars, or snowflakes rustle the
needles of the quivering pine, even these objects cannot touch the full reality of one
another. Yet they affect one another nonetheless .7
ontological plane,

A2 Morton
Morton concedes there is no alt solvency
Bennett, 2012 Professor of political science, John Hopkins
University
[Jane, Spring 2012, Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton New Literary
History, Volume 43, Number 2, Muse]//SGarg

Morton also offers a pragmatic, political rationale for his devotion to the coy object:
no model of the whole (flowing or otherwise) can today help us cope with what he
elsewhere calls hyperobjects.8 And this is the part of his position that raises the strongest objection, I
think, to even a fractious-assemblage kind of holism. Hyperobjects are phenomena such as
radioactive materials and global warming. They are mind-blowing entities,
because their ahuman timescales and the extremely large or vastly diffused quality
of their occupation of space unravel the very notion of entity. It also becomes hard to see
how it is possible to think hyperobjects by placing them within a larger whole within which we humans are a
meaningful part, for hyperobjects render us kind of moot. For Morton, this

means that we need some

other basis for making decisions about a future to which we have no real sense of
connection. Evidence of the unthinkability of the hyperobject climate change is
the fact that conversations about it often devolve into the more conceptualizable
and manageable topic of weather. Weather, even with its large theater of operation, remains
susceptible to probabilistic analysis, and it can still be associated with the idea of a (highly complex) natural order.

Weather, in short, is still an object . But with climate change, its much harder, impossible, really,
says Morton, to sustain a sense of the existence of a neutral background against which human events can become

Climate change represents the possibility that the cycles and repetitions
we come to depend on for our sense of stability and place in the world may be the harbingers of
cataclysmic change.9 I agree, but also note that the terms mind-blowing and ahuman
timescales imply that we can indeed stretch ourselves to study how cli- mate
systems interact with capitalist systems to threaten our future on earth.
meaningful. . . .

Reps Answers

Policy 1st2ac
Policy framework before reps coalitions, anti-politics, and
zero impact.
Churchill, Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado, 96
[Ward, Semantic Masturbation on the Left: A Barrier to Unity and Action, From A
Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985-1995, Published by South End
Press, ISBN 0896085538, p. 460]
linguistic appropriateness and precision are of serious and
arrive at a
point of diminishing return. After that, they degenerate rapidly into liabilities rather
than benefits to comprehension. By now, it should be evident that much of what is mentioned in this
article falls under the latter category; it is, by and large, inept, esoteric, and semantically silly,
bearing no more relevance in the real world than the question of how many angels can dance on the
head of a pin. Ultimately, it is a means to stultify and divide people rather than
stimulate, and unite them. Nonetheless, such "issues" of word choice have come to dominate dialogue in
a significant and apparently growing segment of the Left . Speakers, writers, and organizers of all
persuasions are drawn, with increasing vociferousness and persistence, into heated
confrontations, not about what they've said, but about how they've said it . Decisions on
whether to enter into alliances, or even to work with other parties, seem more and more contingent
not upon the prospect of a common agenda but upon mutual adherence to certain
elements of a prescribed vernacular. Mounting quantities of progressive time, energy, and attention
There can be little doubt that matters of

legitimate concern. By the same token, however, it must be conceded that such preoccupations

are squandered in perversions of Mao's principle of criticism/self-criticismnow variously called process, line

there occurs a virtually endless stream of talk about

how to talk about "the issues." All of this happens at the direct expense of actually
understanding the issues themselves, much less doing something about them . It is
impossible to escape the conclusion that the dynamic at hand adds up to a pronounced
avoidance syndrome, a masturbatory ritual through which an opposition nearly
paralyzed by its own deeply felt sense of impotence pretends to be engaged in
something "meaningful." In the end, it reduces to tragic delusion at best, cynical
game playing or intentional disruption at worst. With this said, it is only fair to observe that it's
high time to get off this nonsense, and on with the real work of effecting positive
social change.
sharpening," or even "struggle"in which

Policy 1st1ar
Policy focus before reps
Adler and Haas 92 [Emanuel ADLER IR @ Hebrew Univ (Jerusalem) AND Peter
HAAS PoliSci @ UMass 92 Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation
of a Reflective Research Program International Organization 46 (1) p. 370-37]
Our critique of the approaches mentioned above should not be interpreted as reflecting a preference for poststructuralist, postpositivist, and radical

Rejecting the view

ofinternational relations as the mere reflections of discourses a nd habits-wherein
the word is power and the only power is the word-we nevertheless have incorporated
into our reflective approach the notion that the manner in which people and institutions
interpret and represent phenomena and structures makes a difference for the outcomes we can expect in international
relations." Thus, we adopt an ontology that embraces historical , interpretive factors, as
well as structural forces, explaining change in a dynamic way. This ontology reflects an epistemology
that is based on a strong element of intersubjectivity . So long as even a tenuous
link is maintained between objects and their representation, we can reject an
exclusive focus on words and discourse.By defending an epistemological and
ontological link between words and the objects with which they are commonly
associated, we believe that learning may occur through reflection on empirical
eventsrather than through their representation. Finally, epistemic communities should not be mistaken
for a new hegemonic actor that is the source of political and moral direction in society." Epistemic communities are not in
the business of controlling societies; what they control is international problems. Their approach is instrumental, and their
life is limited to the time and space defined by the problem and its solutions. Epistemic communities are neither
philosophers, nor kings, nor philosopher- kings.
interpretive analyses, although we do hope to build a bridge between structural and interpretive approaches.

A2 Reps = Reality2ac
Reps don't shape reality.
Balzacq 5 (Thierry, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at
Namur University, The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and
Context European Journal of International Relations, London: Jun 2005, Volume 11,
Issue 2)
However, despite important insights, this position remains highly disputable. The
reason behind this qualification is not hard to understand. With great trepidation my
contention is that one of the main distinctions we need to take into account while
examining securitization is that between 'institutional' and 'brute' threats. In its
attempts to follow a more radical approach to security problems wherein threats are
institutional, that is, mere products of communicative relations between agents, the
CS has neglected the importance of 'external or brute threats', that is, threats that
do not depend on language mediation to bewhat they are- hazards for human life.
In methodological terms, however, any framework over-emphasizingeither
institutional or brute threat risks losing sight of important aspects of a
multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, securitization, as suggested earlier, is
successful when the securitizing agent and the audience reach a common
structured perception of an ominous development. In this scheme, there is no
security problem except through the language game. Therefore, how problems are
'out there' is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them . This is

does not construct reality; at best, it

shapes our perception of it. Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it
empirically credible to hold that what we say about a problem would
not always true. For one, language

determine its essence. For instance, what I say about a typhoon would not change
its essence. The consequence of this position, which would require a deeper
articulation, is that some security problems are the attribute of the development
itself. In short, threats are not only institutional; some of them can actually wreck
entire political communities regardless of the use of language. Analyzing security
problems then becomes a matter of understanding how external contexts, including
external objective developments, affect securitization. Thus, far from being a
departure from constructivist approaches to security, external developments are
central to it.

A2 Reps = Reality1ar
Representations dont influence reality
Kocher 00 (Robert L., Author of The American Mind in Denial and Philosopher,
Discourse on Reality and Sanity,
http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/reality_sanity1.htm)
While it is not possible to establish many proofs in the verbal world, and it is
simultaneously possible to make many uninhibited assertions or word equations in
the verbal world, it should be considered that reality is more rigid and does not
abide by the artificial flexibility and latitude of the verbal world. The world of words
and the world of human experience are very imperfectly correlated. That is,
saying something doesn't make it true. A verbal statement in the world of words
doesn't mean it will occur as such in the world of consistent human experience I call
reality. In the event verbal statements or assertions disagree with consistent human
experience, what proof is there that the concoctions created in the world of words
should take precedence or be assumed a greater truth than the world of human
physical experience that I define as reality? In the event following a verbal assertion
in the verbal world produces pain or catastrophe in the world of human physical
reality or experience, which of the two can and should be changed? Is it wiser to live
with the pain and catastrophe, or to change the arbitrary collection of words whose
direction produced that pain and catastrophe? Which do you want to live with? What
proven reason is there to assume that when doubtfulness that can be constructed in
verbal equations conflicts with human physical experience, human physical
experience should be considered doubtful? It becomes a matter of choice and pride
in intellectual argument. My personal advice is that when verbal contortions lead to
chronic confusion and difficulty, better you should stop the verbal contortions rather
than continuing to expect the difficulty to change. Again, it's a matter of choice.
Does the outcome of the philosophical question of whether reality or proof exists
decide whether we should plant crops or wear clothes in cold weather to protect us
from freezing? Har! Are you crazy? How many committed deconstructionist
philosophers walk about naked in subzero temperatures or don't eat? Try
creatingand living in an alternativesubjective reality wherefood is not needed and
where you can sit naked on icebergs, and find out what happens. I emphatically
encourage people to try it with the stipulation that they don't do it around me, that
they don't force me to do it with them, or that they don't come to me complaining
about the consequences and demanding to conscript me into paying for the cost of
treating frostbite or other consequences. (sounds like there is a parallel to
irresponsibility and socialism somewhere in here, doesn't it?). I encourage people to
live subjective reality. I also ask them to go off far away from me to try it, where I
won't be bothered by them or the consequences. For those who haven't guessed,
this encouragement is a clever attempt to bait them into going off to some distant
place where they will kill themselves off through the process of social Darwinism
because, let's face it, a society ofdeconstructionists and counterculturalists filled
with people debatingwhat, ifany, reality exists would have the productive
functionality of a field of diseased rutabagas and would neversurvive the
first frost. The attempt to convince people to create and move to such a society

never works, however, because they are not as committed or sincere as they claim
to be. Consequently, they stay here to work for left wing causes and promote left
wing political candidates where there are people who live productive reality who can
be fed upon while they continue their arguments. They ain't going to practice what
they profess, and they are smart enough not to leave the availability of people to
victimize and steal from while they profess what they pretend to believe in.

Reps dont shape reality --- we can make accurate observations

about the world
Morten Valbjrn, PhD in the Department of Political Science @ Aarhus, 4 [Middle
East and Palestine: Global Politics and Regional Conflict, Culture Blind and Culture
Blinded: Images of Middle Eastern Conflicts in International Relations, p. 67-8]]
As mentioned before, the relational perspective is a critique of both the neglect of
the issue of Otherness by the IR mainstream and the way in which proponents of an
essentialist approach relate to the Other. For this reason, it would be natural to
assume that proponents of this second attempt to "culturalize" the study of
international relations would be particularly keen to address the question of how to
acknowledge cultural diversity without committing the sins of orientalism. Indeed,
this is also what Said is stressing in the introduction to Orientalism: The most
importanttask of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to
Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian,
or nonrepressive and non-manipulative perspective. (1995: 24) However, he then
goes on to add that "these are all tasksleft embarrassingly incomplete in this
study" (Said, 1995: 24). Looking at other analysesbased on a relational conception
of culture, it becomes apparent that the latter remark is verytelling for this kind of
understanding of culture as a whole (e.g. Doty, 1993: 315). Despite
ablank rejection of the universalism of IR mainstream and, at least in principle, a
recognition of the existence of different Others who are not only projections of own
fantasies and desires, in practice, proponents of this
alternative approach nonetheless usually leave the question of how to address and
approach the actual cultural Other unanswered. This might very well be an
unintended outcome of the previously mentioned radical constructivism associated
with this approach. Thus, by stressing how the representation of the Other
is intimately related to the construction of identities or a subtle way
of performing power, one risks being caught in a kind of epistemological and
moral crisis, characterized by a nagging doubt about whether it really is possible to
gain any knowledge of Others or if we are just projecting our own fantasies, and by
apronounced fear that our representations are silencing voices so that
we unwittingly are taking part in a subtle performance of power (Hastrup, 1992:
54). In merely dealingwith the relationship between the representcr and
his representations, these dilemmas can be "avoided." However, at the same
time one writes off the opportunity to relate to cultural diversity as anything
but discursive products of one's own fantasies and projections. This is precisely the
critique that supporters of the relational understanding of culture have been facing.
From this perspective, it appears less surprising that Said has had so much more to
offer onthe dynamics of Western representations of the Middle East than on real

alternatives to the orientalist depiction of the region. Unfortunately, this

second bid for a culturalistic approach to the study of international relations is not
only aligned with a number of very welcome critical qualities that may enrich the
study of international relations. It is also related to a problematictendency to
overreact when it comes to addressing the prevalent Blindness to the Self within IR
mainstream and among subscribers to the essentialist conception of culture.
Thus,aspirations of promoting a larger self consciousness in the study of
international relation end up becoming self-centeredness, just as the attempt to
promote a larger sensitivity toward the Other in reality becomes oversensitivity to
saying anything substantial when it comes to actual Other. This is problematic,
partly because we are left without any real idea as to how to
approach actual Middle Eastern international relations rather thanWestern
representationsof these; and partly because there is the risk of losing sight
of the material and very concrete
consequences that specific representations may engender (Krishna, 1993). Also,
the proponents of this second "culturalistic" alternative seem to be better at asking
important and critical questions than at offering attractive answers.

A2 Reps = Serial Poicy Failure

Turnmaskingfocusing solely on the language used to
describe something masks the problem and makes it harder to
confront
Meisner, professor of environmental studies at York University, 1995 (Mark,
Resourcist Language: The Symbolic Enslavement of Nature, Proceedings of the
Conference on Communication and Our Environment, ed: David Sachsman, p.
242)

Changing the language we useto talk about nonhuman natureis not a solution.
As I suggested, language is not the problem. Rather, it seems more like a
contagious symptom of a deeper and multi-faceted problem that has yet to
be fully defined. Resourcist language is both an indicator and a carrier of the
pathology of rampant ecological degradation. Furthermore, language change
alone can end up simply being a band-aid solution that gives the appearance
of change and makes the problem all the less visible. In a recent article on
feminist language reform, Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King (1994) argue that because
meanings are socially constructed, attempts at introducing nonsexist language are
being undermined by a culture that is still largely sexist. The words may have

shifted, but the meanings and ideologies have not. The real world cure for
the sick patient matters more than the treatment of a single symptom.
Consequently, language change and cultural change must go together with socialmoral change. It is naive to believe either that language is trivial, or that it is

deterministic.

A2 Reps = Violence
Reps dont come first and dont cause violence
Rodwell, 5 [PhD candidate, Manchester, Jonathan, Trendy But Empty: A Response
to Richard Jackson, http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm]
In this response I wish to argue that the Post-Structural analysis put forward by Richard Jackson is inadequate when
trying to understand American Politics and Foreign Policy. The key point is that this is an issue of methodology and
theory. I do not wish to argue that language is not important, in the current political scene (or indeed any political
era) that would be unrealistic. One cannot help but be convinced that the creation of identity, of defining ones self
(or one nation, or societies self) in opposition to an other does indeed take place. Masses of written and aural
evidence collated by Jackson clearly demonstrates that there is a discursive pattern surrounding post 9/11 U.S.
politics and society. [i] Moreover as expressed at the start of this paper it is a political pattern and logic that this
language is useful for politicians, especially when able to marginalise other perspectives. Nothing illustrates this
clearer than the fact George W. Bush won re-election, for whatever the reasons he did win, it is undeniable that at
the very least the war in Iraq, though arguable far from a success, at the absolute minimum did not damage his
campaign. Additionally it is surely not stretching credibility to argue Bush performance and rhetoric during the

the
problem is Jacksons own theoretical underpinning, his own justification for the importance of
language. If he was merely proposing that the understanding of language as one of
many causal factors is importantthat would be fine. But he is not . The
epistemological and theoretical framework of his argument means the ONLY thing
we should look at islanguage andthis is the problem.[ii] Rather than being a fairly simple, but
nonetheless valid, argument, because of the theoretical justification it actually becomes an
almost nonsensical. My response is roughly laid out in four parts. Firstly I will argue that such
methodology, in isolation, is fundamentally reductionist with atheoretical
underpinning that does not conceal this simplicity . Secondly, that a strict use of
post-structural discourse analysis results in an epistemological cul -de-sac in which
the writercannot actually say anything. Moreover the reader has no reason to accept anything
that has been written. The result is at best an explanation that remains as equally valid as
any other possible interpretation and at worse a work that retains no critical
force whatsoever. Thirdly, possible arguments in response to this charge; that such
approaches provide a more acceptable explanation than others are, in effect, both a tacit acceptance of
thepoverty of force within the approach and of the complete lack ofunderstanding of
the identifiable effects of the real world around us; thus highlighting
thecontradictions within post-structural claims to be moving beyond traditional
causality, re-affirming that rather than pursuing a post-structural approach
weshould continue to employ the traditional methodologies within History, Politics
and International Relations. Finally as a consequence of these limitations I will argue that the postimmediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks also strengthened his position. However, having said that,

structural call for intertextuals must be practiced rather than merely preached and that an understanding and

utilisation of all possible theoretical approaches must be maintainedif academic

writing is to remain useful rather than self-contained and narrative . Ultimately I conclude
that whilst undeniably of some value post-structural approaches are at best a footnote in our
understanding . The first major problem then is that historiographically discourse analysis is so capacious as to
be largely of little use. The process of inscription identity, of discourse development is not given any political or
historical context, it is argued that it just works, is simply a universal phenomenon. It is history that explains

To be specific if the U.S. and every other nation is

continually reproducing identities through othering it is a constant and
universalphenomenon that fails to help us understand at all why one result of the
othering turned out one way and differently at another time . For example, how could
everything and therefore actually explains nothing.

one explain how the process resulted in the 2003 invasion of Iraq butdidnt produce
a similar invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when that country (and by the logic of the Regan
administrations discourse) the West was threatened by the Evil Empire. By the logical of
discourse analysis in both cases these policieswere the result of politicians being
able to discipline and control the political agenda to produce the outcomes. So why
were the outcomes not the same? To reiterate the point how do we explain that the language of the
War on Terror actually managed to result in the eventual Afghan invasion in 2002? Surely it is impossible to
explain how George W. Bush was able to convince his people (and incidentally the U.N and Nato)
to support a war inAfghanistan withoutreferring to a simple fact outside of the
discourse; the fact that a known terrorist in Afghanistan actually admitted to the
murder of thousands of people on the 11h of Sepetember 2001. The point is that if the
discursive othering of an alien people or group is what really gave the U.S.
theopportunity to persue the warin Afghanistan one must surly wonder why
Afghanistan. Why not North Korea? Or Scotland?If the discourse is so powerfully
useful in its own right why could it not have happened anywhere at any time and
more often? Why could the British government not have been able to justify an
armed invasion and regime change in Northern Ireland throughout the terrorist
violence of the 1980s? Surely they could have just employed the same discursive trickery as George W.
Bush? Jackson is absolutely right when he points out that the actuall threat posed by Afghanistan or Iraq today may
have been thoroughly misguided and conflated and that there must be more to explain why those wars were
enacted at that time. Unfortunately that explanation cannot simply come from the result of inscripting identity and
discourse. On top of this there is the clear problem that the consequences of the discursive othering are not
necessarily what Jackson would seem to identify. This is a problem consistent through David Campbells original

Campbell argued for a linguistic process that

always results in an other being marginalized or has the potential for
demonisation[iv]. At the same time Jackson, building upon this, maintains without qualification that the
work on which Jacksons approach is based[iii]. David

systematic and institutionalised abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 is a direct consequence of the
language used by senior administration officials: conceiving of terrorist suspects as evil, inhuman and faceless
enemies of freedom creates an atmosphere where abuses become normalised and tolerated[v]. The only problem
is that the process of differentiation does not actually necessarily produce dislike or antagonism. In the 1940s and
50s even subjected to the language of the Red Scare its obvious not all Americans came to see the Soviets as an
other of their nightmares. And in Iraq the abuses of Iraqi prisoners are isolated cases, it is not the case that the
U.S. militarily summarily abuses prisoners as a result of language. Surely the massive protest against the war, even
in the U.S. itself, is also a self evident example that the language of evil and inhumanity does not necessarily

one of the points of discourse is

that we arecontinually differentiating ourselves from all others around us without
this necessarily leading us to hate fear or abuse anyone .[vi] Consequently, the clear fear of the
Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, and the abuses at Abu Ghirab are unusual cases. To
understand what is going on we must ask how far can the process of inscripting
identity really go towards explaining them? As a result at best all discourse analysis
provides us with is a set of universals and a heuristic model.
produce an outcome that marginalises or demonises an other. Indeed