Generic

Perm
 Generic
Permutation solves- Problems of discourse can be resolved within the limits of
postructuralism- enacting the alternative fails to influence main stream politics
Newman 05- a Research Fellow at UWA and a Lecturer in Politics at Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia. (“Power and Politics in¶ Poststructuralist Thought: New theories of the
political,” Taylor and Francis Group, First Published 2005, http://zinelibrary.info/files/Newman
%20-%20Power%20and%20Politics%20in%20Poststructuralist%20Thought%20-%20New
%20Theories%20of%20the%20Political.pdf)
Therefore the third, and more implicit, aim in this book is to suggest ¶ that, contrary to prevailing
criticism, poststructuralism does not amount to¶ an apolitical and amoral nihilism. Rather, a
poststructuralist approach is¶ ethically and politically engaged. However, this engagement or
commitment is not always obvious – it needs to be teased out, emphasized, and ¶ this is precisely
my aim here. Moreover, there are certain conceptual blind ¶ spots or ‘aporias’ – to use Derrida’s
term – in poststructuralist theory,¶ which present obstacles to its political efficacy, and which I
seek to redress¶ here. These include the need for a more consistent place for the subject, as ¶
well as the need for an ‘outside’ to structures of power, discourse and language. These, and
other, problems emerge in different ways throughout¶ the essays in this book. My contention
here is that they can be resolved¶ within the discursive limits of poststructuralism itself – that is,
they can be¶ resolved without falling back onto essential foundations, such as a universal
conception of the subject or absolute moral and rational positions.¶ Poststructuralism’s
rejection of these metaphysical foundations has¶ perhaps accounted for its rather frosty
reception in the mainstream discipline of political theory, where it is usually regarded with
suspicion, if not¶ outright hostility. Instead, poststructuralist ideas tend to find a home in¶
disciplines outside politics, such as cultural studies, literary criticism and¶ film theory. Indeed,
there seems to be a dissonance between usually AngloAmerican dominated or ‘analytical’
political theory, and ‘continental’ poststructuralist thought. The former seems more concerned
with devising¶ watertight moral and rational bases for political decisions – decisions ¶ which
usually revolve around questions concerning the public sphere, such ¶ as rights or the distribution
of ‘goods’. The latter, on the other hand, is ¶ more interested in how things work or how things
come to be: how might¶ we come to be asking these questions about politics, and not others;
what¶ are the investments of power and the relations of exclusion that are ¶ involved with asking
these questions and limiting ourselves to certain ¶ political institutions and discourses? For
instance, in mainstream political¶ theory, liberalism functions as a kind of meta-ideology or
‘metanarrative’;¶ it has become an embedded, universal discourse that determines the
conceptual limits of the practice of politics and defines its very terms of¶ enquiry. However, a
poststructuralist approach might be more interested ¶ in interrogating or deconstructing the
discourse of liberalism itself, questioning its assumed ‘neutrality’ and universality, and unveiling
the moral¶ and rational assumptions and particular modes of subjectivity that it is ¶ based on.
Therefore, this book shows how poststructuralism might intervene in debates in political theory,
not by conforming to terms of reference¶ that are dominant in this discipline, but by redefining
them.
Perm solves- poststructuralist politics don’t have individual agencies- hidden
power relations, essentialist identities, and discursive and epistemological
frameworks prove.
Newman 12- a Research Fellow at UWA and a Lecturer in Politics at Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia. (“The Politics of Post Anarchism,” The Anarchist Library, May 21, 2012,
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-the-politics-of-postanarchism.pdf)
The impetus for this postanarchist intervention came from my sense that not ¶ only was anarchist
theory in nuce poststructuralist; but also that postructuralism ¶ itself was in nuce anarchist. That
is to say, anarchism allowed, as I have suggested, ¶ the theorization of the autonomy of the
political with its multiple sites of power¶ and domination, as well as its multiple identities and
sites of resistance (state,¶ church, family, patriarchy, etc) beyond the economic reductionist
framework¶ of Marxism. However, as I have also argued, the implications of these theoretical
innovations were restricted by the epistemological conditions of the time¶ — essentialist ideas
about subjectivity, the determinist view of history, and the¶ rational discourses of the
Enlightenment. Poststructuralism is, in turn, at least in ¶ its political orientation, fundamentally
anarchist — particularly its deconstructive ¶ project of unmasking and destabilizing the authority
of institutions, and contesting practices of power that are dominating and exclusionary. The
problem with¶ poststructuralism was that, while it implied a commitment to anti-authoritarian¶
politics, it lacked not only an explicit politico-ethico content, but also an adequate¶ account of
individual agency. The central problem with Foucault, for instance,¶ was that if the subject is
constructed through the discourses and relations of¶ power that dominate him, how exactly
does he resist this domination? Therefore,¶ the premise for bringing together anarchism and
poststructuralism was to explore ¶ the ways in which each might highlight and address the
theoretical problems¶ in the other. For instance, the poststructuralist intervention in anarchist
theory¶ showed that anarchism had a theoretical blindspot — it did not recognize the¶ hidden
power relations and potential authoritarianism in the essentialist identities, and discursive and
epistemological frameworks, that formed the basis of its¶ critique of authority. The anarchist
intervention in poststructural theory, on the ¶ other hand, exposed its political and ethical
shortcomings, and, in particular, the¶ ambiguities of explaining agency and resistance in the
context of all-pervasive¶ power relations.¶ These theoretical problems centered around the
question of power, place and¶ the outside: it was found that while classical anarchism was able
to theorize, in¶ the essential revolutionary subject, an identity or place of resistance outside the

Permutation solves- Engaging politics while acknowledging its incompletion is

better than accepting oppression- failure to do so will spur more radicalism
Zizek 04- Famous Lacanian Scholar, (“Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek,” The
electronic book review, July 1, 2004,
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation)
I'm trying to avoid two extremes. One extreme is the traditional pseudo-radical position which
says, "If you engage in politics - helping trade unions or combating sexual harassment, whatever
- you've been co-opted" and so on. Then you have the other extreme which says, "Ok, you have
to do something." I think both are wrong. I hate those pseudo radicals who dismiss every
concrete action by saying, "This will all be co-opted." Of course, everything can be co-opted
[chuckles] but this is just a nice excuse to do absolutely nothing. Of course, there is a danger
that "the long march through institutions" - to use the old Maoist term, popular in European
student movements thirty-some years ago - will last so long that you'll end up part of the
institution. We need more than ever, a parallax view - a double perspective. You engage in acts,
being aware of their limitations. This does not mean that you act with your fingers crossed. No,
you fully engage, but with the awareness - the ultimate wager in the almost Pascalian sense -
that is not simply that this act will succeed, but that the very failure of this act will trigger a
much more radical process.
 Method focus bad
Methodologies are always imperfect – endorsing multiple epistemological
frameworks can correct the blindspots of each
Stern and Druckman 2k (Paul, National Research Council and Daniel, Institute for Conflict
Analysis and Resolution – George Mason University, International Studies Review, Spring, p.
62-63)
Using several distinct research approaches or sources of information in conjunction is a
valuable strategy for developing generic knowledge. This strategy is particularly useful for meeting the
challenges of measurement and inference. The nature of historical phenomena makes controlled experimentation—the
analytic technique best suited to making strong inferences about causes and effects—practically impossible with real-life
situations. Making inferences requires using experimentation in simulated conditions and various other methods, each of
which has its own advantages and limitations, but none of which can alone provide the level of certainty desired about what
works and under 52Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One
Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984); Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 1985); Reilly and Reynolds, Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies. 62 Stern and
Druckman what conditions. We conclude that debates between advocates of different research
methods (for example, the quantitative-qualitative debate) are unproductive except in the context of a
search for ways in which different methods can complement each other. Because there is no single
best way to develop knowledge, the search for generic knowledge about international conflict
resolution should adopt an epistemological strategy of triangulation, sometimes called
“critical multiplism.”53 That is, it should use multiple perspectives, sources of data, constructs, interpretive
frameworks, and modes of analysis to address specific questions on the presumption that research approaches that rely on
certain perspectives can act as partial correctives for the limitations of approaches that rely on different ones. An underlying
assumption is that robust findings (those that hold across studies that vary along several dimensions ) engender
more confidence than replicated findings (a traditional scientific ideal, but not practicable in international
relations research outside the laboratory). When different data sources or methods converge on a
single answer, one can have increased confidence in the result. When they do not
converge, one can interpret and take into account the known biases in each research
approach. A continuing critical dialogue among analysts using different perspectives, methods, and data could lead to an
understanding that better approximates international relations than the results coming from any single study, method, or data
source.

Methods shouldn’t come first – they are a means to an end. Treating method as
an exclusive endpoint legitimizes mass suffering.
Fearon and Wendt, Professor of Poli Sci at Stanford and Professor of IR at Ohio State,2002
(James and Alexander, Handbook of International Relations, ed. Carlsnaes, p.68)

It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven
social science. Too much research in international relations chooses problems of things to be
explained with a view to whether the analysis will provide support for one or another
methodological ‘ism’. But the point of IR scholarship should be to answer questions
about international politics that are of great normative concern, not to validate methods.
Methods are means, not ends in themselves . As a matter of personal scholarly choice it may be
reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us. But since we do not
know how far that is, if the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then it makes
little sense to rule out one or the other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a
method indeed becomes a tacit ontology, which may lead to neglect of whatever
problems it is poorly suited to address. Being conscious about those choices is why it is important to
distinguish between the ontological, empirical, and pragmatic levels of the rationalist-constructivist debate. We favor the
pragmatic approach on heuristic grounds, but we certainly believe a conversation should continue on all three levels.
 Policy good
We also control uniqueness - Academia is becoming dominated by those who
don’t want to engage in policymaking now – we need to engage policy
relevance instead of intellectual window dressing
Mahnken 10
Thomas G. Mahnken (Visiting Scholar at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning) Winter
2010 “ Bridging the Gap Between the Worlds of Ideas and Action” Orbis Vol. 54 No. 1 Science Direct Pages 4-13
Some calls for greater collaboration between the government and the academy have emerged from professors. Among
international relations scholars, arguably among
the most engaged of social scientists, there is
modest support for engagement in policy. A recent survey of scholars found that 49
percent of respondents believed they should contribute to the policymaking process
as informal advisors but only 29 percent believed they should be formal participants.8 Among those who choose to engage in
policy-relevant research, one frequently heard complaint is that practitioners do not use their theories. Michael C. Desch, for
one, has lamented that ‘‘Policymakers
need to be willing to really listen to us as they
formulate policy, rather than just using us as intellectual window dressing .’’9

Timeframe of our impacts makes your arguments irrelevant – policy relevance

is key
Mahnken 10
Thomas G. Mahnken (Visiting Scholar at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning) Winter
2010 “ Bridging the Gap Between the Worlds of Ideas and Action” Orbis Vol. 54 No. 1 Science Direct Pages 4-13
Although it is true that policymakers would benefit from the perspectives of
academic experts, it is equally true that scholars would benefit from a closer
acquaintance with the world of the policymaker. Such an experience would ideally
lead to more useful theories —that is, theories that deal with the world and the challenges that policymakers
face. As Stephen Walt has admitted, ‘‘Contemporary IR theory conforms to the norms and
incentives of the academic profession rather than the needs of policy. [International
relations] scholarship is often impenetrable to outsiders, largely because it is not
intended for their consumption.’’11 Better, more useful theories would, for example, deal
with uncertainty and ambiguity that pervades policymaking. As Robert Rothstein observed nearly
forty years ago, ‘‘The political practitioner. . .knows nothing for certain, and very little that can even be stated in high
probability. Moreover, the subjects to which he must apply his theory are not inert. Their relatively uncontrolled and
indeterminate behavior guarantees that the application of social theories will always be an ambiguous and uncertain art.’’12
Social
To address these features of the policymaking environment, theories need to be more nuanced and interdisciplinary
science theory tends to be abstract and idealized; the policy process, by contrast, is
messy. Whereas social scientists seek to identify and explain recurring social behavior,
policymakers tend to be concerned with specific problems . Policymakers are less interested in
explaining a trend than in figuring out how to exploit or mitigate it. Moreover, policymakers do not have the
luxury of waiting for all the facts . Rather, they face the daunting challenge of making
decisions with imperfect and often incorrect information under the pressure of time .
Perhaps more importantly, decisions need to be implemented in the face of bureaucratic
resistance, legal constraints, and political partisanship . Both the academy and the
nation would be better off if scholars were more involved in topics of interest to
policymakers than they have been in the recent past. Still, in dealing with the world of action scholars need to
understand that they are at a disadvantage. Senior decision makers, particularly
those in the national security arena, tend to be both smart and experienced
professionals who have access to much more information than do those outside the
government. The rapid pace of events, combined with the secrecy surrounding
national security, conspire to ensure that to a considerable extent those in
government talk only to themselves .

Using structures of domination is politically necessary if it is the only way to

end oppression
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 362-
364
In their desire to renounce vanguardism, hierarchy and authoritarianism, too many intellectuals have also
renounced the value of intellectual and political authority. This renunciation of authority is
predicated on a theoretical crisis of representation in which the authority of any knowledge is suspect, since all knowledge is
historically determined and implicated in hierarchical relations of power. The political reflection of this suspicion is that
structures and hierarchy are equated with domination. Intellectuals cannot claim to speak the “truth” of the world, and they
cannot speak for or in the name of other people. There are only two strategies available to the critic. First, the ability to
describe the reality of people’s experience or position in the world can be given over entirely to the people who are the
subjects of the analysis. They are “allowed” to speak for themselves within the intellectual’s discourse. The critic merely
inscribes the other’s own sense of their place within and relationship to specific experiences and practices.” Second, the critic
analyzes his or her own position self-reflexivly, and its consequences for his or her study (i.e., my history and position have
determined the inevitable failure of my authority) but without privileging that position. In either case, there is little room for
it goes too far when it
the critic’s own authority. While such a moment of intellectual suspicion is necessary,
assumes that all knowledge claims are unjustified and unjustifiable , leaving the critic
to celebrate difference and a radical and pluralist relativism. The fact of contextual determi-
nation does not by itself mean that all knowledge claims are false, nor does it mean that all such claims are equally invalid or
useless responses to a particular context. It need not entail relativism. The fact that specific
discourses are
articulated into relations of power does not mean that these relations are necessary
or guaranteed, nor that all knowledges are equally bad—and to be opposed—for even if they are
implicated with particular structures of power, there as no reason to assume that all structures of
power are equally bad. Such an assumption would entail the futility of political struggle and the end of history. This
is the conundrum of the intellectual Left, for you can’t have knowledge without standards and authority. Similarly, although all
structures of commonality, norrnality and the sacred may be suspect, social existence itself is impossible without at least the
imagination of such possibilities. This
“intellectual’s crisis” of representation becomes
particularly dangerous when it is projected on everyday life and political struggle ,
when it is mistakenly identified with a very different crisis of authority. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Three Mile
Island, post-Challenger, post-Jimmy Bakker world, many if not all of the traditional sources of moral, political and even
intellectual authority (including those empowered by the postwar consensus) have collapsed or at least lost a good deal of
their aura. There is a deep seated public anxiety that America’s power (moral, political, economic, etc.) is on the wane and that
none of the traditional authorities is capable of protecting Americans from the many forces—natural and social—that threaten
them. Here we must assent to part of the new conservative argument: Structures of ironic cynicism have become increasingly
powerful and do represent a real cultural and political problem. Both ‘crises” involve a struggle to redefine cultural authority.
For the former it is a struggle to reestablish the political possibility of theory. For the latter it involves the need to construct
politically effective authorities, and to relocate the right of intellectuals to claim such authority without reproducing
authoritarian relations. The intellectuals’ crisis is a reflexive and rather self-indulgent struggle against a pessimism which they
have largely created for themselves. The conflation of the two glosses over the increasing presence (even as popular figures) of
new conservative intellectuals, and the threatening implications of the power of a popular new conservatism. The new
conservative alliance has quite intentionally addressed the crisis of authority, often blaming it on the Left’s intellectual crisis of
representation (e.g., the attacks on ‘political correctness”), as the occasion for their own efforts to set new authorities in place
Left intellectuals have constructed their own
new positions, new criteria and new statements.
irrelevance, not through their “elitist” language, but through their refusal to find appropriate
forms and sites of authority. Authority is not necessarily authoritarian; it need not claim the
privilege of an autonomous, sovereign and unified speaking subject. In the face of
real historical relations of domination and subordination, political intervention seems to
demand, as part of the political responsibility of those empowered to speak, that they speak to—
and sometimes for—others. And sometimes that speech must address questions
about the relative importance of different struggles and the relative value , even the
enabling possibilities of, different structures.

We must use the institutions that exercise power to change them

Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-
393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is
actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that
power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the
apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in
fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of
decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not
individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it
is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they
must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in fact
have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only
models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act
on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyone’s position is
increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the “fallen” middle class demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees
about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting
for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the world)
better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation action as in everyone’s best
interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has described as a “planetary thought” which
“would be a coherent thought—but not a rationalizing and ‘rationalist’ inflection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the
open totality—for what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by
distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the
former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance
is always a local
struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global
structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of
articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the
meaning of these terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and
locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is
the scene of agency. “Local struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion
into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency
which do not deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e.,
in the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up “trumping” politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the
disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared “responsible yearning: a
yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place now.” The Left, after all, is defined by its
common commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political
and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things are possible. The
construction of
an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite
the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the
only force capable of providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to
organize minorities into a new majority.

Government action is necessary. Alternatives like anarchy, localism, spirituality,

and eco-centrism will get squashed and worsen current destruction
Taylor 2k – Professor of Social Ethics
Bron, Professor of Religion & Social Ethics, Director of Environmental Studies, University of
Wisconsin-Oshkosh, BENENEATH THE SURFACE: CRITICAL ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEEP
ECOLOGY, P. 282-284
A more trenchant problem is how bioregionalists (and the anarchists who influenced
their most influential theorists) often assume that people are naturally predisposed
(unless corrupted by life in unnatural, hierarchical, centralized, industrial societies) to
cooperative behavior. This debatable assumption appears to depend more on radical
environmental faith, a kind of Paul Shepard-style mythologizing, than on ecology or
anthropology. Unfortunately for bioregional theory, evolutionary biology shows that
not only cooperation promotes species survival; so also, at times, does aggressive
competitiveness. Based on its unduly rosy view of the potential for human altruism, it
is doubtful that bioregionalism can offer sufficient structural constraints on the
exercise of power by selfish and well-entrenched elites . It should be obvious, for
example, that nation-state governments will not voluntarily cede authority . Any
political reorganization along bioregional lines would likely require “widespread
violence and dislocation.” Few bioregionalists seem to recognize this likelihood, or
how devastating to nature such a transitional struggle would probably be . Moreover,
making an important but often overlooked point about political power, political
theorist Daniel Deudney warns: The sizes of the bioregionality based states would
vary greatly because bioregions vary greatly. This would mean that some states would
be much more powerful than other [and] it is not inevitable that balances of power
would emerge to constrain the possible imperial pretensions of the larger and
stronger states. Andrew Bard Schmookler, in his critique of utopian bioregional
progeny). For ignoring a specific problem of power. He asked: How can good people
prevent being dominated by a ruthless few, and what will prevent hierarchies from
emerging if decentralized political self-rule is ever achieved? One does not have to
believe all people are bad to recognize that not all people will be good, he argued; and
unless bad people all become good, there is no solution to violence other than some
kind of government to restrain the evil few. Schmookler elsewhere noted that those
who exploit nature gather more power to themselves. How, then, can we restrain such
power? There must be a government able to control the free exercise of power,
Schmookler concluded. Once when debating Green anarchists and bioregionalists in a
radical environmental journal, Schmookler agreed that political decentralization is a
good idea. But if we move in this direction, he warned, “there should be at the same
time a world order sufficient [to thwart] would-be conquerors.” Moreover, “Since the
biosphere is a globally interdependent web, that world order should be able to
constrain any of the actors from fouling the earth. This requires laws and means of
enforcement.” Schmookler concluded, “Government is a paradox, but there is no
escaping it. This is because power is a paradox: our emergence out of the natural
order makes power and inevitable problem for human affairs, and only power can
control power. Bioregionalism generally fails to grapple adequately with the problem
of power. Consequently, it has little “answer to specifically global environmental
problems,” such as atmospheric depletion and the disruption of ocean ecosystems by
pollution and overfishing. Political scientist Paul Wapner argues that this is because
bioregionalism assumes “that all global threats stem from local instances of
environmental abuse and that by confronting them at the local level they will
disappear.” Nor does bioregionalism have much of a response to the “globalization” of
corporate capitalism and consumerist market society, apart from advocating local
resistance or long-odds campaigns to revoke the corporate charters of the worst
environmental offenders. These efforts do little to hinder the inertia of this process.
And little is ever said about how to restrain the voracious appetite of a global-
corporate-consumer culture for the resources in every corner of the planet. Even for
the devout, promoting deep ecological spirituality and ecocentric values seems
pitifully inadequate in the face of such forces. Perhaps it is because they have little if
any theory of social change, and thus cannot really envision a path toward a
sustainable society, that many bioregional deep ecologists revert to apocalyptic
scenarios. Many of them see the collapse of ecosystems and industrial civilization as
the only possible means toward the envisioned changes. Others decide that political
activism is hopeless, and prioritize instead spiritual strategies for evoking deep
ecological spirituality, hoping, self-consciously, for a miracle. Certainly the resistance
of civil society to globalization and its destructive inertia is honorable and important,
even a part a part of a wider sustainability strategy. But there will be no victories over
globalization and corporate capitalism, and no significant progress toward
sustainability, without new forms of international, enforceable, global
environmental governance. Indeed, without new restraints on power both within
nations and internationally, the most beautiful bioregional experiments and models
will be overwhelmed and futile.
 Performance fails
Performative pedagogy fails in the context of a competitive debate -- there is
no rigorous criteria for deciding whether or not we have sufficiently
"performed" our pedagogy
Medina and Perry '11 Mia, University of British Columbia, Carmen, Indiana University
"Embodiment and Performance in Pedagogy Research: Investigating the Possibility of the Body
in Curriculum Experience" Journal of Curriculum Theorizing Volume 27, Number 3, 2
http://www.academia.edu/470170/Embodiment_and_performance_in_pedagogy_The_possibili
ty_of_the_body_in_curriculum
Jean-Luc Nancy (1994) reminds us that our endeavour to write about embodiment
fails before it begins, as the body is impenetrable by the means that we have at
our disposal — words,ink, page, computer. And we would add that the endeavour to talk about
the body is also challenging if not futile, due to the discourses that we have at the ready, that
is, the dominant discourses of the mind. In the face of this methodological predicament,
Caroline Fusco (2008)regrets that in educational research a “discursive and material
disinfecting and cleansing take[s] place” in the transcription of body and space to written or
visual texts (p. 160). In the following analysis, we acknowledge the limitations of representing
research in the written and visualformat of a journal article, but embrace the affordances that
analytic discourses and written text provide. In this way, we aspire to contribute to a much
larger conversation that necessarily extends beyond these two authors, beyond this study, and
beyond the modalities of written andvisual texts.

The negative's performance is coopted as an elite tool for immiseration --

evaluate the debate as if the speakers are anonymous
Gur-ze-ev, 98 - Senior Lecturer Philosophy of Education at Haifa, (Ilan, “Toward a
nonrepressive critical pedagogy,” Educational Theory, Fall 48,
http://haifa.academia.edu/IlanGurZeev/Papers/117665/Toward_a_Nonreperssive_Critical_Peda
gogy)

From this perspective, the

consensus reached by the reflective subject taking part in the dialogue
offered by Critical Pedagogy is naive, especially in light of its declared anti-intellectualism on the
one hand and its pronounced glorification of "feelings", "experience", and self-evident
knowledge of the group on the other. Critical Pedagogy, in its different versions, claims to inhere and overcome the
foundationalism and transcendentalism of the Enlightenment's emancipatory and ethnocentric arrogance, as exemplified by
ideology critique, psychoanalysis, or traditional metaphysics. Marginalized feminist knowledge, like the marginalized,
neglected, and ridiculed knowledge of the Brazilian farmers, as presented by Freire or Weiler, is represented as legitimate and
relevant knowledge, in contrast to its representation as the hegemonic instrument of representation and education. This
knowledge is portrayed as a relevant, legitimate and superior alternative to hegemonic
education and the knowledge this represents in the center. It is said to represent an identity that is desirable and promises to
function "successfully". However, neither the truth value of the marginalized collective memory nor knowledge is cardinal here.
"Truth" is replaced by knowledge whose supreme criterion is its self-evidence, namely the
potential productivity of its creative violence, while the dialogue in which adorers of
"difference" take part is implicitly represented as one of the desired productions of this violence .
My argument is that the marginalized and repressed self-evident knowledge has no superiority over
the self-evident knowledge of the oppressors . Relying on the knowledge of the weak, controlled, and
marginalized groups, their memory and their conscious interests, is no less naive and dangerous than relying
on hegemonic knowledge. This is because the critique of Western transcendentalism,
foundationalism, and ethnocentrism declines into uncritical acceptance of marginalized
knowledge, which becomes foundationalistic and ethnocentric in presenting "the truth", "the
facts", or ''the real interests of the group " - even if conceived as valid only for the group concerned. This position
cannot avoid vulgar realism and naive positivism based on "facts" of self-evident knowledge ultimately realized against the self-
evidence of other groups.
FW
 Generic
Our model of debate is process, not product – decision-making is learned in a
safe space of competing thought experiments
Hanghoj 8
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/ph
d_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf ¶ Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008 ¶ Since
this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM (Danish ¶
Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the Institute
of¶ Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Research visits
have¶ taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT),
the¶ Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as
Learning Lab¶ Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I currently work
as an assistant¶ professor.

Joas’ re-interpretation of Dewey’s pragmatism as a “theory of situated creativity” raises a

critique of humans as purely rational agents that navigate instrumentally through meansends-
schemes (Joas, 1996: 133f). This critique is particularly important when trying to understand
how games are enacted and validated within the realm of educational institutions that by
definition are inscribed in the great modernistic narrative of “progress” where nation states,
teachers and parents expect students to acquire specific skills and competencies (Popkewitz,
1998; cf. chapter 3). However, as Dewey argues, the actual doings of educational gaming cannot
be reduced to rational means-ends schemes. Instead, the situated interaction between
teachers, students, and learning resources are played out as contingent re-distributions of
means, ends and ends in view, which often make classroom contexts seem “messy” from an
outsider’s perspective (Barab & Squire, 2004). 4.2.3. Dramatic rehearsal The two preceding
sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and
how his assumptions on creativity and playful actions represent a critique of rational means-end
schemes. For now, I will turn to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal, which assumes that
social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future action.
Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most
extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in
imagination) of various competing possible lines of action… [It] is an experiment in finding out
what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and foresees
outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An
act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in
imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This excerpt illustrates
how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the lens of an
imaginative drama metaphor. Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of
outcomes, where the “possible competing lines of action” are resolved through a thought
experiment. Moreover, Dewey’s compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that
decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they have
emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are relatively few
discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A
notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, who praises Dewey’s concept as a
“fortunate image” for understanding everyday rationality (Schütz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are
primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000,
2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; Rönssön, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic
rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not characterise
the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes “duties and contractual
obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights”
(Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be seen as the process of “crystallizing
possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus,
deliberation can in no way guarantee that the response of a “thought experiment” will be
successful. But what it can do is make the process of choosing more intelligent than would be the
case with “blind” trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic rehearsal provides a
valuable perspective for understanding educational gaming as a simultaneously real and
imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios. Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the
capacity to stage and evaluate “acts”, which implies an “irrevocable” difference between acts
that are “tried out in imagination” and acts that are “overtly tried out” with real-life
consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities with games as
they require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf. chapter 2). On
the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral deliberation and educational
game activities in terms of the actual consequences that follow particular actions. Thus, when it
comes to educational games, acts are both imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life
consequences of the practices, knowledge forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the
game world. Simply put, there is a difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of
everyday life and in games, which only “play at” or simulate the stakes and risks that
characterise the “serious” nature of moral deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a
parliamentary election experiences more personal and emotional risk than students trying to
win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time, the lack of real-life
consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively safe learning
environment, where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and validated
for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games are able to provide a safe but
meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor political
presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular “competing possible lines of action” that are
relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from this pragmatist
perspective, the educational value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving
the “right” answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domain-specific
processes of problem-based scenarios.

Decision-making is a trump impact—it improves all aspects of life regardless of

its specific goals
Shulman, president emeritus – Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, ‘9
(Lee S, Education and a Civil Society: Teaching Evidence-Based Decision Making, p. ix-x)

These are the kinds of questions that call for the exercise of practical reason, a form of thought
that draws concurrently from theory and practice, from values and experience, and from
critical thinking and human empathy. None of these attributes is likely to be thought of no value
and thus able to be ignored. Our schools, however, are unlikely to take on all of them as goals of
the educational process. The goal of education is not to render practical arguments more
theoretical; nor is it to diminish the role of values in practical reason. Indeed, all three sources—
theoretical knowledge, practical knowhow and experience, and deeply held values and identity
—have legitimate places in practical arguments. An educated person, argue philosophers
Thomas Green (1971) and Gary Fenstermacher (1986), is someone who has transformed the
premises of her or his practical arguments from being less objectively reasonable to being more
objectively reasonable. That is, to the extent that they employ probabilistic reasoning or interpret
data from various sources, those judgments and interpretations conform more accurately to
well-understood principles and are less susceptible to biases and distortions. To the extent that
values, cultural or religious norms, or matters of personal preference or taste are at work, they
have been rendered more explicit, conscious, intentional, and reflective. In his essay for this
volume, Jerome Kagan reflects the interactions among these positions by arguing: We are more
likely to solve our current problem, however, if teachers accept the responsibility of
guaranteeing that all adolescents, regardless of class or ethnicity, can read and comprehend the
science section of newspapers, solve basic mathematical problems, detect the logical coherence
in non-technical verbal arguments or narratives, and insist that all acts of maliciousness,
deception, and unregulated self-aggrandizement are morally unacceptable. Whether choosing
between a Prius and a Hummer, an Obama or a McCain, installing solar panels or planting taller
trees, a well-educated person has learned to combine their values, experience,
understandings, and evidence in a thoughtful and responsible manner. Thus do habits of mind,
practice, and heart all play a significant role in the lives of citizens.

Authenticity tests shut down debate– it’s strategically a disaster

SUBOTNIK 98
Professor of Law, Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center.
7 Cornell J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 681

Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the strands' effect on
the relationships of CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the foregoing material
suggests, the central CRT message is not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or
even that individuals out there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist
for the academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly.
An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes
into focus. What can an academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72 possibly say to
Patricia Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"?
"You shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most
tellingly - "What do you expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority
were perceived as having the well- being of minority groups in mind, these responses might be
acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the
failure by those "cushioned within the invisible privileges of race and power... to incorporate a
sense of precarious connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74
"Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses only from fools and
sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection, disconcert and disunite others. "I
hurt," in academic discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects. First, it demands
priority from the reader's conscience. It is for this reason that law review editors, waiving
usual standards, have privileged a long trail of undisciplined - even silly n75 - destructive and,
above all, self-destructive arti [*695] cles. n76 Second, by emphasizing the emotional bond
between those who hurt in a similar way, "I hurt" discourages fellow sufferers from
abstracting themselves from their pain in order to gain perspective on their condition. n77
 [*696] Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and structured conversation
with others. n78
[*697] It is because of this conversation-stopping effect of what they insensitively call "first-
person agony stories" that Farber and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of academic civility
hamper readers from challenging the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be rather
difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by questioning the author's emotional
stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the scholar's experience on
the table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience to the same level of
scrutiny.
If through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting academic debate,
why do they not have greater influence on public policy? Discouraging white legal scholars from
entering the national conversation about race, n80 I suggest, has generated a kind of cynicism
in white audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse effect of that ostensibly desired
by CRATs. It drives the American public to the right and ensures that anything CRT offers is
reflexively rejected.
In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course, it is difficult to be
sure what reasons they would give for not having rallied behind CRT. Two things, however, are
certain. First, the kinds of issues raised by Williams are too important in their implications
[*698]  for American life to be confined to communities of color. If the lives of minorities are
heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of the majority elements in
society, it would seem to be of great importance that white thinkers and doers participate in
open discourse to bring about change. Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the
community of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the highest
scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more generally, the streets
and the airwaves.

DEBATE roleplay specifically activates agency

Hanghoj 8
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/ph
d_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf ¶ Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008 ¶ Since
this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM (Danish ¶
Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the Institute
of¶ Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Research visits
have¶ taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT),
the¶ Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as
Learning Lab¶ Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I currently work
as an assistant¶ professor.

Thus, debate games require teachers to balance the centripetal/centrifugal forces of gaming and
teaching, to be able to reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple
voices of a dialogical game space in relation to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives
provide a valuable analytical framework for describing the discursive interplay between
different practices and knowledge aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In addition
to this, Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy also offers an explanation of why debate games (and other
game types) may be valuable within an educational context. One of the central features of
multi-player games is that players are expected to experience a simultaneously real and
imagined scenario both in relation to an insider’s (participant) perspective and to an outsider’s
(co-participant) perspective. According to Bakhtin, the outsider’s perspective reflects a
fundamental aspect of human understanding: In order to understand, it is immensely important
for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative
understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior
and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be
seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and
because they are others (Bakhtin, 1986: 7). As the quote suggests, every person is influenced by
others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated.
Thus, it is in the interaction with other voices that individuals are able to reach understanding
and find their own voice. Bakhtin also refers to the ontological process of finding a voice as
“ideological becoming”, which represents “the process of selectively assimilating the words of
others” (Bakhtin, 1981: 341). Thus, by teaching and playing debate scenarios, it is possible to
support students in their process of becoming not only themselves, but also in becoming
articulate and responsive citizens in a democratic society.
 Warming
Our debate about ecological change will cause a real-world paradigm shift –
eventually spurring political action
Ophuls (William, Professor of Political Science @ Northwestern, Politics of Scarcity
Revisited) 1992
Even more encouraging is the change in perspectives among young people.
In schools across the United States, environmental education courses are
springing up. Among the objectives of these courses is to teach youngsters such
concepts as the “web of life” to show them that “you can’t do just one
thing,” and to involve them personally in planting, recycling, and cleaning
up debris in their communities. The fact that these courses are being
taught from elementary schools “on up” itself suggest changing attitudes
among today’s educational elites. Moreover, those who teach these
concepts are often surprised at how readily children accept ecological
concepts – how, indeed children will encourage their parents to launch
recycling programs or will educate their parents about other
environmental issues. One observer has suggested that this should come
as no surprise at all. Just as today’s 40- and 50-year-old grew up with a
vague fear of the bomb and worried at times that their elders would blow
up the world, he suggests that 10-year-olds today are vaguely fearful of
environmental deterioration and worry that their elders are polluting the
world. If this is so and these children are adopting a change in paradigm,
suggestions dismissed today as politically unrealistic will, in some
modified form, become tomorrow’s political imperatives. Environmental
impact will no longer be the nuisance of generating required paperwork
but will be an important underpinning for political decisions.

DELIBERATIVE POLICYMAKING through DEBATE is the CRUCIAL internal link to

solving warming through public policy and SUBSUMES their critiques of
traditional persuasion
Herbeck and Isham 10
http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/775
Jon Isham
Associate Professor of Economics, Middlebury College
In the fall of 1999, Jon joined the department of economics and the program in environmental
studies at Middlebury College. Jon teaches classes in environmental economics, environmental
policy, introductory microeconomics, social capital in Vermont, and global climate change. Jon is
co-editing a new book, Ignition: The Birth of the Climate Movement; has co-edited Social
Capital, Development, and the Environment (Edward Elgar Publications); has published articles
(several forthcoming) in Economic Development and Cultural Change, The Journal of African
Economies, The Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Rural Sociology, Society and Natural Resources, The Southern Economic Journal, The Vermont
Law Review, and the World Bank Economic Review; and has published book chapters in volumes
from Ashgate Press, The New England University Press, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge
University Press. His current research focuses on building the new climate movement; the
demand for water among poor households in Cambodia; information asymmetries in low-
income lending; and the effect of local social capital on environmental outcomes in Vermont.
Herbeck, member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and the
Honors College.

Getting to 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere will require massive investments in
clean-energy infrastructure—investments that can too often be foiled by a combination of
special interests and political sclerosis. Take the recent approval of the Cape Wind project by the
U.S. Department of the Interior. In some ways, this was great news for clean-energy advocates:
the project’s 130 turbines will produce, on average, 170 megawatts of electricity, almost 75
percent of the average electricity demand for Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard
and Nantucket.1 But, because of local opposition by well-organized opponents, the approval
process was lengthy, costly, and grueling —and all for a project that will produce only 0.04
percent of the total (forecasted) U.S. electricity demand in 2010.2,3 Over the next few decades,
the world will need thousands of large-scale, low-carbon electricity projects—wind, solar, and
nuclear power will certainly be in the mix. But if each faces Cape Wind–like opposition, getting
to 350 is unlikely. How can the decision-making process about such projects be streamlined so
that public policy reflects the view of a well-informed majority, provides opportunities for
legitimate critiques, but does not permit the opposition to retard the process indefinitely? One
answer is found in a set of innovative policy-making tools founded on the principle of deliberative
democracy, defined as “decision making by discussion among free and equal citizens.”4 Such
approaches, which have been developed and led by the Center for Deliberative Democracy
(cdd.stanford.edu), America Speaks (www.americaspeaks.org), and the Consensus Building
Institute (cbuilding.org), among others, are gaining popularity by promising a new foothold for
effective citizen participation in the drive for a clean-energy future. Deliberative democracy
stems from the belief that democratic leadership should involve educating constituents about
issues at hand, and that citizens may significantly alter their opinions when faced with
information about these issues. Advocates of the approach state that democracy should shift
away from fixed notions toward a learning process in which people develop defensible positions.5
While the approaches of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, America Speaks, and the
Consensus Building Institute do differ, all of these deliberative methodologies involve unbiased
sharing of information and public-policy alternatives with a representative set of citizens; a
moderated process of deliberation among the selected citizens; and the collection and
dissemination of data resulting from this process. For example, in the deliberative polling
approach used by the Center for Deliberative Democracy, a random selection of citizens is first
polled on a particular issue. Then, members of the poll are invited to gather at a single place to
discuss the issue. Participants receive balanced briefing materials to review before the
gathering, and at the gathering they engage in dialogue with competing experts and political
leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions. After deliberations, the
sample is asked the original poll questions, and the resulting changes in opinion represent the
conclusions that the public would reach if everyone were given the opportunity to become more
informed on pressing issues.6 If policymakers look at deliberative polls rather than traditional
polls, they will be able to utilize results that originate from an informed group of citizens. As
with traditional polls, deliberative polls choose people at random to represent U.S.
demographics of age, education, gender, and so on. But traditional polls stop there, asking the
random sample some brief, simple questions, typically online or over the phone. However,
participants of deliberative polls have the opportunity to access expert information and then talk
with one another before voting on policy recommendations. The power of this approach is
illustrated by the results of a global deliberative process organized by World Wide Views on
Global Warming (www.wwviews.org), a citizen’s deliberation organization based in Denmark.7
On September 26, 2009, approximately 4,000 people gathered in 38 countries to consider what
should happen at the UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (338 Americans met in five
major cities). The results derived from this day of deliberation were dramatic and significantly
different from results of traditional polls. Overall, citizens showed strong concern about global
warming and support for climate-change legislation, contrary to the outcomes of many standard
climate-change polls. Based on the polling results from these gatherings, 90 percent of global
citizens believe that it is urgent for the UN negotiations to produce a new climate change
agreement; 88 percent of global citizens (82 percent of U.S. citizens) favor holding global
warming to within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels; and 74 percent of global citizens (69
percent of U.S. citizens) favor increasing fossil-fuel prices in developed countries. However, a
typical news poll that was conducted two days before 350.org’s International Day of Climate
Action on October 24, 2009, found that Americans had an overall declining concern about global
warming.7 How can deliberative democracy help to create solutions for the climate-change
policy process, to accelerate the kinds of policies and public investments that are so crucial to
getting the world on a path to 350? Take again the example of wind in the United States. In the
mid-1990s, the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC) launched an “integrated resource plan”
to develop long-term strategies for energy production, particularly electricity.8 Upon learning
about the deliberative polling approach of James Fishkin (then at the University of Texas at
Austin), the PUC set up deliberative sessions for several hundred customers in the vicinity of
every major utility provider in the state. The results were a surprise: it turned out that
participants ranked reliability and stability of electricity supply as more important characteristics
than price. In addition, they were open to supporting renewable energy, even if the costs
slightly exceeded fossil-fuel sources. Observers considered this a breakthrough: based on these
public deliberations, the PUC went on to champion an aggressive renewable portfolio standard,
and the state has subsequently experienced little of the opposition to wind-tower siting that has
slowed development in other states.8 By 2009, Texas had 9,500 megawatts of installed wind
capacity, as much as the next six states (ranked by wind capacity) in the windy lower and upper
Midwest (Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, North Dakota, Kansas, and New Mexico).9 Deliberative
democracy has proven effective in a wide range of countries and settings. In the Chinese
township of Zeguo, a series of deliberative polls has helped the Local People’s Congress (LPC) to
become a more effective decision-making body.10 In February 2008, 175 citizens were randomly
selected to scrutinize the town’s budget—and 60 deputies from the LPC observed the process.
After the deliberations, support decreased for budgeting for national defense projects, while
support rose for infrastructure (e.g., rural road construction) and environmental protection.
Subsequently, the LPC increased support for environmental projects by 9 percent.10 In decades
to come, China must be at the forefront of the world’s investments in clean-energy
infrastructure. The experience of Zeguo, if scaled up and fully supported by Chinese leaders, can
help to play an important role. Deliberative democracy offers one solution for determining
citizen opinions, including those on pressing issues related to climate change and clean energy.

Simulation allows us to influence state policy AND is key to agency

Eijkman 12
The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development: Implications for Practice / Dr. Henk Simon
Eijkman. [electronic resource] http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf. Dr Henk Eijkman is
currently an independent consultant as well as visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force
Academy and is Visiting Professor of Academic Development, Annasaheb Dange College of Engineering and Technology in India. As a
sociologist he developed an active interest in tertiary learning and teaching with a focus on socially inclusive innovation and culture
change. He has taught at various institutions in the social sciences and his work as an adult learning specialist has taken him to South
Africa, Malaysia, Palestine, and India. He publishes widely in international journals, serves on Conference Committees and editorial
boards of edited books and international journal

However, whether as an approach to learning, innovation, persuasion or culture shift, policy

simulations derive their
power from two central features: their combination of simulation and gaming (Geurts et al. 2007). 1. The
simulation element: the unique combination of simulation with role-playing .The unique simulation/role-play
mix enables participants to create possible futures relevant to the topic being studied . This is
diametrically opposed to the more traditional , teacher-centric approaches in which a future is
produced for them. In policy simulations, possible futures are much more than an object of
tabletop discussion and verbal speculation. ‘No other technique allows a group of participants to
engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures they want to
explore’ (Geurts et al. 2007: 536). 2. The game element: the interactive and tailor-made modelling and design of the
policy game. The actual run of the policy simulation is only one step, though a most important and visible one, in a collective process
of investigation, communication, and evaluation of performance. In the context of a post-graduate course in public policy
development, for example, a policy simulation is a dedicated game constructed in collaboration with
practitioners to achieve a high level of proficiency in relevant aspects of the policy development process. To drill
down to a level of finer detail, policy development simulations —as forms of interactive or participatory modelling—
are particularly effective in developing participant knowledge and skills in the five key areas of the policy
development process (and success criteria), namely: Complexity, Communication, Creativity, Consensus, and Commitment to action
(‘the five Cs’). The capacity to provide effective learning support in these five categories has proved to be particularly helpful in
strategic decision-making (Geurts et al. 2007). Annexure 2.5 contains a detailed description, in table format, of the synopsis below.

Engaging and discussing the state is key to warming

Held and Hervey 9
David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of LSE Global
Governance at the London School of Economics.
Angus Fane Hervey is a Doctoral Student and Ralph Miliband Scholar in the Department of
Government at the London School of Economics.
www.policy-network.net/publications_download.aspx?ID=3426

The key role of the state In all of these challenges, states remain the key actors, as they hold the key
to both domestic and international policymaking. The implementation of international
agreements will be up to individual states, emissions trading and carbon pricing will require
domestic legislation, and technological advance will need state support to get off the ground
(Giddens, 2008). However, state strategies at the domestic level should involve the creation of
incentives, not overly tight regulation. Governments have an important role in “editing” choice,
but not in a way that precludes it altogether. This approach is represented in the form of what
Giddens (2008) calls “the ensuring state,” whose primary role is help energise a diversity of
groups to reach solutions to collective action problems. The state, so conceived, acts as a
facilitator and an enabler, rather than as a top-down agency. An ensuring state is one that has
the capacity to produce definite outcomes. The principle goes even further; it also means a state
that is responsible for monitoring public goals and for trying to make sure they are realised in a
visible and legitimate fashion. This will require a return to planning – not in the old sense of top
down hierarchies of control, but in a new sense of flexible regulation. This will require finding
ways to introduce regulation without undermining the entrepreneurialism and innovation upon
which successful responses will depend. It will not be a straightforward process, because
planning must be reconciled with democratic freedoms. There will be push and pull between the
political centre, regions and localities, which can only be resolved through deliberation and
consultation. Most importantly, states will require a long term vision that transcends the normal
push and pull of partisan politics. This will not be easy to achieve. All this takes place in the
context of a changing world order. The power structure on which the 1945 multilateral
settlement was based is no longer intact, and the relative decline of the west and the rise of Asia
raises fundamental questions about the premises of the 1945 multilateral order. Democracy and
the international community now face a critical test. However, addressing the issue of climate
change successfully holds out the prospect of reforging a rule-based politics , from the nation-state
to the global level. Table 1 highlights what we consider to be the necessary steps to be taken
along this road. By contrast, failure to meet the challenge could have deep and profound
consequences, both for what people make of modern democratic politics and for the idea of rule-
governed international politics. Under these conditions, the structural flaws of democracy could be
said to have tragically trumped democratic agency and deliberative capacity.
 LA Edu Good/Key
Criticism alone does nothing – engagement of Latin studies is key to change
Hoffnung-Garskof 12 (Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof is Associate Professor of History and American
Culture and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan,
“Latin American Studies and United States Foreign Policy,” Fall 2012,
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/ii/Home/II%20Journal/Documents/Fall-2012-IIJournal-
LatinAmerica.pdf)//AS
Such effects are neither simple nor purely instrumental, nor are they uncontested. Faculty at the
University of Michigan did finally create a Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program in 1984. This program later evolved into
the present, Title VI funded, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS). In 1984 the Reagan administration funneled
growing resources to Contra insurgents in Nicaragua and to military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. These governments, with
U.S. complicity, murdered more than 120,000 of their citizens. The creation of LACS at Michigan certainly did not stem from
enthusiasm for such policies among area experts. To the contrary, at least some of the founders of our program, and many who
have participated in it since, approached their scholarship and teaching from an explicitly dissident position with respect to the wars
in Central America (and other policies). In fact, nationally,
Latin American Studies, despite its frequent
dependence on government funding, has become a key site for criticizing and exposing the
exercise of U.S. power in the region, for challenging established foreign policy expertise, and for
working to unravel the knot of our relative privilege with respect to colleagues in Latin America.
Criticism of United States foreign policy does not, in and of itself, guarantee careful or
considered scholarship. Nor do dissenting policy views necessarily escape the epistemological
traps set by power relations in the hemisphere . But the emergence of informed dissent within the
structure of federally funded area studies is a mark of just how potentially transformative
serious scholarly engagement with foreign languages, literature, culture, and politics can be.
Criticism of U.S. foreign policy and its intellectual apparatus, and criticism of the neat division of the hemisphere into United States
and Latin America (which can be traced back to Bolton himself) are, to my mind, two of the most valuable, if unintended,
consequences of the area studies model. Members of the political establishment will not necessarily agree, which may be part of the
reason for our present funding predicaments.

Global studies are key to addressing violence and inequality

Hoffnung-Garskof 12 (Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof is Associate Professor of History and American
Culture and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan,
“Latin American Studies and United States Foreign Policy,” Fall 2012,
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/ii/Home/II%20Journal/Documents/Fall-2012-IIJournal-
LatinAmerica.pdf)//AS
What are those strengths? Despite its pitfalls, the area studies model has built an expectation that scholarship will be founded on
serious language training; specific, local cultural and historical knowledge; meaningful, longstanding collaborations with colleagues
in the region; and a certain skepticism about the very institutional frameworks in which we work. It
is not clear to me that
the institutional forces putting money into new global initiatives are as committed to the kind of
deep, rigorous, engagement with the local, or critique of the imperial, that is our stock and
trade. Some visions of the global have a sweeping scale that may render such engagement simply unmanageable. And some
models of the global ignore or hide the violence and inequality that mark past and present-day
experiences of globalization. Which is to say, I think we should be ready to make the leap from
traditional area studies to global studies, if need be. But we should champion a vision of the global
that does not throw the baby out with the bath water . And, even as we make use of the resources the new
regime offers, we should expect, as generations of scholars have done in Title VI centers, to adopt
roles as dissidents and as critics of the regime itself.
Discussing Latin America is key to educational equity for minorities
Davila and de Bradley 10 (Erica Davila, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Education and Coordinator
of Urban Education at Arcadia University and Ann Aviles de Bradley, Assistant Professor. Department of
Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Academic journal article from
Educational Foundations, Vol. 24, No. 1-2, Spring 2010, http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-
227945957/examining-education-for-latinas-os-in-chicago-a-crt-latcrit)//AS
In the last thirty years, the response of public schools to policy mandates stemming from the Civil Rights Movement that were
intended to protect the rights of people of color, including Latina/os, sheds light on how little has changed in the structure and
function of schools. From the time we were allowed to obtain an education in the same system as the dominant
class and race, marginalized groups have been told that schools are vehicles to equal opportunity; schools
have even been described as "the great equalizer." The
Latina/o population is by and large, young, and
the erosion of equality in American schooling has hit it hard. However, the struggle for school
equity for Latina/os has been coupled with a strong history of resistance rooted in community
and grassroots organizing. As Spring (1991) states;¶ From World War II to the 1990s [and today],
Native Americans,¶ Puerto Ricans, African Americans and Mexican Americans have ¶ demanded
that public schools recognize their distinct cultures and ¶ incorporate these cultures into curricula
and textbooks. (p. 195)¶ The struggle for equity in education for Latina/os has not ended. While
some schools and school districts have made affirmative efforts to fully include the life experiences and
histories of the students they serve, the vast majority of public schools serving Latinas/os have not done so
(Valenzuela, 1999). Furthermore, while progressive educators have made some gains to better serve Latina/os
during the 1960s and 1970s, the sharp conservative turn in the 1980s laid the foundation for many
school policies and practices that worked against the gains made in areas such as culturally
inclusive curricula and bilingual education. For this paper, we have focused on the inequities that clearly
disenfranchise Latina/o students by drawing on two editions of a previous research project (Aviles, Capeheart,
Davila, & Miller, 2004) and (Aviles, Capeheart, Davila, Miller, & Rodriguez-Lucero, 2006) which is discussed
further in our methods section (We will refer to these reports as Dando 2004 and Dando 2006 for the duration
of this paper). Using the data we collected for these reports we will examine the ways in which
CRT and
LatCrit can assist in exposing the historical and political context of systemic educational practices
that are designed to hinder real progress for Latinas/os.

Discussing Latin America avoids racial exclusion

Davila and de Bradley 10 (Erica Davila, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Education and Coordinator
of Urban Education at Arcadia University and Ann Aviles de Bradley, Assistant Professor. Department of
Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Academic journal article from
Educational Foundations, Vol. 24, No. 1-2, Spring 2010, http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-
227945957/examining-education-for-latinas-os-in-chicago-a-crt-latcrit)//AS
CRT scholars draw from various educational foundations and intersections within these foundations. The social construction
of race and other identities is rooted in sociological studies. Furthermore, historical foundations of education as well as
education policy studies help us see the realities of oppression that unfold. This interdisciplinary backdrop will help us
contextualize the data within the social context of institutional oppression. The lack of educational opportunities
for Latina/o students speaks to the oppression students endure on an institutional level. The
exposition of institutional racism which can be analyzed through a sociological perspective of
struggle and resistance, and policies born form these tensions are critical to deconstruct. Further,
the interdisciplinary nature of CRT and LatCrit provide us with theoretical insights rooted in lived experience.¶ Both CRT
and LatCrit serve as frameworks that assist in our understanding of areas related to the racial
inequity embedded in our society. CRT is used to understand educational issues such as school discipline and hierarchy, testing,
tracking and curriculum (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Often when persons think about race and racism in America,
the conversation frequently focuses on issues of oppression among the African American
community. We recognize this is a necessary and critical conversation; however, it often leaves little space to discuss
common areas of concern for all populations of color, as well as illuminate areas specific to
these other groups. The Latina/o population in the U.S. is quickly growing and therefore it is incumbent upon education scholars to identify
theoretical frameworks that help us to move beyond the traditional Black-White binary. LatCrit helps us in our efforts to take on such a task. LatCrit
theory in education is defined as:¶ ...a
framework that can be used to theorize and examine the ways in which
race and racism explicitly and implicitly impact on the educational structures, processes and
discourses that effect People of Color generally and Latinas/os specifically . (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001, p. 479)
Framing
 Epist
Broad indicts of epistemology don’t take out our impacts—you should weigh
specific evidence to get closer to the truth
Kratochwil, 08 – professor of international relations – European University Institute, ‘8 (Friedrich, “The Puzzles of
Politics,” pg. 200-213)
In what follows, I claim that the shift in focus from “demonstration” to science as practice provides strong prima facie reasons
to choose pragmatic rather than traditional epistemological criteria in social analysis. Irrespective of its various forms, the
epistemological project includes an argument that all warranted knowledge has to satisfy
certain field- independent criteria that are specified by philosophy (a “theory of know- ledge”). The
real issue of how our concepts and the world relate to each other, and on which non-idiosyncratic grounds we are justified to
hold on to our beliefs about the world, is “answered” by two metaphors. The first is that of an inconvertible ground, be it the
nature of things, certain intuitions (Des- cartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”) or methods and inferences; the second is that of a
“mirror” that shows what is the case. There is no need to rehearse the arguments demonstrating that these under- lying beliefs
and metaphors could not sustain the weight placed upon them. A “method” à la Descartes could not make good on its claims, as
it depended ultimately on the guarantee of God that concepts and things in the outer world match. On the other hand, the
empiricist belief in direct observation forgot that “facts” which become “data” are – as the term suggests – “made”. They are
based on the judgements of the observer using cultural criteria, even if they appear to be based on direct perception, as is the
case with colours.4 Besides, there
had always been a sneaking suspicion that the epistemo- logical
ideal of certainty and rigour did not quite fit the social world, an objection voiced first by humanists
such as Vico, and later rehearsed in the continuing controversies about erklä ren and verstehen (Weber 1991; for a more
recent treatment see Hollis 1994). In short, both the constitutive nature of our concepts, and the value interest in which they
are embedded, raise peculiar issues of meaning and contestation that are quite different from those of description. As Vico
(1947) suggested, we “understand” the social world because we have “made it”, a point raised again by Searle concerning both
the crucial role played by ascriptions of meaning (x counts for y) in the social world and the distinction between institutional
“facts” from “brute” or natural facts (Searle 1995). Similarly, since values are constitutive for our “interests”, the concepts we
use always portray an action from a certain point of view; this involves appraisals and prevents us from accepting allegedly
“neutral” descriptions that would be meaningless. Thus, when we say that someone “abandoned” another person and hence
communicate a (contestable) appraisal, we want to call attention to certain important moral implica- tions of an act.
Attempting to eliminate the value-tinge in the description and insisting that everything has
to be cast in neutral, “objective”, observational language – such as “he opened the door and went through
it” – would indeed make the statement “pointless ”, even if it is (trivially) “true” (for a powerful statement of
this point, see Connolly 1983). The most devastating attack on the epistemological project , however,
came from the history of science itself. It not only corrected the naive view of knowledge
generation as mere accumulation of data, but it also cast increasing doubt on the viability of
various field-independent “demarcation criteria”. This was, for the most part, derived from the old Humean
argument that only sentences with empirical content were “meaningful”, while value statements had to be taken either as
statements about individual preferences or as meaningless, since de gustibus non est disputandum. As the later dis- cussion in
the Vienna circle showed, this distinction was utterly unhelpful (Popper 1965: ch. 2). It did not solve the problem of induction,
and failed to acknowledge that not all meaningful theoretical sentences must correspond with natural facts. Karl Popper’s
ingenious solution of making “refutability” the logical cri- terion and interpreting empirical
“tests” as a special mode of deduction (rather than as a way of increasing supporting evidence) seemed to
respond to this epistemological quandary for a while. An “historical reconstruction” of science as a progressive development
thus seemed possible, as did the specification of a pragmatic criterion for conducting research. Yet again, studies in the history
of science undermined both hopes. The different stages in Popper’s own intellectual development are, in fact, rather telling. He
started out with a version of conjectures and refutations that was based on the notion of a more or less self-correcting
demonstration. Con- fronted with the findings that scientists did not use the refutation criterion in their research, he
emphasised then the role of the scientific community on which the task of “refutation” devolved. Since the individual scientist
might not be ready to bite the bullet and admit that she or he might have been wrong, colleagues had to keep him or her
honest. Finally, towards the end of his life, Popper began to rely less and less on the stock of knowledge or on the scientists’
shared theoretical understandings – simply devalued as the “myth of the framework” – and emphasised instead the processes
of communica- tion and of “translation” among different schools of thought within a scien- tific community (Popper 1994). He
still argued that these processes follow the pattern of “conjecture and refutation”, but the model was clearly no longer that of
logic or of scientific demonstration, but one that he derived from his social theory – from his advocacy of an “open society”
(Popper 1966). Thus a near total reversal of the ideal of knowledge had occurred. While formerly everything was measured in
terms of the epistemological ideal derived from logic and physics, “knowledge” was now the result of deliberation and of
certain procedural notions for assessing competing knowledge claims. Politics and law, rather than physics, now provided the
template. Thus the history of science has gradually moved away from the epistemo- logical ideal to
focus increasingly on the actual practices of various scientific communities engaged in
knowledge production, particularly on how they handle problems of scientific
disagreement.5 This reorientation implied a move away from field-independent criteria and
from the demonstrative ideal to one in which “arguments” and the “weight” of evidence had
to be appraised. This, in turn, not only generated a bourgeoning field of “science studies” and their “social”
epistemologies (see Fuller 1991), but also suggested more generally that the traditional understandings of
knowledge production based on the model of “theory” were in need of revision. If the history of
science therefore provides strong reasons for a pragmatic turn, as the discussion above illustrates, what
remains to be shown is how this turn relates to the historical, linguistic and constructivist turns that preceded it. To start with,
from the above it should be clear that, in the social world, we are not dealing with natural kinds
that exist and are awaiting, so to speak, prepackaged, their placement in the appropriate
box. The objects we investi- gate are rather conceptual creations and they are intrinsically
linked to the language through which the social world is constituted . Here “constructivists”,
particularly those influenced by Wittgenstein and language philosophy, easily link up with “pragmatists” such as
Rorty, who emphasises the product- ive and pragmatic role of “vocabularies” rather than
conceiving of language as a “mirror of nature” (Rorty 1979). Furthermore, precisely because social facts are
not natural, but have to be reproduced through the actions of agents, any attempt to treat them like “brute” facts becomes
doubly problematic. For one, even “natural” facts are not simply “there”; they are interpretations based on our theories.
Secondly, different from the observation of natural facts, in which perceptions address a “thing” through a conceptually
mediated form, social
reality is entirely “arti- ficial” in the sense that it is dependent on the
beliefs and practices of the actors themselves. This reproductive process, directed by norms, always
engenders change either interstitially, when change is small-scale or adaptive – or more dramatically, when it becomes
“transformative” – for instance when it produces a new system configuration, as after the advent of national- ism (Lapid and
Kratochwil 1995) or after the demise of the Soviet Union (Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994). Consequently,
any
examination of the social world has to become in a way “historical” even if some
“structuralist” theories attempt to minimise this dimension . [. . .] Therefore a pragmatic
approach to social science and IR seems both necessary and promising. On the one hand, it is
substantiated by the failure of the epistemological project that has long dominated the field.
On the other, it offers a different positive heuristics that challenges IR’s traditional disciplin-
ary boundaries and methodological assumptions. Interest in pragmatism therefore does not seem to be just
a passing fad – even if such an interpre- tation cannot entirely be discounted, given the incentives of academia to find, just like
advertising agencies, “new and improved” versions of familiar products.

Accept our impacts

( ) We don’t need to win our epistemology is perfect – but it’s better to try and understand the world through flawed
empiricism than just give up on all meaning – it’s key to persuading audiences
Sil 2k
[Rudra Sil, assistant professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania. “Against Epistemological Absolutism: Toward
a “Pragmatic” Center,” in Beyond Boundaries ed Sil and Eileen M. Doherty 2000 p160-161]
In the end, there may be no alternative to relying on the judgment of other human
beings, and this judgment is difficult to form in the absence of empirical findings.
However, instead of clinging to the elusive idea of a uniform standard for the empirical validation of theories, it is
possible to simply present a set of observational statements – whether we call it “data” or
“narrative” – for the modest purpose of rendering an explanation or interpretation more
plausible than the audience would allow at the outset. In practice, this is precisely what the most
committed positivists and interpretivists have been doing anyway; the presentation of “ logically
consistent” hypotheses “ supported by data ” and the ordering of facts in a “thick”
narrative are both ultimately designed to convince scholars that a particular
proposition should be taken more seriously than others. Social analysis is not about
final truths or objective realities, but nor does it have to be a meaningless world of
incommensurable theories where anything goes. Instead, it can be an ongoing collective
endeavor to develop, evaluate, and refine general inferences - be they in the form of models,
partial explanations, descriptive inferences, or interpretations- in
order to render them more “sensible”
or “plausible” to a particular audience. In the absence of a consensus on the possibility and desirability of a full-blown
explanatory science of international and social life, it is important to keep as many doors open as
possible. This does not require us to accept each and very claim without some sort of
validation, but perhaps the community of scholars can be more tolerant about the
kinds of empirical referents and logical propositions that are employed in validating
propositions by scholars embracing all but the most extreme epistemological
positions.
 Onto
Prior focus on ontology causes paralysis – having “good enough knowledge” is a
sufficient condition for action
Kratochwil, ‘8 – professor of international relations – European University Institute, ‘8
(Friedrich, “The Puzzles of Politics,” pg. 200-213)

The lesson seems clear. Even at the danger of “fuzzy boundaries”, when we deal with “practice ”
( just as with the “pragmatic turn”), we would be well advised to rely on the use of the term rather
than on its reference (pointing to some property of the object under study), in order to draw the bounds of
sense and understand the meaning of the concept. My argument for the fruitful character of
a pragmatic approach in IR, therefore, does not depend on a comprehensive mapping of the
varieties of research in this area, nor on an arbitrary appropriation or exegesis of any
specific and self-absorbed theoretical orientation . For this reason, in what follows, I will not provide a
rigidly specified definition, nor will I refer exclusively to some prepackaged theoretical approach. Instead, I will sketch
out the reasons for which a prag- matic orientation in social analysis seems to hold
particular promise. These reasons pertain both to the more general area of knowledge appropriate for praxis and to the
more specific types of investigation in the field. The follow- ing ten points are – without a claim to completeness – intended to
engender some critical reflection on both areas.
Firstly, a
pragmatic approach does not begin with objects or “things” (ontology), or with
reason and method (epistemology), but with “acting” (prattein), thereby preventing some false
starts. Since, as historical beings placed in a specific situations, we do not have the luxury of
deferring decisions until we have found the “truth”, we have to act and must do so always
under time pressures and in the face of incomplete information. Pre- cisely because the social
world is characterised by strategic interactions, what a situation “is”, is hardly ever clear ex
ante, because it is being “produced” by the actors and their interactions , and the multiple
possibilities are rife with incentives for (dis)information. This puts a premium on quick diagnostic and
cognitive shortcuts informing actors about the relevant features of the situ- ation, and on leaving an alternative open
(“plan B”) in case of unexpected difficulties. Instead of relying on certainty and universal validity gained
through abstraction and controlled experiments, we know that completeness and attentiveness to
detail, rather than to generality, matter. To that extent, likening practical choices to simple “discoveries” of an already
independently existing “reality” which discloses itself to an “observer” – or relying on optimal strategies – is somewhat heroic.
These points have been made vividly by “realists” such as Clausewitz in his controversy with von Bü low, in which he criticised
the latter’s obsession with a strategic “science” (Paret et al. 1986). While Clausewitz has become an icon for realists, only a few
of them (usually dubbed “old” realists) have taken seriously his warnings against the misplaced belief in the reliability and
use- fulness of a “scientific” study of strategy. Instead, most of them, especially “neorealists” of various stripes, have embraced
the “theory”-building based on the epistemological project as the via regia to the creation of knowledge. A pragmatist
orientation would most certainly not endorse such a position.
Secondly, since
acting in the social world often involves acting “for” some- one, special
responsibilities arise that aggravate both the incompleteness of knowledge as well as its
generality problem. Since we owe special care to those entrusted to us, for example, as teachers, doctors or lawyers,
we cannot just rely on what is generally true, but have to pay special attention to the
particular case. Aside from avoiding the foreclosure of options, we cannot refuse to act on the basis of
incomplete information or insufficient know- ledge, and the necessary diagnostic will involve typification
and comparison, reasoning by analogy rather than generalization or deduction. Leaving out the particularities of a case, be it a
legal or medical one, in a mistaken effort to become “scientific” would be a fatal flaw. Moreover, there
still remains the
crucial element of “timing” – of knowing when to act. Students of crises have always pointed out the
importance of this factor but, in attempts at building a general “theory” of international politics analogously to the natural sci-
ences, such elements are neglected on the basis of the “continuity of nature” and the “large number” assumptions. Besides,
“timing” seems to be quite recalcitrant to analytical treatment.
Extinction outweighs ontology. Scratch Zimmerman, reverse it.
Jonas ’96 (Hans, Former Alvin Johnson Prof. Phil. – New School for Social Research and Former Eric
Voegelin Visiting Prof. – U. Munich, “Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz”,
p. 111-112)
With this look ahead at an ethics for the future, we are touching at the same time upon the question of the future of freedom.
The unavoidable discussion of this question seems to give rise to misunderstandings. My dire prognosis that not only our
material standard of living but also our democratic freedoms would fall victim to the growing pressure of a worldwide
ecological crisis, until finally there would remain only some form of tyranny that would try to save the situation, has led to the
accusation that I am defending dictatorship as a solution to our problems. I shall ignore here what is a confusion between
warning and recommendation. But I have indeed said that such a tyranny would still be better than total
ruin; thus, I have ethically accepted it as an alternative. I must now defend this standpoint, which I continue to support,
before the court that I myself have created with the main argument of this essay. For are we not contradicting
ourselves in prizing physical survival at the price of freedom ? Did we not say that freedom was
the condition of our capacity for responsibility—and that this capacity was a reason for the survival of humankind?; By
tolerating tyranny as an alternative to physical annihilation are we not violating the
principle we established: that the How of existence must not take precedence over its
Why? Yet we can make a terrible concession to the primacy of physical survival in the
conviction that the ontological capacity for freedom, inseparable as it is from man's
being, cannot really be extinguished, only temporarily banished from the public
realm. This conviction can be supported by experience we are all familiar with. We
have seen that even in the most totalitarian societies the urge for freedom on the part
of some individuals cannot be extinguished, and this renews our faith in human
beings. Given this faith, we have reason to hope that, as long as there are human beings who survive ,
the image of God will continue to exist along with them and will wait in concealment
for its new hour. With that hope—which in this particular case takes precedence over fear—it is
permissible , for the sake of physical survival, to accept if need be a temporary
absence of freedom in the external affairs of humanity. This is, I want to emphasize, a worst-case
scenario, and it is the foremost task of responsibility at this particular moment in world history to prevent it from happening.
This is in fact one of the noblest of duties (and at the same time one concerning self-preservation), on the part of the
imperative of responsibility to avert future coercion that would lead to lack of freedom by acting freely in the present, thus
preserving as much as possible the ability of future generations to assume responsibility. But more than that is involved. At
stake is the preservation of Earth's entire miracle of creation, of which our human
existence is a part and before which man reverently bows, even without
philosophical "grounding." Here too faith may precede and reason follow; it is faith that longs for this
preservation of the Earth (fides quaerens intellectum), and reason comes as best it can to faith's aid with arguments, not
knowing or even asking how much depends on its success or failure in determining what action to take. With this confession of
faith we come to the end of our essay on ontology.
 Method

Method focus causes endless paradigm wars

Wendt, ’98 – professor of international security – Ohio State University, ‘98
(Alexander, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations,” British International Studies Association)

As a community, we in the academic study of international politics spend too much time worrying about the kind of issues
addressed in this essay. The
central point of IR scholarship is to increase our knowledge of how
the world works, not to worry about how (or whether) we can know how the world works. What
matters for IR is ontology, not epistemology. This doesn’t mean that there are no interesting epistemological questions in IR,
and even less does it mean that there are no important political or sociological aspects to those questions. Indeed there are, as
I have suggested above, and as a discipline IR should have more awareness of these aspects. At the same time, however, these
are questions best addressed by philosophers and sociologists of knowledge, not political scientists. Let’s
face it: most
IR scholars, including this one, have little or no proper training in epistemology, and as such the
attempt to solve epistemological problems anyway will inevitably lead to confusion (after all,
after 2000 years, even the specialists are still having a hard time). Moreover, as long as we let
our research be driven in an open-minded fashion by substantive questions and problems
rather than by epistemologies and methods, there is little need to answer epistemological
questions either. It is simply not the case that we have to undertake an epistemological
analysis of how we can know something before we can know it, a fact amply attested to by
the success of the natural sciences, whose practitioners are only rarely forced by the results
of their inquiries to consider epistemological questions. In important respects we do know
how international politics works, and it doesn’t much matter how we came to that
knowledge. In that light, going into the epistemology business will distract us from the real
business of IR, which is international politics. Our great debates should be about first-order
issues of substance, like the ‘first debate’ between Realists and Idealists, not second-order issues of method.
Unfortunately, it is no longer a simple matter for IR scholars to ‘just say no’ to epistemological
discourse. The
problem is that this discourse has already contamin- ated our thinking about international politics,
helping to polarize the discipline into ‘paradigm wars’. Although the resurgence of these wars in the 1980s
and 90s is due in large part to the rise of post-positivism, its roots lie in the epistemological anxiety of positivists, who since
the 1950s have been very concerned to establish the authority of their work as Science. This is an important goal, one that I
share, but its implementation has been marred by an overly narrow conception of science as being concerned only with causal
questions that can be answered using the methods of natural science. The effect has been to marginalize historical and
interpretive work that does not fit this mould, and to encourage scholars interested in that kind of work to see themselves as
somehow not engaged in science. One has to wonder whether the two sides should be happy with the result. Do positivists
really mean to suggest that it is not part of science to ask questions about how things are constituted, questions which if those
things happen to be made of ideas might only be answerable by interpretive methods? If so, then they seem to be saying that
the double-helix model of DNA, and perhaps much of rational choice theory, is not science. And do post-positivists
really mean to suggest that students of social life should not ask causal questions or attempt to test
their claims against empirical evidence? If so, then it is not clear by what criteria their work
should be judged, or how it differs from art or revelation. On both sides, in other words, the result of the
Third Debate’s sparring over epistemology is often one-sided, intolerant caricatures of science.
 Reps
Policy analysis should precede discourse – most effective way to challenge
power
Taft-Kaufman ’95
Jill Taft-Kaufman, Speech prof @ CMU, 1995, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3,
“Other Ways”, p pq

The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference,"

unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a
solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of
power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial
posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-
referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist
politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern
emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and
transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no
vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is
underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic
Has there ever been a
manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments:
historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much
radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or
Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with
the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any
Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the
"sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend .
Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are
linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls
apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political
and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the
discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to
speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It
may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection
onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is
derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather
than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require
collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an
accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances
hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals
(Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the
postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990)
for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just
textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content
of education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p.
299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of
American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges
are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are
clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People
whose
lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share
the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such
an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and
current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They
do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more
real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a
person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The
need to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals
keeps writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power
works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.

Only the perm solves – challenging representations without challenging

institutional forms of domination furthers oppression
Tuathail 96 – Prof in the Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute
(Gearoid, Political Geography, 15(6-7), 664)

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the

discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different
that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is
a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the
practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to
minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic
communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to
note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways
political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’- evades the
important question of
agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action
possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions,
discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be
theorized together with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines
towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book
is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning
practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual;
the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the
distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others.
Third, Dalby’s interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident
peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the
Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately
futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by
Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree
with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there
is a
danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and
the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts
within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words,
should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient
reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.

Reps don’t come first and placing them first shatters real world change
Dewsbury ‘3 (John-David Dewsbury -- School of Geographical Studies, University of Bristol
-- Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pages 1907-1932 --
http://www.sages.unimelb.edu.au/news/mhgr/dewsbury.pdf)
That someone includes us -- the social scientists, the researchers, and the writers. In some way we are all false witnesses to
what is there.(2) So, even
though the philosophical drive moves against the apparently
sterile setup of totalizing representations, the presentation of ideas is trapped within
the structure it is trying to critique. In my opinion, this sterility is only apparent. Significantly, this appearance
is valid from both sides: from the side of representational theory because of the belief in the representational structure as
being able to give an account of everything; and from the side of nonrepresentational theory because of the danger
of getting carried away with an absolute critique of representations. The apparent
sterility comes from this last point: that in getting carried away with critique you fail
to appreciate that the building blocks of representation are not sterile in themselves --
only when they are used as part of a system. The representational system, its structure and
regulation of meaning, is not complete -- it needs constant maintenance, loyalty, and faith from those who practice it. In
this regard, its power is in its pragmatic functions: easy communication of ideas (that restricts their potential
extension), and sustainable, defensible, and consensual agreement on understanding (a certain kind of understanding, and
hence a certain type of knowledge). The nonrepresentational argument comes into its own in asking us to revisit the
performative space of representation in a manner that is more attuned to its fragile constitution. The point being that
representation left critically unattended only allows for conceptual difference and not for a concept
of difference as such. The former maintains existing ideological markers whilst the latter challenges us to invent new ones. For
me, the project of nonrepresentational theory then, is to excavate the empty space between the lines of representational
meaning in order to see what is also possible. The representational
system is not wrong: rather, it is
the belief that it offers complete understanding -- and that only it offers any sensible
understanding at all -- that is critically flawed.
Impacts
 Root cause
No root cause of war – complexity dooms monocausal explnalations
Jabri 96
Vivienne, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent, Introduction: Conflict
Analysis Reconsidered,” Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, Published by
Manchester University Press ND, ISBN 0719039592, p. 3
The study of war has produced a number of often conflicting answers to
Quincy Wright’s question, “Why is war thought? Why is war fought?”1 The
history of human political violence has shown that we cannot produce
monocausal explanations of war. Studies which concentrate on assumed innate
human characteristics fail to account for the societal factors which are implicated in
what is essentially an interactive and dynamic process. Similarly, investigations
which link attributes of the international system, such as balances of power,
not only produce contradictory findings, but seem to negate human decision-
making and psychological processes in the onset of war in specific
conditions. Studies of violent conflict aspire to uncover, through empirical
investigation, patterns of behaviour which lead to war. As indicated by Holsti, studies
of war may be divided into those which emphasise structural or “ecological” variables,
such as the distribution of power capabilities within the system, and those which
emphasise “decision-making, values, and perceptions of policy-makers” in attempts to
isolate common features leading up to the decision for war.2

The consensus of experts is on our side

Holsti 91
Kalevi Jaakko, Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, On The Study
Of War,” Peace And War: Armed Conflicts And International Order, 1648-1989, Published by
Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521399297, p. 3
Investigators of conflict, crises, and war reached a consensus years ago that
monocausal explanations are theoretically and empirically deficient.
Kenneth Waltz’ (1957) classic typology of war explanations convincingly
demonstrated various problems arising from diagnoses that locate war causation
exclusively at the individual, state attribute, or systemic levels. He also illustrated how
prescriptions based on faulty diagnoses offer no solution to the problem. Even
Rousseau’s powerful exploration of the consequences of anarchy, updated by Waltz
(1979), remains full of insights, but it only specifies why wars recur (there is nothing
to prevent them) and offers few clues that help to predict when, where, and over what
issues. Blainey (1973), in another telling attack on monocausal theories, continues
where Waltz left off. He offers, on the basis of rich historical illustrations, both logical
and anecdotal rebuttals of facile explanations of war that dot academic and
philosophical thought on the subject. But rebuttals of the obvious are not
sufficient. We presently have myriads of theories of war, emphasizing all
sorts of factors that can help explain its etiology. As Carroll and Fink (1975)
note, there are if anything too many theories, and even too many
typologies of theories. Quoting Timascheff approvingly, they point out that
anything might lead to war, but nothing will certainly lead to war.
No single cause of conflict
Barnett et al 7
Michael, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O’Donnell, Laura Sitea, Global Governance, “Peacebuilding:
What is in a Name?”, Questia
Because there are multiple contributing causes of conflict, almost any
international assistance effort that addresses any perceived or real
grievance can arguably be called "peacebuilding." Moreover, anyone invited to
imagine the causes of violent conflict might generate a rather expansive
laundry list of issues to be addressed in the postconflict period, including
income distribution, land reform, democracy and the rule of law, human
security, corruption, gender equality, refugee reintegration, economic
development, ethnonational divisions, environmental degradation,
transitional justice, and on and on. There are at least two good reasons for such
a fertile imagination. One, there is no master variable for explaining either the
outbreak of violence or the construction of a positive peace but merely
groupings of factors across categories such as greed and grievance, and catalytic
events. Variables that might be relatively harmless in some contexts can be a potent
cocktail in others. Conversely, we have relatively little knowledge regarding
what causes peace or what the paths to peace are. Although democratic
states that have reasonably high per capita incomes are at a reduced risk
of conflict, being democratic and rich is no guarantor of a positive peace,
and illiberal and poor countries, at times, also have had their share of sucascess.
Second, organizations are likely to claim that their core competencies and mandates
are critical to peacebuilding. They might be right. They also might be opportunistic.
After all, if peacebuilding is big business, then there are good bureaucratic reasons for
claiming that they are an invaluable partner.
 Structural Violence
War fuels structural violence
Goldstein ’01
PROF OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS @ AMERICAN UNIV (JOSHUA, WAR AND GENDER,
P. 412)
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists
support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work
for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the
peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The
evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way . War is not a
product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single
cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and
sustained these and other injustices. 9 So,”if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if
you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of
analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in
attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that
peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s
evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate .
 Extinction 1st
Even if extinction is inevitable – taking steps to postpone it solves suffering and
adds value to life
Epstein and Zhao 9 (Richard and Y, Laboratory of Computational Oncology, Department
of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, “The threat that dare not speak its name: human
extinction”, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 52, Number 1 (winter 2009):
116-25 Project Muse)
Human extinction is 100% certain—the only uncertainties are when and how. Like the men and women of Shakespeare’s As
You Like It, our species is but one of many players making entrances and exits on the evolutionary stage. That we generally
deny that such exits for our own species are possible is to be expected, given the brutish selection pressures on our biology.
Death, which is merely a biological description of evolutionary selection, is fundamental to life as we know it. Similarly, death
occurring at the level of a species—extinction—is as basic to biology as is the death of individual organisms or cells. Hence, to
regard extinction as catastrophic—which implies that it may somehow never occur, provided that we are all well behaved—is
not only specious, but self-defeating. Man
is both blessed and cursed by the highest level of self-
awareness of any life-form on Earth. This suggests that the process of human extinction is
likely to be accompanied by more suffering than that associated with any previous
species extinction event. Such suffering may only be eased by the getting of wisdom: the
same kind of wisdom that could, if applied sufficiently early, postpone extinction. But the tragedy of
our species is that evolution does not select for such foresight. Man’s dreams of being
an immortal species in an eternal paradise are unachievable not because of original sin—the doomsday
scenario for which we choose to blame our “free will,” thereby perpetuating our creationist illusion of being at the center of
the universe—but rather, in reductionist terms, because paradise is incompatible with evolution. More
scientific effort in propounding this central truth of our species’ mortality, rather than
seeking spiritual comfort in escapist fantasies, could pay dividends in minimizing the eventual
cumulative burden of human suffering.

Elevating human extinction to a real possibility encourages a new social ethic to

solve conflicts and create meaning to life
Epstein and Zhao 9 (Richard and Y, Laboratory of Computational Oncology, Department
of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, “The threat that dare not speak its name: human
extinction”, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 52, Number 1 (winter 2009):
116-25 Project Muse)
Final ends for all species are the same, but the journeys will be different . If we cannot
influence the end of our species, can we influence the journey? To do so—even in a small way—
would be a crowning achievement for human evolution and give new meaning to the
term civilization. Only by elevating the topic [End Page 121] of human extinction to the level of
serious professional discourse can we begin to prepare ourselves for the challenges that
lie ahead. Table 3. Human Thinking Modes Relevant to Extinction: from Ego-Think to Eco-Think The difficulty of the
required transition should not be underestimated. This is depicted in Table 3 as a painful multistep progression from the 20th-
century philosophical norm of Ego-Think—defined therein as a short-term state of mind valuing individual material self-
interest above all other considerations—to Eco-Think, in which humans come to adopt a broader Gaia-like outlook on
themselves as but one part of an infinitely larger reality. Making
this change must involve
communicating the non-sensationalist message to all global citizens that “things are
serious” and “we are in this together”—or, in blunter language, that the road to extinction and its
related agonies does indeed lie ahead. Consistent with this prospect, the risks of human
extinction—and the cost-benefit of attempting to reduce these risks—have been quantified in a recent
sobering analysis (Matheny 2007). Once complacency has been shaken off and a sense of collective purpose created,
the battle against self-seeking anthropocentric human instincts will have only just begun. It is often said that human beings
suffer from the ability to appreciate their own mortality—an existential agony that has given rise to the great religions— but
in the present age of religious decline, we
must begin to bear the added burden of anticipating the
demise of our species. Indeed, as argued here, there are compelling reasons for encouraging
this collective mind-shift. For in the best of all possible worlds, the realization that our species has
long-term survival criteria distinct from our short-term tribal priorities could spark a new social ethic to
upgrade what we now all too often dismiss as “human nature” (Tudge 1989).
 Consequentialism
Turn – moral absolutism – moral opposition to intervention is a bankrupt ethic
– evaluating consequences of non-intervention is necessary
Isaac 2
Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the
Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine,
Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed
that U.S. military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given
to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in
Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence
abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and
repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer
not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a
Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring
criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and
important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also
vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy
or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus
left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in
which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention
but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate
feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in
the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of
power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means
that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say
that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max
Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern
with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally
laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws:
(1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of
what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail
impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean
conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and
injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of
complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to
religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating
violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and
(3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most
significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the
pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the
twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these
effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance.
And it undermines political effectiveness.
 Calculations good
Calculative thought is necessary in order to secure justice in the face of specific
forms of oppression that deny “being” or “alterity”
Campbell 99 – Professor of International Politics
David, Prof of Int’l Politics @ Univ. of Newcastle, Moral Spaces, p. 50-51
In pursuing Derrida on the question of the decision, a pursuit that ends up in the
supplementing of Derridean deconstruction with Levinasian ethics, Critchley was
concerned to ground political decisions in something other than the "madness" of a
decision, and worried that there could be a "refusal of politics in Derrida's work"
because the emphasis upon undecidability as the condition of responsibility contained
an implicit rejection of politics as "the field of antagonism, decision, dissension, and
struggle," the "domain of questioning s Yet from the above discussion, I would argue
that Derrida's account of the procedure of the decision also contains within it an
account of the duty, obligation, and responsibility of the decision within
deconstruction. Moreover, the undecidable and infinite character of justice that
fosters that duty is precisely what guarantees that the domain of politics bears the
characteristics of contestation rightly prized by Critchley. Were everything to be
within the purview of the decidable, and devoid of the undecidable, then (as Derrida
constantly reminds us) there would be no ethics, politics, or responsibility, only a
program, technology, and its irresponsible application. Of course, for many (though
Critchley is clearly not among them), the certainties of the program are synonymous
with the desires of politics. But if we seek to encourage recognition of the radical
interdependence of being that flows from our responsibility to the other, then
the provocations give rise to a different figuration of politics, one in which its
purpose is the struggle for-or on behalf of-alterity, and not a struggle to efface,
erase, or eradicate alterity. Such a principle -one that is ethically transcendent if
not classically universal-is a powerful starting point for rethinking, for example,
the question of responsibility vis-avis "ethnic" and "nationalist" conflicts.'°6 But the
concern about politics in Derrida articulated by Critchley is not about politics per se, nor
about the possibilities of political analysis, but about the prospects for a progressive,
radical politics, one that will demand-and thus do more than simply permit-the
decision to resist domination, exploitation, oppression, and all other
conditions that seek to contain or eliminate alterity . Yet, again, I would argue
that the above discussion demonstrates that not only does Derridean deconstruction
address the question of politics, especially when Levinasian ethics draws out its
political qualities, it does so in an affirmative antitotalitarian manner that gives its
politics a particular quality, which is what Critchley and others like him most want
(and rightly so, in my view). We may still be dissatisfied with the prospect that
Derrida's account cannot rule out forever perverse calculations and unjust
laws. But to aspire to such a guarantee would be to wish for the demise of
politics, for it would install a new technology, even if it was a technology that
began life with the markings of progressivism and radicalism . Such dissatisfaction,
then, is not with a Derridean politics, but with the necessities of politics per se, necessities that
can be contested and negotiated, but not escaped or transcended.
Alts
Reject/Do nothing/Reject mil discourse
 Genocide turn
Turn – genocide – The affirmative justifies complacency in the face of a coming
wave of genocide
Wester 7
Eric, Senior Military Fellow, Last Resort and Preemption: Using Armed Force as a Moral and
Penultimate Choice,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/07summer/wester.pdf
National leaders will continue to face the pressing issues associated with
humanitarian crises, especially in light of the military, political, and international
turbulence that surrounds the United States’ involvement in and beyond Iraq as well
as concerns regarding a possible near-peer competitor for the US military. There are a
number of crises demanding our attention, but none more pressing than the genocide
in Darfur that begs for international action. Darfur is merely the crest of a wave
that included the humanitarian crises in Somalia, Rwanda, Macedonia, Bosnia,
Kosovo, and East Timor. Ethical questions abound regarding humanitarian matters
and US national interests. Such decisions regard how power might best be used to
resolve a problem or influence its outcome in keeping with the United States’ national
interests and the principles of justice. This is especially true when considering
whether military power can be justified to preempt or prevent conflict. Continued
research also needs to address a persistent problem: defining on what grounds
“disinterested” states might rescue foreigners from harm at the hands of a
government or other entity that has the inherent responsibility to protect them. On
what grounds and under which mandates might others intervene? This article noted
two standards for action, barbarism and genocide. Are there others? And are
national and international bureaucracies prepared to address the seminal questions,
“Do we go in or not?” and “Is it right to go in or not?

Genocide turns their inequality impact and leads to mass death

Card 3
Hypatia 18.1 (2003) 63-79. “Genocide and Social Death”. Claudia Card is Emma Goldman
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin
Genocide is not simply unjust (although it certainly is unjust); it is also evil. It
characteristically includes the one-sided killing of defenseless civilians—babies,
children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and the injured of both genders along with
their usually female caretakers—simply on the basis of their national, religious,
ethnic, or other political identity. It targets people on the basis of who they are rather
than on the basis of what they have done, what they might do, even what they are
capable of doing. (One commentator says genocide kills people on the basis of what
they are, not even who they are). [End Page 72] Genocide is a paradigm of what Israeli
philosopher Avishai Margalit (1996) calls "indecent" in that it not only destroys
victims but first humiliates them by deliberately inflicting an "utter loss of freedom
and control over one's vital interests" (115). Vital interests can be transgenerational
and thus survive one's death. Before death, genocide victims are ordinarily deprived
of control over vital transgenerational interests and more immediate vital interests.
They may be literally stripped naked, robbed of their last possessions, lied to about
the most vital matters, witness to the murder of family, friends, and neighbors, made
to participate in their own murder, and if female, they are likely to be also violated
sexually. 7 Victims of genocide are commonly killed with no regard for lingering
suffering or exposure. They, and their corpses, are routinely treated with utter
disrespect. These historical facts, not simply mass murder, account for much of the
moral opprobrium attaching to the concept of genocide. Yet such atrocities, it may be
argued, are already war crimes, if conducted during wartime, and they can otherwise
or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why, then, add the specific crime of
genocide? What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit such things
as the rape, enslavement, torture, forced deportation, and the degradation of
individuals? Is any ethically distinct harm done to members of the targeted group that
would not have been done had they been targeted simply as individuals rather than
because of their group membership? This is the question that I find central in arguing
that genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, to any of the other war crimes, or
to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe the answer is affirmative:
the harm is ethically distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I wish
only to question the assumption that it is not. Specific to genocide is the harm
inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group membership is the
occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of
the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose
their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use
Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may become "socially dead"
and their descendants "natally alienated ," no longer able to pass along and build upon
the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier
generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than
that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it
indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual, social connections, and social
contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death
meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just
physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent
meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination . This view,
however, is controversial.

Even if intervention doesn’t necessarily prevent genocide, their ethical

framework signals an unwillingness to intervene that makes genocide more
likely
Vetlessen 2k
Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, July 2000, Journal of Peace
Research, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” p. 520-522
Most often, in cases of genocide, for every person directly victimized and killed there
will be hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions, who are neither directly targeted
as victims nor directly participating as perpetrators. The moral issues raised by
genocide, taken as the illegal act par excellance, are not confined to the nexus
of agent and victim. Those directly involved in a given instance of genocide will
always form a minority, so to speak. The majority to the event will be formed
by the contemporary bystanders. Such bystanders are individuals; in their private and professional lives,
they will belong to a vast score of groups and collectives, some informal and closely knit, others formal and detached as far as personal
and emotional involvement are concerned. In the loose sense intended here ,
every contemporary citizen
cognizant of a specific ongoing instance of genocide, regardless of where
in the world, counts as a bystander. Bystanders in this loose sense are cognizant, through TV, radio, newspapers, and
other publicly available sources of information, of ongoing genocide somewhere in the world, but they are not - by profession or formal appointment —
involved in it. Theirs is a passive role, that of onlookers, although what starts out as a passive stance may, upon decision, convert into active engagement in
the events at hand. I shall label this category passive bystanders. This group should be distinguished from bystanders by formal appointment: the latter
bystanders have been professionally Engaged as a ‘third party’ to the interaction between the two parties directly involved in acts of genocide. The stance of
this third party to an ongoing conflict, even one with genocidal implications, is in principle often seen as one of impartiality and neutrality, typically
highlighted by a determined refusal to ‘take sides.’ This manner of principled non-involvement is frequently viewed as highly meritorious (Vetlesen, 1998). A
case in point would be UN personnel deployed to monitor a ceasefire between warring parties, or (as was their task in Bosnia) to see to it that the civilians
within a UN declared ‘safe area’ are effectively guaranteed ‘peace and security’, as set down in the mandate to establish such areas. By virtue of their assigned
physical presence on the scene and the specific tasks given to them, such (groups of) bystanders may be referred to as bystanders by assignment. What does it
mean to be a contemporary bystander? To begin with, let us consider this question not from the expected view- point — that of the bystander - but from the
From the viewpoint of an
two viewpoints provided by the parties directly involved in the event. To put it as simply as possible:

agent of genocide, bystanders are persons possessing a potential (one

needing to be estimated in every concrete case) to halt his ongoing actions. The
perpetrator will fear the bystander to the extent that he [or she] has
reason to believe that the bystander will intervene to halt the action already under way, and
thereby frustrate the perpetrators goal of eliminating the targeted group, that said, we immediately need to differentiate among the
different categories of bystanders introduced above. It is obvious that the more knowledgeable and other wise resourceful the
bystander, the more the perpetrator will have reason to fear that the potential for such resistance will translate into action, meaning a
more or less direct intervention by military or other means. Deemed efficient to reach the objectives of halting the incipient genocide.
Of course, one should distinguish between bystanders who remain inactive and those who become actively engaged. Nonetheless, the
even the most initially passive and remote bystander
point to be stressed is that, in principle,
possesses a potential to cease being a mere onlooke r to the events unfolding.
Outrage at what comes to pass may prompt the judgement that ‘this simply
must be stopped’ and translate into action promoting that aim. But is not
halting genocide first and foremost a task, indeed a duty, for the victims themselves?
The answer is simple: The sheer fact that genocide is happening shows that
the targeted group has not proved itself able to prevent it. This being so,
responsibility for halting what is now unfolding cannot rest with the
victims alone, it must also be seen to rest with the party not itself affected
but which is knowledgeable about -which is more or less literally witnessing — the
genocide that is taking place. So whereas for the agent, bystanders represent the potential of resistance, for the victims they
may represent the only source of hope left. In ethical terms, this is borne out in the notion of
responsibility of Immanuel Levinas (1991), according to which
responsibility grows bigger the weaker its addressee. Of course, agents of genocide may be caught
more or less in delicto flagrante. But in the age of television - with CNN being able to film and even interview doers as well as victims on the spot, and
broadcast live to the entire television-watching world (such as was the case in the concentration camp Omarska in Bosnia in August 1992) (see Gutman, 1993)
— physical co-presence to the event at hand is almost rendered superfluous. One need not have been there in order to have known what happened, The same
holds for the impact of the day-to-day reporting From the ground by newspaper journalists of indisputable reputation. In order to be knowledgeable about
ongoing genocide, it suffices to watch the television news or read the front pages of a daily newspaper. But, to be more precise, what exactly does it mean to
act? What is to count as an action? We need to look briefly at the philosophical literature on the notion of action — as well as the notion of agent responsibility
following from it - in order to gel a better grasp of the moral issues involved in being a bystander to genocide, whether passive or active. ‘I never forget', says
Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, 'to speak of humans as acting and suffering, The moral problem', he continues, ‘is grafted onto the recognition of this
essential dissymmetry between the one who acts and the one who undergoes, culminating in the violence of the powerful agent.' To be the 'sufferer' of a given
action in Ricoeur's sense need not be negative; either 'the sufferer appears as the beneficiary of esteem or as the victim of disesteem, depending on whether
the agent proves to be someone who distributes rewards or punishments'. Since there is to every action an agent and a sufferer (in the sense given), action is
interaction, its structure is interpersonal (Ricoeur. 1992:145). But this is not the whole picture. Actions are also omitted, endured, neglected, and the like; and
not acting is still
Ricoeur takes these phenomena to remind us that ‘on the level of interaction, just as on that of subjective understanding ,

acting: neglecting, forgetting to do something, is also letting things be

done by someone else, sometimes to the point of criminality. (Ricoeur, 1992:157) Ricoeur's systematic objective is to
extend the theory of action from acting to suffering beings; again and again he emphasizes that 'every action has its agents and its
patients' (1992; 157). Ricoeur's proposed extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight
articulated, albeit not developed, in the passages quoted is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the case of genocide as a
the inaction making a difference is the inaction of the
reported, on going affair,
bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when confronted with
such action, as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure which carries
a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed.
Knowing, yet still not acting, means-granting acceptance to the action. Such
inaction entails letting things be done by someone else - clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, 'to the point of criminality', to invoke one of the quotes
from Ricoeur. In short, inaction here means complicity; accordingly, it raises the question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive
bystander, by which I mean the bystander who decides to remain inactive. In the view I am advancing, the theory of action is satisfactorily extended only
when it is recognized that the structure of action is triadic, not dyadic. It takes two to act, we are tempted to say — no more and no less. But is an action really
the exclusive possession — a private affair — between the two parties immediately affected as agent and sufferer? For one thing, the repercussions of a
particular piece of action are bound to reach far beyond the immediate dyadic setting. As Hannah Arendt (1958) famously observed, to act is to initiate, to
make a new beginning in the world, to set in motion - and open-endedly so. Only the start of a specific action allows precise localization in space and time,
besides our attributing it to a particular agent, as her property and no one else’s. But, as for the repercussions, they evade being traced in any definite manner,
to any final and definitive endpoint.

Nonviolence doesn’t guarantee success

Zunes 3
Stephen, professor of politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University
of San Francisco, Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum,
http://www.thenation.com/article/humanitarian-intervention-forum-0?page=0,11
Nonviolence is not a panacea. For example, if a government is determined to
unleash a campaign of genocide against an ethnic minority and has indoctrinated
enough of its citizens to support it, outside military intervention may be necessary.
However, the power of nonviolent action must be recognized and actively supported
before we resign ourselves to the use of military force to end repression.
Scholarship
 Predictions Good
Predictions are feasible – they can be made logically from empirical evidence.
Chernoff 9 (Fred, Prof. IR and Dir. IR – Colgate U., European Journal of International
Relations, “Conventionalism as an Adequate Basis for Policy-Relevant IR Theory”, 15:1,
Sage)
For these and other reasons, many social theorists and social scientists have come to the conclusion that prediction is impossible. Well-known IR reflexivists like Rick Ashley, Robert Cox, Rob Walker and Alex Wendt have attacked naturalism by
emphasizing the interpretive nature of social theory. Ashley is explicit in his critique of prediction, as is Cox, who says quite simply, ‘It is impossible to predict the future’ (Ashley, 1986: 283; Cox, 1987: 139, cf. also 1987: 393). More recently, Heikki
Patomä ki has argued that ‘qualitative changes and emergence are possible, but predictions are not’ defective and that the latter two presuppose an unjustifiably narrow notion of ‘prediction’.14 A determined prediction sceptic may continue to hold that

there is too great a degree of complexity of social relationships (which comprise ‘open systems’) to allow any prediction whatsoever. Two very simple examples may circumscribe and help to refute a radical variety of scepticism. First, we all
make reliable social predictions and do so with great frequency. We can predict with high probability that a spouse, child or
parent will react to certain well-known stimuli that we might supply, based on extensive past experience. More to the point of IR prediction – scepticism, we can imagine a young child in the UK who (perhaps at the cinema) (1) picks up a bit of 19th-
century British imperial lore thus gaining a sense of the power of the crown, without knowing anything of current balances of power, (2) hears some stories about the US–UK invasion of Iraq in the context of the aim of advancing democracy, and (3) hears
a bit about communist China and democratic Taiwan. Although the specific term ‘preventative strike’ might not enter into her lexicon, it is possible to imagine the child, whose knowledge is thus limited, thinking that if democratic Taiwan were threatened

scholars who study the

by China, the UK would (possibly or probably) launch a strike on China to protect it, much as the UK had done to help democracy in Iraq. In contrast to the child, readers of this journal and

world more thoroughly have

factual information (e.g. about the relative military and economic capabilities of the
UK and China) and hold some cause-and-effect principles (such as that states do not usually initiate actions that leaders understand will have an extremely
high probability of undercutting their power with almost no chances of success). Anyone who has adequate knowledge of world politics would predict that the UK will not launch a preventive attack against China. In the real world, China knows that for
the next decade and well beyond the UK will not intervene militarily in its affairs. While Chinese leaders have to plan for many likely — and even a few somewhat unlikely — future possibilities, they do not have to plan for various implausible
contingencies: they do not have to structure forces geared to defend against specifically UK forces and do not have to conduct diplomacy with the UK in a way that would be required if such an attack were a real possibility. Any rational decision-maker in
China may use some cause-and-effect (probabilistic) principles along with knowledge of specific facts relating to the Sino-British relationship to predict (P2) that the UK will not land its forces on Chinese territory — even in the event of a war over Taiwan
(that is, the probability is very close to zero). The statement P2 qualifies as a prediction based on DEF above and counts as knowledge for Chinese political and military decision-makers. A Chinese diplomat or military planner who would deny that theory-
based prediction would have no basis to rule out extremely implausible predictions like P2 and would thus have to prepare for such unlikely contingencies as UK action against China. A reflexivist theorist sceptical of ‘prediction’ in IR might argue that the
China example distorts the notion by using a trivial prediction and treating it as a meaningful one. But the critic’s temptation to dismiss its value stems precisely from the fact that it is so obviously true. The value to China of knowing that the UK is not a
military threat is significant. The fact that, under current conditions, any plausible cause-and-effect understanding of IR that one might adopt would yield P2, that the ‘UK will not attack China’, does not diminish the value to China of knowing the UK does
not pose a military threat. A critic might also argue that DEF and the China example allow non-scientific claims to count as predictions. But we note that while physics and chemistry offer precise ‘point predictions’, other natural sciences, such as
seismology, genetics or meteorology, produce predictions that are often much less specific; that is, they describe the predicted ‘events’ in broader time frame and typically in probabilistic terms. We often find predictions about the probability, for
example, of a seismic event in the form ‘some time in the next three years’ rather than ‘two years from next Monday at 11:17 am’. DEF includes approximate and probabilistic propositions as predictions and is thus able to catagorize as a

prediction the former sort of statement, which is of a type that is often of great value to policy-makers.
With the help of these ‘non-point predictions’ coming from the natural and the social sciences, leaders are able to
choose the courses of action (e.g. more stringent earthquake-safety building codes, or procuring an additional
carrier battle group) that are most likely to accomplish the leaders’ desired ends . So while ‘point
predictions’ are not what political leaders require in most decision-making situations, critics of IR predictiveness often attack
the predictive capacity of IR theory for its inability to deliver them. The critics
thus commit the straw man
fallacy by requiring a sort of prediction in IR (1) that few, if any, theorists claim to be
able to offer, (2) that are not required by policy-makers for theory-based predictions
to be valuable, and (3) that are not possible even in some natural sciences.15 The range of
theorists included in ‘reflexivists’ here is very wide and it is possible to dissent from some of the general descriptions. From
the point of view of the central argument of this article, there are two important features that should be rendered accurately.
One is that reflexivists
reject explanation–prediction symmetry, which allows them to
pursue causal (or constitutive) explanation without any commitment to prediction . The second
is that almost all share clear opposition to predictive social science .16 The reflexivist
commitment to both of these conclusions should be evident from the foregoing discussion.

Defer to specificity and data in evaluating decisions – our linear model of

prediction informed by experts isn’t perfect, but it’s roughly 90% accurate
de Mesquita 11 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York
University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution B.A. from Queens, M.A. from
Michigan, PhD from Michigan, "FOX-HEDGING OR KNOWING: ONE BIG WAY TO KNOW
MANY THINGS" July 18 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/18/bruce-bueno-de-
mesquita/fox-hedging-or-knowing-one-big-way-to-know-many-things/
Given what we know today and given the problems inherent in dealing with human
interaction, what is a leading contender for making accurate , discriminating,
useful predictions of complex human decisions ? In good hedgehog mode I
believe one top contender is applied game theory . Of course there are others but I am betting on
game theory as the right place to invest effort. Why? Because game theory is the only method of which I am
aware that explicitly compels us to address human adaptability. Gardner and Tetlock rightly note
that people are “self-aware beings who see, think, talk, and attempt to predict each other’s behavior—and who are
continually adapting to each other’s efforts to predict each other’s behavior, adding layer after layer of new calculations
and new complexity.” This adaptation
is what game theory jargon succinctly calls “endogenous
choice.” Predicting human behavior means solving for endogenous choices while
assessing uncertainty . It certainly isn’t easy but, as the example of bandwidth auctions helps clarify,
game theorists are solving for human adaptability and uncertainty with some
success . Indeed, I used game theoretic reasoning on May 5, 2010 to predict to a large
investment group’s portfolio committee that Mubarak’s regime faced replacement,
especially by the Muslim Brotherhood, in the coming year. That prediction did not rely on in-
depth knowledge of Egyptian history and culture or on expert judgment but rather on a game theory model
called selectorate theory and its implications for the concurrent occurrence of logically
derived revolutionary triggers. Thus, while the desire for revolution had been present in Egypt (and
elsewhere) for many years, logic suggested that the odds of success and the expected rewards for
revolution were rising swiftly in 2010 in Egypt while the expected costs were not.
This is but one example that highlights what Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who was quoted by Gardner and Tetlock, has
said about game theory and prediction (referring, as it happens, to a specific model I developed for predicting policy
decisions): “Bueno
de Mesquita has demonstrated the power of using game theory and
related assumptions of rational and self-seeking behavior in predicting the outcome
of important political and legal processes . ” Nice as his statement is for me personally, the
broader point is that game theory in the hands of much better game theorists than I
am has the potential to transform our ability to anticipate the consequences of
alternative choices in many aspects of human interaction.
How can game theory be harnessed to achieve reliable prediction ? Acting like a
fox, I gather information from a wide variety of experts . They are asked only for
specific current information (Who wants to influence a decision? What outcome do they currently advocate?
How focused are they on the issue compared to other questions on their plate? How flexible are they about getting the
outcome they advocate? And how much clout could they exert?). They are not asked to make judgments
about what will happen. Then, acting as a hedgehog, I use that information as data with which
to seed a dynamic applied game theory model. The model’s logic then produces not only
specific predictions about the issues in question, but also a probability distribution around the
predictions. The predictions are detailed and nuanced . They address not only
what outcome is likely to arise, but also how each “player” will act, how they are likely to relate to
other players over time, what they believe about each other, and much more. Methods like this are

credited by the CIA, academic specialists and others , as being accurate

about 90 percent of the time based on large-sample assessments . These
methods have been subjected to peer review with predictions published well ahead of
the outcome being known and with the issues forecast being important questions of
their time with much controversy over how they were expected to be resolved. This is not so
much a testament to any insight I may have had but rather to the virtue of combining the focus of the hedgehog with the
breadth of the fox. When facts are harnessed by logic and evaluated through
replicable tests of evidence , we progress toward better prediction .
 A2 Academics = Co-opted
Your cooptation arguments do not link and rest on monolithic conceptions of
policy-makers. Engaging in practical policy options is critical to repoliticizing the
aff/alt
Kurki, 11
(Milja, Aberystwyth University, UK The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR
Scholarship Today, Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Published Online)
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/05/07/0305829811411997.full.pdf [9/12/11])
Such interaction involves research that is realistic but also utopian and ‘future-oriented’ at the same
time. Indeed, I agree with Heikki Patoma¨ki’s recent call for future-oriented IR and politics research.52 This involves not
only engaging negatively with the past, but also thinking positively of possible future openings and possibilities. Crucially,
thinking in such terms importantly means not only prioritising ‘self-reflexivity’, but also engaging
‘stakeholders’, including the public and the policy elites. Such research has its dangers of not only
‘proselytising’ but also of becoming bewitched by the ‘siren-call’ of ‘policy relevance’; yet it is also wrong to assume ,
as some critical theorists do, that putting concrete suggestions on the table in
engaging with policymakers is necessarily dan gerous. From my own recent
engagements with democracy promotion, it seems that the best friend of a critically
minded academic can surprisingly often be a critically minded policymaker, if only they
have concrete future actions and possibilities (even rather radical ones) to discuss. Future-oriented critical
scholarship should keep its mind open to the critical engagement of both NGO and policy
actors and remain attuned to the few openings that do exist in policy practice for
progressive and emancipatory politics. It is not my aim to argue that the recommendations here solve the
problems of critical and philosophical IR research. Yet, I would like to suggest that certain kinds of re-politicisation,
re-concretisation and reorienting of philosophical and critical research can be
productive, at least for individual research projects. I call here for somewhat more ‘positive’ critical theoretical work – a
challenge that some critical theorists might wish to criticise, conceiving as they might do the aim of critical theorising to be
merely negative. While different readings of the role of critical theory are of course to be acknowledged, it may still be
advisable to remind ourselves that for
some critical theorists the point of theory was not just to
analyse the world but to change it and that this may still present a challenge worth
taking up today.

Expert testimony is good—complex issues require sophisticated solutions

grounded in technocratic analysis.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and a Member of the
Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University,
2004 (Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Published by
Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231126090, p. 77-78)
But praise for the amateur also has its limits. To ignore the need for critical
disciplinary intellectuals with various forms of scientific expertise is to [end page
77] abdicate responsibility for a host of issues involving knowledge of fields
ranging from physics and genetics to electronics and even environmentalism.
There is surely an overabundance of jargon and mystification and , as has been
mentioned before, the need exists for a new sensitivity to the vernacular.39 But it is
also the case that complex issues sometimes require complex language and, often
for good reasons, fields generate their own vocabularies. A judgment is undoubtedly
necessary with respect to whether the language employed in a work is necessary for illuminating
the issue under investigation: that judgment, however, can never be made in advance. There
must be a place for the technocrat with a political conscience as surely as for the
humanist with a particular specialty. The battle against oppression requires a
multi-frontal strategy. Best to consider the words of Primo Levi who understands the
critical intellectual as a "person educated beyond his daily trade, whose culture is
alive insofar as it makes an effort to renew itself, and keep up to date, and who
does not react with indifference or irritation when confronted by any branch of
knowledge, even though, obviously, he cannot cultivate all of them."40

Their politics are a depolitical form of fragmentation that collapses into

irrelevance – defer to recency and specificity
Kurki, 11
(Milja, Aberystwyth University, UK The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR
Scholarship Today, Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Published Online)
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/05/07/0305829811411997.full.pdf [9/12/11])
It is a sign of the times that while dissatisfaction with the political and economic structures of society is rife, academic
criticism of the politico-economic system we live in, and which is simultaneously promulgated by our
foreign policy machines around the world, is surprisingly impotent and ineffective . The excesses of the
liberal capitalist developmental blueprint received a minor ‘rap on the wrists’ by the crisis of 2009, but nevertheless the
structure and the external policies of market democracies around the world remain much the same. If the end of the Cold War
is supposed to have ‘ended history’, disappointingly it is the
2009 crisis that seems to be a more telling
sign of the end of history; it shows that no real ‘ideational’ alternative seems to exist
to global capitalism as a model of growth or to the ideals of liberal market
democratisation as a way of expanding the sphere of freedom. The left and other
radical politico-economic models are on the wane as authoritarian capitalism presents, it seems, the
most viable challenge to the hegemony of liberal market democracy. This pessimism on the question of progressive
alternative politics at a time of crisis stems from my recent research , the aim of which has been to
interrogate whether room exists for alternative politico-economic visions in today’s
democracy assistance. In its initial stages, this research was driven by an optimistic belief in the power of critical
theory to generate new and important avenues for rethinking the deeply consequential policy practice of democracy
assistance. Yet, worries have appeared about such prospects. One is that it has
become evident (somewhat
unsurprisingly) that room for critical interventions in policy practice is fairly limited . A far
more worrying issue, however, is the observation that critical theory is increasingly lacking in
relevance in contributing to the revitalisation of policy practice or perceptive
critiques of it. This is because of the abstract and theory-driven nature of critical
theory and its lack of realistic understanding as to how to challenge the dominance of
hegemonic ideas in today’s foreign policy practice. As Richard Youngs has argued in relation to
critical theoretical investigations of democracy support, critical theorists today are
dangerously behind the curve on policy practices and theoretically obsessed with
critiques of little use to practitioners.1 It really is rather disappointing for – and a
disappointing symptom of – alternative, or so-called ‘critical’, thinking in the social
sciences that even when the problems of the dominant model are evident , there is no
real systematic , effective or realistic opposition to it. Why is there such a dearth of successful or
influential ‘critical’ thinking even in the relatively ‘fruitful’ context of multiple social and economic crises? This is a big
question, requiring, for an adequate treatment, a holistic sociological study conducted on multiple levels of analysis of society.
Nothing of this nature can be attempted here, but we can, and arguably should, on the 40th anniversary of Millennium: Journal
of International Studies – one of the leading critical theory journals in International Relations (IR) – reflect on some of the key
trends in critical and philosophical research in IR, with the hope that this might reveal something characteristic of wider
trends. With this in mind, I reflect on the prospects of critical theoretical analysis in IR and, in so doing, hope to add a new
angle (or rather reintroduce an old angle) to assessment of critical theory’s role in IR. Despite many excellent reviews of the
 few have analysed in detail the
development and fortunes of critical and philosophical research in IR,2
curious depoliticising and fragmentation-oriented trends afflicting critical theory and
associated forms of philosophical analysis today. Also, few analysts have dared to openly
comment on the striking failures of critical theory to bring about or facilitate progressive
change in today’s world political environment . It is my aim here to open the discussion towards a more
(self-)critical analysis of critical theory in IR.
Terror Reps
 Rhet good
The rhetoric of terrorism creates less violence long term
Chowdhury and Krebs ’10 (Arjun Chowdhury, Professor of IR at The University of British
Columbia, Ph.D. Minnesota. His ongoing research focuses on autocratic survival strategies, the
effects of counterinsurgency campaigns, and the transition from the imperial to the
international system. and Ronald R. Kerbs, Professor in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Minnesota. Ph.D., Columbia University. January 2010 “Talking about terror:
Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representations” European Journal of International
Relations 16.125// JG)
The success of counterterrorist efforts, therefore, does not hinge only on military tactics,
operations, and strategy. Also important, if not equally important, is the state’s rhetoric.
Coercion can temporarily suppress resistance, and co-optation can temporarily sap ¶ protest.
Defeating terrorist insurgency in the long run, however, requires both undermining the
legitimacy of political violence and opening space for the pursuit of a less violent, ¶ but still
legitimate, communal politics. These are fundamentally rhetorical projects. An ¶ enduring
settlement depends on either direct dialogue between the state and the aggrieved ¶ group or
the emergence of a moderate politics that mediates between the two, and both ¶ paths demand
a sustained rhetorical effort to transform the game of politics. Paul Pillar ¶ (2001: 18) nicely
characterizes counterterrorism as ‘an effort to civilize the manner in ¶ which any political contest
is waged.’ Force alone can hardly civilize politics. Remolding ¶ the culture of contention requires
rhetorical intervention. To the extent that the insurgents’ violence is redirected into non-violent
contestation, and to the extent that this ¶ transformation can be attributed to the state’s efforts,
counterterrorism has succeeded.

Terror representations are key to counterterrorism

Chowdhury and Krebs ’10 (Arjun Chowdhury, Professor of IR at The University of British
Columbia, Ph.D. Minnesota. His ongoing research focuses on autocratic survival strategies, the
effects of counterinsurgency campaigns, and the transition from the imperial to the
international system. and Ronald R. Kerbs, Professor in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Minnesota. Ph.D., Columbia University. January 2010 “Talking about terror:
Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representations” European Journal of International
Relations 16.125// JG)
These legitimation requirements are perhaps particularly pressing in the arenas of terrorism and
counterterrorism, which are fundamentally communicative and symbolic ¶ enterprises (Hoffman,
2006; Kydd and Walter, 2006). Terrorism is open-air theater, seeking to attract large audiences
through spectacular displays (Jenkins, 1975: 16). ¶ Counterterrorism does not always need
equally large audiences, and the spectacular is ¶ often ineffective (Bueno de Mesquita, 2007).
But counterterrorism is equally theater. If ¶ terrorists avidly seek publicity for their causes and
adopt methods designed to signal ¶ their resolve, so too must the terror-fighting state be
centrally concerned with what messages it sends to what audiences. Thomas Schelling (1966:
142) observed that force ¶ could be ‘an expressive bit of repartee … [which] took mainly the form
of deeds, not ¶ words.’ But deeds accompanied by words are that much more expressive, and
there is a ¶ good reason that leaders devote effort to molding that interpretive context.
Counterterrorism is key to shift our perceptions of foreign cultures – The UK
proves
Spalek and Lambert ‘8 (Basia Spalek, Reader in Communities and Justice and Director of
Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Birmingham, Basia is also an Ambassador
to the Make Justice Work Campaign and has acted as an advisor/consultant to the Royal United
Services Institute (RUSI), the OSCE, DCLG, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Robert
Lambert, Lecturer on Terrorism Studies at the University of St. Andrews. 2008 “Muslim
communities, counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation: A critically reflective approach to
engagement” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36// JG)
In the UK, communities are viewed as an important resource for tackling social problems ¶ like
crime, anti-social behaviour or unemployment, by working with local state institutions, as ¶ well
as other statutory and voluntary sector organisations. This reflects broader developments in¶
governance, whereby responsibility and accountability for crime is increasingly focused ¶ towards
local levels, whilst at the same time centralised control in terms of resources and target ¶ setting
is maintained. Also, formal responsibilities for policy implementation and service ¶ delivery are
progressively being shared across statutory, voluntary agencies and community ¶ groups in the
form of partnership work (Prior et al., 2006). ¶ In a post 9/11 context, and in light of recent
bombings and attempted bombings in the ¶ UK, engagement with Muslim communities takes on
particular significance, and includes an¶ added dimension of counter-terrorism and counter-
radicalisation, whereby Muslims are¶ encouraged to work with state agencies in order to help
combat extremism. For example, in the National Policing Plan 2005e2008 (Home Office, 2005a)
it is stated that the ‘counterterrorism strategy of Government is underpinned by strong
intelligence processes within¶ each force area and strong communities to build and increase
trust and confidence within¶ minority faith communities’. In the aftermath of the July 7th
bombings in London in 2005,¶ the British Government put together seven ‘Preventing Extremism
Together’ working groups¶ consisting of representatives of Muslim communities who drew up a
series of proposals¶ seeking to respond to extremism, and these included a professional
development programme¶ or the ‘upskilling’ of Imams and mosque officials, as well as a national
campaign and¶ coalition to increase the visibility of Muslim women , and empower them to
become¶ informed and active citizens, amongst many other proposals (Home Office, 2005b).
More¶ recently, a new Muslim women’s advisory group has been created, the National Muslim¶
Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG), consisting of 19 Muslim women who will discuss ¶ issues
and concerns that are affecting Muslim women, advising the Government on the role¶ that
women can play in ‘winning hearts and minds and tackling extremism’ (Communities ¶ and Local
Government, 2007).
 Threats are real
Threats are real – they predate 9-11
Feinstein and Slaughter 4
Lee, Acting Director of the Washington Program of the Council on Foreign Relations, Anne-
Marie, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and Interational Affairs at Princeton
University and President of the American Society of International Law, A Duty to Prevent,
Foreign Affairs 83.1
We live in a world of old rules and new threats. This period did not begin on
September 11, 2001. Before then, politicians and public figures were already lacing
their millennium speeches with calls for a new global financial architecture, new
definitions of national self-interest and humanitarian intervention, and new ways of
organizing international institutions. They recognized that the existing rules and
institutions created to address the economic, political, and security problems of the
last century were inadequate for solving a new generation of threats to world order:
failed states; regional economic crises; sovereign bankruptcies; the spread of
HIV/AIDS and other new viruses; global warming; the rise of global criminal
networks; and trafficking in arms, money, women, workers, and drugs.

The representational threat of terrorism is real and needs an equal response

Chowdhury and Krebs ’10 (Arjun Chowdhury, Professor of IR at The University of British
Columbia, Ph.D. Minnesota. His ongoing research focuses on autocratic survival strategies, the
effects of counterinsurgency campaigns, and the transition from the imperial to the
international system. and Ronald R. Kerbs, Professor in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Minnesota. Ph.D., Columbia University. January 2010 “Talking about terror:
Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representations” European Journal of International
Relations 16.125// JG)
Attacks on civilians are often weighted with symbolism: the World Trade Center was ¶ targeted
on 11 September 2001 precisely because it symbolized America’s cultural and ¶ economic power.
Terrorists are simultaneously highly strategic and culturally sensitive. ¶ This is not accidental:
terrorists most effectively further their ends when they are attuned ¶ to the power of symbols.
The literature, however, has less often recognized that, in this ¶ theater, there is a dialogue
taking place on-stage, between terrorist and counterterrorist ¶ players. The latter may have
superior material resources at their disposal, but they cannot ¶ stand outside culture.
Complementing military, economic, and political measures, state ¶ leaders wage a rhetorical
campaign that not only legitimates these approaches, but has a ¶ logic and effect of its own.¶ This
article has focused on ethnonational insurgency, but its insights travel to the ¶ dominant concern
of recent years — transnational Islamist terrorism. The basic purpose ¶ of counterterrorism is
shared across national and transnational contexts: to help nurture ¶ an environment in which
moderate co-ethnics (or Muslims), often themselves voicing ¶ nationalist (or Islamist) goals, can
offer a credible alternative to extremists, leading to ¶ the latter’s eventual delegitimation (Krebs,
2008). This article’s analytical framework ¶ regarding the representational politics of
counterterrorism also remains relevant to ¶ transnational terrorists, whatever their religious,
ideological, or communal coloration. ¶ The two questions that structure Table 1 — Are the
violent actors represented as having ¶ a political agenda? Are they represented as potentially
legitimate interlocutors? — can ¶ be answered in either the affirmative or the negative, even if
the terrorists are not national ¶ citizens and are therefore unquestionably Other. While this is
obviously true of the first ¶ question, since Others often pursue recognizably political agendas in
international politics, it may not be as self-evident of the second, as one might assume that
clearly-drawn ¶ lines between Self and Other prevent the former from offering even the prospect
of ¶ legitimacy to the latter. We do not see processes of identity construction as establishing ¶
impermeable boundaries, even in the international arena. The history of foreign relations — and
we here cast our subject intentionally as foreign relations — is marked by ¶ continual bargaining
with Others. Implicit in such negotiations, at least when they are ¶ conducted publicly and must
be legitimated, is that the parties, notwithstanding their ¶ abiding differences, share enough to
make conversation possible. Identity is nested, and ¶ there is always a conceivable basis for the
discovery of sufficient higher-order commonality. In other words, Self and Other are always
potentially liminal, and thus even foreign terrorists may be represented as legitimate
interlocutors.

Responding to threats is necessary – the alternative is isolationist pacifism

Schweller 4
Randall, Professor of Political Science @ The OSU, Unanswered threats: political constraints on
the balance of power, Google Book
Balancing behavior requires the existence of a strong consensus among elites that an
external threat exists and must be checked by either arms or allies or both. As the
proximate causal variable in the model, elite consensus is the most necessary of
necessary causes of balancing behavior. Thus, when there is no elite consensus, the
prediction is either unbalancing or some other nonbalancing policy option.
Developing such a consensus is difficult, however, because balancing, unlike
expansion, is not a behavior motivated by the search for gains and profit. It is instead
a strategy that entails significant costs in human and material resources
that could be directed toward domestic programs and investment rather
than national defense. In addition, when alliances are formed, the state
must sacrifice some measure of its autonomy in foreign and military
policy to its allies. In the absence of a clear majority of elites in favor of a
balancing strategy, therefore, an alternative policy, and not necessarily a
coherent one, will prevail. This is because a weak grand strategy can be
supported for many different reasons (e.g., pacifism, isolationism, pro-
enemy sympathies, collective security, a belief in conciliation, etc.). Consequently,
appeasement and other forms of underbalancing will tend to triumph in
the absence of a determined and broad political consensus to balance simply
because these policies represent the path of least domestic resistance and
can appeal to a broad range of interests along the political spectrum. Thus,
underreacting to threats, unlike an effective balancing strategy, does not require
overwhelming, united, and coherent support from elites and masses; it is a default
strategy.
 Turns
Turn – using euphemistic language to describe terror causes more terrorism
Murdock, ‘5 – [Deroy, nationally syndicated columnist for Scipps-Howard News,
“Terrorism and the English Language,”¶ 3-9,
http://www.heritage.org/research/homelanddefense/hl867.cfm]
Yet within a week, some incredibly detached language emerged to describe what happened
on 9/11. Consider this message that Verizon left in my voice mail box on September 19: "During this time of crisis, we are
asking all customers to review and delete all current and saved messages that are not essential," a nameless female announcer
stated. "This request is necessary due to extensive damage that was recently sustained in the World Trade Center district."
Time of crisis? Did a tidal wave cause the "recently sustained" wreckage in Manhattan? Similarly, a company called Tullet &
Tokyo Liberty referred to "the disaster that has hit New York and Washington."
The use of the passive voice in these and similar instances suggested that the World
Trade Center and Pentagon were smashed by unguided, perhaps natural, forces.
Kinko's was even more elliptical. Shortly after the massacre, the photocopying company placed in its stores some very colorful
posters with the Stars and Stripes superimposed upon an outline of the lower 48 states. The graphic also included this
regrettable caption: "The Kinko's family extends our condolences and sympathies to all Americans who have been affected by
the circumstances in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania."
Circumstances? That word describes an electrical blackout, not terrorist bloodshed.
Likewise, I kept hearing that people "died" in the Twin Towers or at the Pentagon. No, people "die" in hospitals, often
surrounded by their loved ones while doctors and nurses offer aid and comfort. The innocent people at the World Trade
Center, the Defense Department, and that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were killed in a carefully choreographed act of
mass murder.
A Terrorist By Any Other Name
The more this passive, weak, euphemistic language appeared as the war on terrorism began, the
more I thought it was vital to pay close attention to the words, symbols, and images that
govern this new and urgent conflict.
The civilized world today faces the most anti-Semitic enemy since Adolf Hitler and Josef
Goebbels committed suicide in Berlin nearly 60 years ago. Militant Islam is the most bloodthirsty
ideology since the Khmer Rouge eliminated one-third of Cambodia's people. The big
difference, of course, is that Pol Pot had the good manners to keep his killing fields within his own borders, as awful as that
was.
Islamo-fascism is a worldwide phenomenon that already has touched this country and many of our allies. Yet Muslim
extremists rarely have armies we can see, fighter jets we can knock from the sky, or an easily identifiable headquarters, such
as the Reichs Chancellery of the 1940s or the Kremlin of the Cold War.
While basketball players and their fans battle each other on TV, actresses suffer wardrobe malfunctions, and rap singers
scream sweet nothings in our ears, it is very
easy to forget that Islamic extremists plot daily to end all of
that and more by killing as many
of us as possible.
Language can lull Americans to sleep in this new war, or it can keep us on the
offensive and our enemies off balance. Here are a few suggestions to keep Americans alert to the dangers
Islamic terrorism poses to this country:
September 11 was an attack--not just a series of coincidental strokes and heart failures that wiped out so many
victims at once.
Victims of terrorism do not "die," nor are they "lost." They are killed, murdered, or slaughtered.
We should be specific about the number of people terrorists kill . "Three thousand" killed on
9/11 sounds like an amorphous blob. The actual number--2,977--forces us to look at these people as
individuals with faces, stories, and loved ones who miss them very much . The precise
figures are: 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 44 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Likewise, the Bali
disco bombings killed 202 people, mainly Australians. The Madrid train bombings killed 191 men, women, and children.
Somehow, a total of 191 people killed by al-Qaeda's pals seems more ominous and concrete than a smoothly rounded 200.
Terrorists do not simply "threaten" us, nor is homeland security supposed to shield Americans from "future attacks." All of this
is true, but it is more persuasive if we acknowledge what these people have done and hope to do once more--wipe us out.
Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said this on NBC Nightly News last
Sunday: "We need to tighten up our drivers' license provisions and our immigration laws so that terrorists cannot take
advantage of the present system to kill thousands of Americans again." That is a perfect sound bite. There is no vague talk
about "the terrorist threat" or "stopping further attacks." Sensenbrenner concisely explained exactly what is at risk, and what
needs to be thwarted--no more killing of Americans by the thousands again.
Quote Islamo-fascist leaders to remind people of their true intentions. President George W. Bush, Heritage Foundation
President Ed Feulner, or Deroy Murdock can talk about how deadly militant Islam is and how seriously we should take this
gravely dangerous ideology. Far more persuasive, however, is to let these extremists do the talking. However, their words are
nowhere as commonly known as they should be. For instance, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri said in their 1998
declaration of war on the United States: "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilian and military--is an individual
duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." The late Iranian dictator, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, put it this way in 1980: "Our struggle is not about land or water.... It is about bringing, by force if
necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path." Ever the comedian, he said this in 1986: "Allah did not create man so
that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic
regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There
can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious." Asked what he would say to the loved ones of the 202 people killed in the
October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, Abu Bakar Bashir, leader of Indonesia's radical Jemaah Islamiyah, replied, "My message
to the families is, please convert to Islam as soon as possible."
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) has been pounded into meaninglessness. It has been repeated ad infinitum.
Fairly or unfairly, the absence of warehouses full of anthrax and nerve gas in Iraq has made the whole idea of "WMD" sound
synonymous with "L-I-E." America's enemies do not plot the "mass destruction" of empty office buildings or abandoned
parking structures. Conversely, they want to see packed office buildings ablaze as their inhabitants scream for mercy. That is
why I use the terms "weapons of mass death" and "weapons of mass murder."
When speaking about those who are killed by terrorists, be specific, name them, and tell us about them. Humanize these
individuals. They are more than just statistics or stick figures. I have written 18 articles and produced a Web page,
HUSSEINandTERROR.com, to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein did have ties to terrorism. (By the way, I call him "Saddam
Hussein" or "Hussein." I never call him "Saddam" any more than I call Joseph Stalin "Joseph" or Adolf Hitler "Adolf." "Saddam"
has a cute, one-name ring to it, like Cher, Gallagher, Liberace, or Sting. Saddam Hussein does not deserve such a term of
endearment.) To show that Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism cost American lives, I remind people about the aid and
comfort he gave to terrorism master Abu Nidal. Among Abu Nidal's victims in the 1985 bombing of Rome's airport was John
Buonocore, a 20-year-old exchange student from Delaware. Palestinian terrorists fatally shot Buonocore in the back as he
checked in for his flight. He was heading home after Christmas to celebrate his father's 50th birthday. In another example,
those killed by Palestinian homicide bombers subsidized by Saddam Hussein were not all Israeli, which would have been
unacceptable enough. Among the 12 or more Americans killed by those Baathist-funded murderers was Abigail Litle, the 14-
year-old daughter of a Baptist minister. She was blown away aboard a bus in Haifa on March 5, 2003. Her killer's family got a
check for $25,000 courtesy of Saddam Hussein as a bonus for their son's "martyrdom." Is all of this designed to press
emotional buttons? You bet it is. Americans
must remain committed--intellectually and emotionally--to
this struggle. There are many ways to engage the American people. No one should hesitate to remind
Americans that terrorism kills our countrymen--at home and abroad--and that those whom militant
Islam demolishes include promising young people with bright futures, big smiles, and, now,
six feet of soil between them and their dreams.
Finally, who are we fighting? Militants? Martyrs? Insurgents? Melinda Bowman of Brief Hill, Pennsylvania, wrote this in a
November 24 letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal: "And, by the way, what is all this `insurgent' nonsense? These
people kidnap, behead, dismember and disembowel. They are terrorists." Nicely and accurately put, Ms. Bowman. Is
this a war on terror, per se? A war on terrorism? Or is it really a war on Islamo-fascism? It is really the latter, and we should
say so. Jim Guirard runs the TrueSpeak Institute in Washington, D.C. He has thought long and hard about terrorism and the
English language. He informed me Tuesday--to my horror--that three years into the war on terrorism, the State Department
and the CIA have yet to produce a glossary of the Arabic-language words that Middle Eastern terrorists use, as well as the
antonyms for those words. Such a "Thesaurus of Terrorism" would help us linguistically to turn the war on terrorism upside
down. Why, for instance, do we inadvertently praise our enemies by agreeing that they fight a jihad or "holy war?" Why not
correctly describe them as soldiers in a hirabah or "unholy war?"
A Weapon at the Ready
In closing, I would say that America and the rest of civilization can and must win this new twilight struggle against these
bloodthirsty cavemen. We can and we will crush them through espionage, high-tech force, statecraft, and public diplomacy
overseas.
Here at home, we can and will vanquish them through eternal vigilance. One of our
chief weapons should be something readily available to each and every one of us--the
English language.

Terrorist is the only etymologically accurate term

Safire, ‘1 [Will, Journalist at the NYT, “WORDS OF THE WAR ON TERROR,”
HTTP://MITGLIED.LYCOS.DE/FRANKGEMKOW/LAKU/USA/NEWS/23ONLANG.HT
Ml]
The first draft of President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to Congress for a declaration of war began, ‘‘Yesterday, December 7,
1941, a date which will live in world history.’’ In his second draft, he crossed out ‘‘world history’’ and substituted a
condemnatory word that was far more memorable: infamy. Though its adjective, infamous, was frequently used, the noun
infamy was less familiar. It means ‘‘evil fame, shameful repute, notorious disgrace’’ and befitted
the nation’s shock at the bloody destruction at Pearl Harbor, a successful surprise blow that was instantly characterized by the
victim nation as a ‘‘sneak attack.’’ The
word, with its connotation of wartime shock and horror,
was chosen by headline writers to label the terrorist attack on New York and
Washington that demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a portion of the Pentagon. In newspapers
and on television, the historical day of infamy was the label chosen, along with the more general ‘‘attack on America.’’ The
killers were hijackers. This Americanism, origin unknown, was first cited in 1912 as to kick up high jack, which Dialect Notes
defined as ‘‘to cause a disturbance’’; 10 years later, a book about hobos noted ‘‘hijacking, or robbing men at night when
sleeping in the jungles.’’ In the 1960’s, as terrorists began seizing control of airliners, the verb skyjack was coined but has since
fallen into disuse. The suicidal hijackers were able to slip a new weapon through the metal detectors: a box cutter, defined in
the ontop-of-the-news New Oxford American Dictionary (to be published next month) as ‘‘a thin, inexpensive razor-blade knife
designed to open cardboard boxes.’’ Barbara Olson, a passenger aboard the airliner doomed to be crashed into the Pentagon,
was able to telephone her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson; she told him that the hijackers were armed with knives and
what she called a cardboard cutter. These terrorists were suicide bombers, a phrase used in a 1981 Associated Press dispatch
by Tom Baldwin in Lebanon about the driving of an explosives-laden car into the Iraqi Embassy. In 1983, Newsweek reported
that ‘‘the winds of fanaticism have blown up a merciless throng of killers: the assassins, thugs, kamikazes — and now the
suicide bombers.’’ Kamikaze is Japanese for ‘‘divine wind,’’ a reference to a storm in the 13th century that blew away a fleet of
invading Mongols. In World War II, the word described suicidal pilots who dived their planes into enemy ships. English has
now absorbed the word: Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that airline policy ‘‘was turned upside down by
these kamikaze fanatics.’’ Hunt, like President Bush and many others, called these acts of murder-suicide cowardly. That is not
a modifier I would use, nor would I employ its synonym dastardly (though F.D.R. did), which also means ‘‘shrinking from
danger.’’ If anything, the suicide bomber or suicide hijacker is maniacally fearless, the normal human survival instinct
overwhelmed by hatred or brainwashed fervor. Senseless and mindless are other mistaken modifiers of these killings: the
sense, or
evil purpose, of modern barbaric murder is to carry out a blind ly worshiped leader’s
desire to shock, horrify and ultimately intimidate the target’s civilized compatriots.
Another word that deserves a second look is justice. Both Senator John McCain and the Bush adviser Karen Hughes called for
‘‘swift justice ’’ to be meted out to the perpetrators, ordinarily a sentiment widely shared. But the columnist Charles
Krauthammer wrote: ‘‘There should be no talk of bringing these people to ‘swift justice.’ . . . An open act of war demands a
military response, not a judicial one.’’ The leading suspect at the center of the terror campaign is Osama bin Laden. The bin,
meaning ‘‘son of,’’ is not capped; Westerners have chosen not to capitalize the Arabic just as they have often chosen to
capitalize the Hebrew Ben, which has the same meaning. This has nothing to do with correctness; it is strictly idiosyncratic
convention, varying among regions and stylists. (When starting a sentence with bin Laden’s name, Times style calls for
capitalizing it, which then looks like a mistake.) Bin Laden has been given a shorthand, bogus title, much like vice overlord,
fugitive financier and drug kingpin: his is terrorist mastermind. The name of his organization, al-Qaeda, means ‘‘the base,’’ in
looser modern Arabic, ‘‘the military headquarters.’’ His host in Afghanistan is the Taliban, a religio-political group whose name
means ‘‘those who seek.’’ The Arab word talib, ‘‘student,’’ has been given a Persian suffix, an, which is an unusual amalgam or
was a mistake. The Taliban (proper noun construed as plural) harbor bin Laden and the base of his organization. That is now
becoming a political verb with a vengeance. ‘‘We will make no distinction,’’ President Bush said, ‘‘between the terrorists who
committed these acts and those who harbor them.’’ A key sense of the verb to harbor is ‘‘to give shelter and concealment to
wrongdoers.’’ The next day, Bush used the noun form creatively: ‘‘This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe, but they
won’t be safe forever.’’ That was an extension of the noun’s present meaning of ‘‘place of shelter, haven, port’’ to ‘‘place where
evildoers think they are out of reach of punishment.’’ Finally, the word
terrorist. It is rooted in the Latin
terrere, ‘‘to frighten,’’ and the -ist was coined in France to castigate the perpetrators of the
Reign of Terror. Edmund Burke in 1795 defined the word in English: ‘‘Those hell-hounds called terrorists . . . are let loose on
the people.’’ The sternly
judgmental word should not be avoided or euphemized. Nobody
can accurately call those who plotted, financed and carried out the infamous mass
slaughter of Sept. 11 militants, resistance fighters, gunmen, partisans or guerrillas.
The most precise word to describe a person or group who murders even one
innocent civilian to send a political message is terrorist.

No link and turn- your critical approach to terrorism can never refound the
political, lacks any form of empirical validity and serves a hegemonic agenda.
This divisive form of scholarship retreats to scholarly enclaves at the expense of
producing action and research that can reduce ongoing violence
Michel and Richards, 2k9 (Torsten University of St. Andrews and Anthony University of
East London, False dawns or new horizons? Further issues and challenges for Critical
Terrorism Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism 2.3, 399-413)
Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS)
is not a completely new theoretical and conceptual
way of approaching problems or issues in international politics, but rather it draws
heavily from the wider body of critical thought in the field of International
Relations. This relationship, however, also implies an onus upon CTS
scholars to take on board some of the problems within critical scholarship
if they are serious about their theoretical and practical aims . Particularly
important in relation to this point seems the almost complete absence of any
meaningful and substantial engagement with the epistemological
implications of Critical Theory and its close - but again partly problematic -
relation to the normative-ethical agenda of emancipation . In order to present a
coherent and conceptually sound argument, CTS scholars need a much closer treatment of these issues than is currently
the case. This is not only due to the need for theoretical and conceptual rigour, but also, as has been argued above, it is
related to the demands of Critical Theory itself which stipulates an inextricable link between social and political
philosophy and the practical tasks for the application of any critique of reason. Furthermore, it
also seems
necessary to develop the notion of emancipation beyond the mere aim of
liberating people from different kinds of violence , be it physical or structural. The last thing
CTS needs is a political agenda that drives its research. Emancipation as a practical task of
Critical Theory is a perpetual endeavour necessitated by the inevitable
fusion of instrumental and emancipatory reason; any stipulation that this
process of a self-reflective critique by and of reason can come to an end
through realising a specific political and/or social setting is not only naive,
but also would entail a crude and almost banal understanding of Critical
Theory itself- something that CTS surely intends to avoid. In the same vein, it
seems necessary to elaborate more clearly on the value of the scholarly
output of CTS studies. It is one thing to criticise the ongoing practice of
episte-mological and methodological reification in pursuit of a hegemonic
agenda, but quite another to present a valid alternative that answers the
conceptual and theoretical shortcomings of such an approach . The question of truth
in its widest meaning arises since the spectre of historicism opens the door to the charge of relativism. To be sure,
historicist conceptions of knowledge do not necessarily lead to a relativistic position, but the
challenge of how
to avoid falling into relativism needs to be addressed and stated clearly .
Critical Theory itself addresses this problematique and provides an answer to this challenge (which itself entails certain
problems that need to be discussed) and so must CTS if its scholarly validity and rigour is to be taken seriously. A
further challenge for CTS is to convince that it has something significantly
new to offer terrorism studies. It is not a revelation to discover that states
have been responsible for committing the worst acts of 'terror' or indeed
that democratic states are culpable when it comes to sponsoring terrorism .
We are all engaged in trying to understand the phenomenon of terrorism and its causes. But, (admittedly) like much of
terrorism studies in general, CTS
scholarship is empirically flawed and, like the
broader critical project, draws on a number of assumed relationships . Two
of these assumed relationships are: between the state and individual
insecurity, and between that individual insecurity and motivation for
terrorism. The question then logically follows (if these relationships do exist): what part of individual insecurity is
attributable to 'the state* and what part of individual insecurity motivates terrorism, and therefore, most importantly, is
there an overlap between the two? In other words to what extent is 'the state' culpable for any of the individual insecurity
that is causally linked to the occurrence of terrorism? Not
only are the answers to these
questions difficult to validate but so are the assumptions that lie beneath
them. In what context arc these questions being posed in the first place? Is it really to underpin a rigorous
understanding as to why terrorism occurs or is it actually to provide a convenient explanation for terrorism that serves
the wider critical project? Finally, it is important to emphasise that CTS perspectives should certainly be part of any
curriculum on the subject of terrorism. It
is also therefore a little unfortunate that some of its
proponents have adopted an adversarial approach towards what has been
called 'traditional terrorism studies' - that somehow critical theorists have
seen the light while the 'orthodox' researchers have for a long time been
walking along a skewed and discredited path. This does a great disservice
to some of the eminent scholars in the field who have contributed so much
to the study of terrorism. We therefore suggest that while CTS should certainly be part
of terrorism studies, the field should remain as just that - terrorism studies,
it would a shame if a separate 'Critical Terrorism Studies' field emerged as
a manifestation of a 'separate camps' mentality, at the expense of a more
integrated and fruitful debate within terrorism studies as a whole.
Managerialism
 General
Domination of the physical universe is key to solve poverty, promote nanotech
and space control
Zey 1 – Professor of Business
Michael, professor at Montclair State University School of Business and executive director of the
Expansionary Institute, a research and consulting organization focusing on future trends in
technology, society, the economy, politics, “MAN'S EVOLUTIONARY PATH INTO THE UNIVERSE”
The Futurist, Vol. 35, May 2001
We must examine the many ways such developments impact the individual, society,
and the economy. And we must explore the underlying reasons why our species is
feverishly working to advance the planet and ourselves and transform all we
encounter. When we truly understand the depth and strength of man's overwhelming
imperative to grow and progress, we can more clearly anticipate the future. At first
blush, it would seem that there is little mystery about the impulses driving the human
species in this quest: We engage in such productive activities merely to enhance our
material condition. We invent technologies that will improve our standard of living
and make our lives more pleasant and comfortable. Our species from the earliest
periods of prehistory seems compelled not just to survive, but to grow, progress, and
enhance itself and its environment. At each new level of our development, we
endeavor to master our environment as well as the physical dynamics governing our
universe. Humanity's activities, including the entire scientific and technological
enterprise, represent a unified attempt by the species to spread "humanness" to
everything we encounter. Over the centuries, we have labored to improve planet
Earth, and we are now preparing to transform the universe into a dynamic entity
filled with life. We will accomplish this by extending our consciousness, skills,
intellect, and our very selves to other spheres. I label the sum total of our species'
endeavors to improve and change our planetary environment--and ultimately the
universe itself-vitalization. Vitalization is a force that is conditioning human behavior.
The drive to vitalize--to imbue our planet and eventually the cosmos with a
consciousness and intelligence--is a primary motivation behind all human productive
activity. Vitalization is the primary force shaping human behavior. However, in order
to pursue vitalization successfully, the human species must master four other forces,
what I label the "building blocks of vitalization." These four processes encompass the
extraordinary advances in areas such as space, medicine, biogenetics, engineering,
cybernetics, and energy. The four supporting forces are: * Dominionization: control
over physical forces, such as energy. * Species coalescence: unity through built
systems, such as transportation and communications. * Biogenesis: improvement of
the physical shell, such as through bioengineering. * Cybergenesis: interconnection
with machines to advance human evolution. Each of these forces plays a critical
catalytic role in the achievement of vitalization. Dominionization: Controlling Nature
The term dominionization refers to the process whereby humankind establishes
control over several key aspects of its physical universe. With each passing decade, we
enhance our ability to manipulate matter, reshape the planet, develop innovative
energy sources, and control fundamental aspects of the physical universe, such as the
atom and electromagnetism. Someday, we will learn to influence weather patterns
and climate. In a host of ways, dominionization helps humanity vitalize the planet
and eventually the universe. As we master the basic dynamics of nature, we are more
able to shepherd the evolution of our planet as well as others. As we develop novel
and powerful forms of energy, we can rocket from one sphere to another. Moreover,
by improving our already formidable skills in moving mountains and creating lakes,
we will be better able to change both the topography and the geography of other
planets. Examples of dominionization abound. Major macroengineering projects
attest to man's ability to transform the very surface of the earth. By constructing man-
made lakes, we will be able to live in previously uninhabitable areas such as intenor
Australia. Shimizu Corporation envisions a subterranean development called Urban
Geo Grid--a series of cities linked by tunnels--accommodating half a million people.
In the emerging Macro-industrial Era, whose framework was established in the 1970s
and 1980s, we will redefine the concept of "bigness" as we dot Earth's landscape with
immense architectural structures. Takenaka, a Japanese construction firm, has
proposed "Sky City 1000," a 3,000-foot tower, to be built in Tokyo. Another firm,
Ohbayashi, plans to erect a 500-story high-rise building featuring apartments, offices,
shopping centers, and service facilities. We will establish dominion over the very
heart of physical matter itself. Through nanotechnology, our species will attain
control over the atom and its tiniest components. Such control will enable us to
effortlessly "macromanufacture" from the bottom up, one atom at a time, any
material object. This will enable us to permanently eradicate age-old problems such
as scarcity and poverty.

Only foresighted management can solve global warming – the impact is the
case
Berg 8 – Advisor @ World Federation of United Nations
Robert, Senior Advisor World Federation of United Nations Associations, 2008, Governing in a
World of Climate Change, http://www.wfuna.org/atf/cf/%7B84F00800-D85E-4952-9E61-
D991E657A458%7D/BobBerg'sNewPaper.doc
If, as Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen states, humanity is now in the
Anthropocene Epoch where forever more humanity must manage the
environment, the scientific community for centuries to come must take a
leading social and institutional role. This places a completely new
responsibility on national and global scientific academies. It implies a
constructive, serious and sustained dialogue with the public as well as with
political leadership. Frankly, few scientific academies are yet up to this task. Building
the capacity of scientists to respond If governments and foundations are far-
sighted, they will help ensure that national scientific academies are
strengthened so that they can become responsible partners in forming public
policies in response to climate change.  Each ecological setting will need
specific responses calling for national academies and academic centers to
partner with national policy makers.  The Open Society Institute and others are
working to strengthen scientific communities, but it is important that scientific
communities take even greater leading roles.
 A2 Luke
Luke concludes that institutional change is necessary to stop extinction – their
alternative fails
Luke, 97 – professor of political science at Virginia polytechnic
Timothy, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture”, pg 126-127
It may be true that “the actions of those now living will determine the future and
possibly the very survival of the species”, but it is, in fact, mostly a mystification. Only
the actions of a very small handful of the humans who are now living, namely, those
in significant positions of decisive managerial power in business or central executive
authority in government, can truly do something to determine the future. Hollander’s
belief that thousands of his readers, who will replace their light bulbs, water heaters,
automobiles, or toilets with ecologically improved alternatives, can decisively affect
the survival of the species is pure ideology. It may sell new kinds of toilets, cars,
appliances, and light bulbs, but it does not guarantee planetary survival. Hollander
does not stop here. He even asserts that everyone on the planet, not merely the
average consumers in affluent societies, is to blame for the ecological crisis.
Therefore, he maintains, rightly and wrongly, that “no attempt to protect the
environment will be successful in the long run unless ordinary people—the California
executive, the Mexican peasant, the Soviet [sic] factory worker, the Chinese farmer—
are willing to adjust their life-styles and values. Our wasteful, careless ways must
become a thing of the past.” The wasteful, careless ways of the California executive
plainly must be ecologically reconstituted, but the impoverished practices of Mexican
peasants and Chinese farmers, short of what many others would see as their
presumed contributions to “overpopulation,” are probably already at levels of
consumption that Hollander happily would ratify as ecologically sustainable if the
California executive could only attain and abide by them. As Hollander asserts, “every
aspect of our lives has some environmental impact,” and, in some sense, everyone he
claims, “must acknowledge the responsibility we were all given as citizens of the
planet and act on the hundreds of opportunities to save our planet that present
themselves every day.” Nevertheless, the typical consumer does not control the
critical aspects of his or her existence in ways that have any major environmental
impact. Nor do we all encounter hundreds of opportunities every day to do much to
save the planet. The absurd claim that average consumers only need to shop, bicycle,
or garden their way to an ecological failure merely moves most of the responsibility
and much of the blame away from the institutional center of power whose decisions
actually maintain the wasteful, careless ways of material exchange that Hollander
would end by having everyone recycle all their soda cans.

Rejection of managerialism is just as dangerous – their author

Luke, 97 – professor of political science at Virginia polytechnic
Timothy, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture”, pg. 80
Although resource managerialism can be criticized on many levels, it has provisionally
guaranteed some measure of limited protection to wilderness areas, animal species,
and watercourses in the United States. And, whatever its flaws, the attempt to extend
the scope of its oversight to other regions of the world probably could have a similar
impact. Resource managerialism directly confronts the existing cultural, economic,
and social regime of transnational corporate capitalism with the fact that millions of
Americans, as well as billions of other human beings, must be provisioned from the
living things populating Earth’s biosphere (the situation of all these other living
things, of course, is usually ignored or reduced to an aesthetic question). And, if they
are left unregulated, as history as shown, the existing corporate circuits of commodity
production will degrade the biosphere to the point that all living things will not be
able to renew themselves. Other ecological activists can fault resource managerialism,
but few, if any, of them face these present-day realities as forthrightly in actual
practice, largely because the prevailing regimes of state and corporate power, now
assuming the forms of the “wise-use” movement often regard even this limited
challenge as far too radical. Still, this record of “success” is not a license to ignore the
flawed working of resource managerialism. In fact, this forthright engagement with
resource realities raises very serious questions, as the global tactics of such agencies
as the Worldwatch Institute reveal.

Anti-management results in mass extinctions

Soule 95 - Professor of Environmental Studies
Michael E., Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies, UC-Santa Cruz, REINVITING NATURE?
RESPONSES TO POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION, Eds: Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease, p. 159-
160
Should We Actively Manage Wildlands and Wild Waters? The decision has already
been made in most places. Some of the ecological myths discussed here contain,
either explicitly or implicitly, the idea that nature is self-regulating and capable of
caring for itself. This notion leads to the theory of management known as benign
neglect – nature will do fine, thank you, if human beings just leave it alone. Indeed, a
century ago, a hands-off policy was the best policy. Now it is not. Given natures`s
current fragmented and stressed condition, neglect will result in an accelerating spiral
of deterioration. Once people create large gaps in forests, isolate and disturb habitats,
pollute, overexploit, and introduce species from other continents, the viability of
many ecosystems and native species is compromised, resiliency dissipates, and
diversity can collapse. When artificial disturbance reaches a certain threshold, even
small changes can produce large effects, and these will be compounded by climate
change. For example, a storm that would be considered normal and beneficial may,
following widespread clearcutting, cause disastrous blow-downs, landslides, and
erosion. If global warming occurs, tropical storms are predicted to have greater force
than now. Homeostasis, balance, and Gaia are dangerous models when applied at the
wrong spatial and temporal scales. Even fifty years ago, neglect might have been the
best medicine, but that was a world with a lot more big, unhumanized, connected
spaces, a world with one-third the number of people, and a world largely unaffected
by chain saws, bulldozers, pesticides, and exotic, weedy species. The alternative to
neglect is active caring – in today`s parlance, an affirmative approach to wildlands: to
maintain and restore them, to become stewards, accepting all the domineering
baggage that word carries. Until humans are able to control their numbers and their
technologies, management is the only viable alternative to massive attrition of
living nature. But management activities are variable in intensity, something that
antimanagement purists ignore. In general, the greater the disturbance and the
smaller the habitat remnant, the more intense the management must be. So if we
must manage, where do we look for ethical guidance?
Human existence necessarily transforms the environment. Our choice is not
whether to intervene, but how – and their style of management excuses
unlimited ecological destruction
Barry 99 – Politics Lecturer @ Keele
John, Politics Lecturer at Keele University, RETHINKING GREEN POLITICS: NATURE, VIRTUE AND
PROGRESS, p. 101-102
In Chapter 3, I argued that the ecological niche for humans is created rather than
naturally given and that a humanized or transformed environment is our natural
habitat. The collective management, manipulation and intentional transformation of
the environment are thus universal features of all human societies. As a universal
requirement they are, in a sense, pre-political. It is how human socieities create their
humanized ecological niches, the various insititutional mechanisms used to maintain
a stable metabolism between the social and the natural system , that raise moot
political and moral question. In this chapter, collective ecological management is
presented as an institutional form regulating this metabolism based on green values
and principles. This idea of active ecological management cuts across the deep –
shallow, radical – reformist continuum within green theory. What conceptions of
green political theory differ over are the scale, type, institutional structure and
normative side-constraints operative upon social-environmental metabolic states, not
the necessity for environmental management and transformation. For example, even
deep ecologists, for whom a pre-emptive hands-off-cum-nature-knows-best position
constitutes a central principle, accept that preserving wilderness requires active
social, and particularly institutional, intervention. In other words, preservation from
development, as much as conservation for (future) development or ecological
restoration, all take place within the broad framework of ecological restoration, all
take place within the broad framework of ecological management. The deep ecology
ideal of wilderness preservation, the preservation of the non-human world from a
certain type of collective human transformation (in the form of development),
paradoxically necessitates another form of human management. In the form of
institutional structures, practices, etc. which function as a form of social governance
to limit and/or transform development, such that wilderness is preserved. What
appears as non-management at one level is at another level simple another form of
management. Walking lighter on the earth is as much a form of ecological
management as economic development. The political and normative issue is that
collective purposive-transformative interaction with the environment can simply be
more or less extensive, have a different character or be more or less sustainable.
 Perm
Must reject radical environmental criticism – undercuts pragmatic
environmental change
Reitan 98
Eric Reitan (Seattle University Writer for the Electronic Green Journal) Pragmatism,
Environmental World Views, and Sustainability. December 1998
With the urgency of the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford to get
bogged down in theoretic disputes that mask a common mission and get in the way of
making the practical changes that are so pressing. Pragmatic Mediation of Deep
Ecology and Christian Stewardship The example I have chosen to discuss is the
theoretic debate between two environmental philosophies that have emerged in the
last few decades: the philosophy of stewardship that has evolved in Christian
communities, and the philosophy of deep ecology. I choose these two not on the basis
of any special status they have, but rather because they are the two environmental
perspectives with which I have the most personal acquaintance, and because the
nature of the debate between them usefully illustrates the value of using pragmatic
principles to guide theoretic environmental discourse. Before applying pragmatic
principles to this example, some preliminary comments may be helpful. First, it is
important to keep in mind that complex worldviews or philosophical systems may
impact more than one domain of human life, and that they may have radically
opposing pragmatic implications in one or more of those domains while implying
substantially the same behaviors in the domain of the human-nature relationship. In
such a case, we can say that while the worldviews do not have the same pragmatic
meaning overall, they have the same environmental meaning. As such, it is important
not to let the real differences in other areas mask the genuine agreement in the
environmental domain. Second, it is worth noting that there is almost certainly more
than one human social arrangement that harmonizes sustainable with the natural
environment. Put another way, there is more than one set of human practices that
works in terms of promoting a healthy human-natural system. And it follows from
this observation that more than one worldview can be pragmatically true:
while two worldviews may imply environmental behaviors that are
different, and hence have a different pragmatic meaning, insofar as they both
promote sustainable behaviors they are both true from a pragmatic
standpoint. Pragmatic truth is not monistic, but pluralistic. Given the urgent
pragmatic goals of environmental philosophy, sustained theoretic debates about
meaning differences of this sort appear to be unwarranted, and should be
put aside in favor of the task of finding practical ways of integrating and
accommodating those alternative social arrangements which serve the
common goal of sustainable human-natural systems.

Only the permutation solves

-recognizing areas of compromise is more effective than trying to isolate differences. Only the
permutation results in a unified ecological movement
Ellis 96 – MS in Civil Engineering
Jeffrey Ellis, Chief, Environmental, Safety and Health Engineering at United States Air Force, MS
in Civil Engineering, 1996, Uncommon ground: rethinking the human place in nature, pg. 260
Because of the complexity and seeming intransigence of environmental problems, it is
clearly time for radical environmentalists to focus less on defining their differences
and more on determining the common ground that might provide the basis for a more
coherent and unified ecology movement. As I hope this essay illustrates, if they
hope to achieve a working consensus, radicals must strive to resist the well-
established tendency in environmental discourse to identify the single most important
and fundamental cause of the many environmental problems that have become
increasingly apparent in recent decades. The desire to essentialize environmental
problems and trace them all to one root cause is obviously a powerful one. If a root
cause can be identified, then priorities can be clearly established and a definite
agenda determined. Although the intention behind this silver bullet approach to
understanding the global environmental crisis has been to provide the environmental
movement with a dear focus and agenda, its impact has been very nearly just the
opposite. It has repeatedly proven to be more divisive than productive in
galvanizing a united front against environmental destruction.

No single root cause – their emphasis on root cause dooms the alternative –
permutation solves best
Ellis 96 – MS in Civil Engineering
Jeffrey Ellis, Chief, Environmental, Safety and Health Engineering at United States Air Force, MS
in Civil Engineering, 1996, Uncommon ground: rethinking the human place in nature, pg. 260
Because of the complexity and seeming intransigence of environmental problems, it is
clearly time for radical environmentalists to focus less on defining their differences
and more on determining the common ground that might provide the basis for a more
coherent and unified ecology movement. As I hope this essay illustrates, if they
hope to achieve a working consensus, radicals must strive to resist the well-
established tendency in environmental discourse to identify the single most important
and fundamental cause of the many environmental problems that have become
increasingly apparent in recent decades. The desire to essentialize environmental
problems and trace them all to one root cause is obviously a powerful one. If a root
cause can be identified, then priorities can be clearly established and a definite
agenda determined. Although the intention behind this silver bullet approach to
understanding the global environmental crisis has been to provide the environmental
movement with a dear focus and agenda, its impact has been very nearly just the
opposite. It has repeatedly proven to be more divisive than productive in
galvanizing a united front against environmental destruction. This is not surprising. It
would indeed be convenient if all ecological problems sprang from the same source,
but this is far from likely. If nothing else, during the last forty years it has become
abundantly clear that environmental problems arc deeply complex. Not only have
they proven extremely difficult to unravel scientifically, but they have social and
political aspects that further compound their complexity. Global warming, species
extinction, pollution human population growth, depletion of resources, and increased
rates of life-threatening disease are just some of the many problems that confront us.
The idea that there is a single root cause to any one of these problems, let alone to
all of them taken together, is, to put it mildly, absurd. Because environmental
problems arc each the result of a multiplicity of causal factors, there can be no one
comprehensive solution to all of them. And yet radical environmental thinkers are
correct in rejecting the piecemeal approach to environmental problems that has
become institutionalized in American society. Thus far, reform environmentalism has
proven itself inadequate to the task of halting the deterioration of the earth's
ecological systems. But an alternative to that approach will not emerge until radicals
reject the quixotic and divisive search for a root cause to the spectrum of
environmental problems that have been subsumed under the umbrella of the
ecological crisis. Instead of arguing with one another about who is most right, radicals
must begin to consider the insights each perspective has generated and work toward a
more comprehensive rather than a confrontational understanding of problems that
have multiple, complex, and interconnected causes.
Security
 Heg turn
Securitization key to hegemony
Noorani 5
Yaseen, Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, The Rhetoric of
Security" CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41 Muse
Any threat to the existence of the United States is therefore a threat to the
existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this order
possible. It is not merely that the United States, as the most powerful
nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending it. It is rather
that the United States is the supreme agency advancing the underlying
principle of the free order. The United States is the world order's fulcrum,
and therefore the key to its existence and perpetuation. Without the United
States, freedom, peace, civil relations among nations, the possibility of
civil society are all under threat of extinction. This is why the most
abominable terrorists and tyrants single out the United States for their
schemes and attacks. They know that the United States is the guardian of liberal
values. In the rhetoric of security, therefore, the survival of the United States, its
sheer existence, becomes the content of liberal values. In other words, what
does it mean to espouse liberal values in the context of the present state of world
affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote energetically the survival of the
United States of America. When the world order struggles to preserve its "self," the
self that it seeks to preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United States.
Conferring;this status upon the United States allows the rhetoric of security to insist
upon a threat to the existence of the world order as a whole while confining the non-
normative status that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United
States-as the self under threat-remains external to the normative relations by which
the rest of the world continues to be bound. The United States is both a specific
national existence struggling for its life and normativity itself, which
makes it coextensive with the world order as a whole. For this reason, any
challenge to U.S. world dominance would be a challenge to world peace
and is thus impermissible. W e read in The National Security Strategy that the
United States [End Page 321 will "promote a balance of power that favors freedom"
(National Security 2002, 1).And later, we find out what is meant by such a balance of
power.

US military primacy is comparatively better than the alternative

Noonan 10
John, 1/4, The Weekly Standard, Obama's Nuke-Free Vision Impacts with Reality
If the White House's stance on disarmament is indeed that elementary, we might have
a real problem. For better or for worse, America's mighty strategic
vanguard has served as one of the most powerful global stabilization tools
in history. We shouldn't abandon it simply to appease a gaggle of
Scandanavian peaceniks, nor should we sacrifice America's security
because we're off chasing utopian fantasies.
Absolute rejection of security based politics leads to global injustices – only US
forces can prevent global violence
Elshtain 3 
Jean Bethke, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University
of Chicago Divinity School, and is a contributing editor for The New Republic, Just War Against
Terror
Peace is a good, and so is justice, but neither is an absolute good. Neither
automatically trumps the other, save for those pacifists who claim that
“violence is never the solution,” “fighting never settled anything,” and “violence
only begets more violence.” Does it? Not always, not necessarily. One can point to
one historical example after another of force being deployed in the name
of justice and leading to not only a less violent world but a more just one.
Consider the force used to combat Japanese militarism in World War II.
Defeating Japan in the war, occupying Japan in its aftermath and
imposing a constitutional order did not incite further Japanese
aggression of the sort witnessed in its full horror in what came to be known as “the
rape of Manchuria.” What emerged instead was a democratic Japan. Are there
living Japanese who believe it is time to return to a violent world of militarist
dominance or the world of violent self-help associated with the samurai tradition?
When the great Japanese writer Yukio Mishima called for a mass uprising and
restoration of the old militarism in 1970, only a couple of pathetic disciples
responded. Mishima’s bizarre fantasy of the return of a more violent world was
regarded by the Japanese as daft and nigh-unintelligible. All violence, including the
rule-governed violence of warfare, is tragic. But even more tragic is permitting
gross injustices and massive crimes to go unpunished. Just war stipulates
that the goods of settled social life cannot be achieved in the face of
pervasive and unrelenting violence. The horror of today’s so-called failed
states is testament to that basic requirement of the “tranquility of order.”
In Somalia, as warlords have jostled for power for more than a decade,
people have been abused cynically and routinely. Anyone at anytime may be a
target. The tragedy of American involvement in Somalia is not that U.S.
soldiers were sent there, but that the American commitment was not
sufficient to restore minimal civic peace and to permit the Somalian people to
begin to rebuild their shattered social framework. Can anyone doubt that a
sufficient use of force to stop predators from killing and starving people
outright would have been the more just course in Somalia and, in the long
run, the one most conducive to civic peace?
 Alt fails
The alternative cannot overcome securitization. Humans CANNOT change the
orientation of terror towards threats. It’s a natural product of evolution
Pyszczynski et al 6
Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Sheldon Solomon, Prof. Psych. – Skidmore College, Jeff
Greenberg, Prof. Psych. – U. Arizona, and Molly Maxfield, U. Colorado, Psychological Inquiry,
“On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and
Variations” 17:4, Ebsco
Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is
wedded to an outmoded assumption that human beings share with many other
species a survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in
specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined
 Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight  the
adaptive response.

general orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many of an

organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverseapproach
and avoidance tendencies that promote its survival and reproduction,ultimately leading to
genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT
of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that
natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over
 adaptations as a series
evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes. However, whether one construes these

of discrete mechanisms or a general overarching tendency that encompasses many

specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection
usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate continued
existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other
ways, or that all species or even all humans, will always choose life over other valued goals in all circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists
because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of
independent modules that produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-
related mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For
example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the
circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the overarching function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve
specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning(Dawkins,
1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those characteristics
become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-
preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to generally foster life or insure reproduction, or cognitive

The obvious first

representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The selfish gene: 

priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions
for it, are individual survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to
elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten
themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from
unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children
advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the
theory,we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people do not
fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and because they want to continue

Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not fear

living. 

death? Although people sometimes claim that they are not afraid of

death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach
their death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great
deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system that
makes this possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting
question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation
. A
instinct was not, in and of itself, selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for

desire to stay alive, and a fear of anything that threatens to end one’s life,
are likely emergent properties of these many discrete mechanisms that
result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, future- oriented, and self-
reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death
and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point. First, for
 “Such constant expenditure of
psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT:

psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be

impossible if the fear of death were not as constant” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist
Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that
which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142)
And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight: Phyllis: I learned something up in that
. An important consequence of the emergence of
plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die

this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to anxiety due to

events or stimuli that are not immediately present  and novel threats to
survival that did not exist for our ancestors,such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear
weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear
that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a gun,
a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires
further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can
attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of
weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear
reactions in response to such threats?

Evolutionary theory is best because it’s falsifiable, direct, and scientific- prefer
our ev
Thayer 2k
Bradley A., Senior Analyst @ National Institute for Public Policy, Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary
Theory, Realism, and International Politics, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Autumn,
2000), pp. 124-151
Evolutionary theory provides a better foundation for realism than the theological or metaphysical
arguments advanced by Niebuhr or Morgenthau for three reasons. First, it is superior as judged by

the common metrics in philosophy of science developed by Carl Hempel and Karl Evolutionary theory
meets all of Hempel's criteria of the deductive-nomological (D-N) model of scientific explanation, unlike Niebuhr's evil or Morgenthau's animus dominandi.
Measured by Popper's criteria-developed in his theory of critical rationalism- evolutionary theory is also superior
because it is falsifiable. That is, scholars know what evidence would not verify the theory.67 Niebuhr's and Morgenthau's ultimate
causes are noumenal (i.e., outside the realm of scientific investigation). Second, evolutionary theory offers a widely

accepted scientific explanation of human evolution, thus giving realism the

scientific foundation it has lacked. Third, realists can use evolutionary theory
to advance arguments supporting offensive realism without depending
on the anarchic international system. Offensive realists argue that states seek to maximize power because
competition in the international system to achieve security compels them to do so.68 Realism based on evolutionary

theory reaches the same conclusion, but the causal mechanism is at the
first image (the individual) rather than the third image (the international
system). State decisionmakers are egoistic and strive to dominate others. In international politics they do so by maximizing state power.69 Focused,
empirical testing is required to determine which insights an offensive realism based on evolutionary theory provides. This in turn may inform explanations of
why state leaders choose to expand and why they are often able to generate popular support for expansion with relative ease, or why external or internal
threats have been such powerful motivators in building national solidarity and mobilizing a society's resources.

We can’t stop caring about our survival. The ONLY way humans can deal with
the terror of inevitable death is to manage it with order and denial. The
alternative LITERALLY makes life unlivable
Pyszczynski 4  
Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Social Research, “What are we so afraid of? A terror
management theory perspective on the politics of fear”,
Winter, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_71/ai_n13807478/
TMT starts with a consideration of how human beings are both similar to, and
different from, all other animals. We start with the assumption that, like all other
animals, humans are born with a very basic evolved proclivity to stay alive
and that fear, and all the biological structures of the brain that produce it,
evolved, at least initially, to keep the animal alive. This, of course, is highly
adaptive, in that it facilitates survival, and an animal that does not stay alive
very long has little chances of reproducing and passing on its genes. But
as ourspecies evolved, it developed a wide range of other adaptations that helped
us survive and reproduce, the most important being a set of highly
sophisticatedintellectual abilities that enable us to: a) think and communicate
with symbols, which of course is the basis for language, b) project ourselves in time
and imagine a future including events that have never happened
before, and c) reflect back on ourselves, and take ourselves as an object of our
own attention--self-awareness. These are all very adaptive abilities that play central
roles in the system through which humans regulate their behavior--usually referred to
as the self (cf. Carver and Scheier, 1998). These abilities made it possible for us to
survive and prosper in a far wider range of environments than any other animal has
ever done, and accomplish all that we humans have done that no other species ever
has been capable of doing. However, these unique intellectual abilities also created a
major problem: they made us aware that, although we are biologically
programmed to stay alive and avoid things that would cut our life short, the one
absolute certainty in life is that we must die. We are also forced to realize that death
can come at any time for any number of reasons, none of which are particularly
pleasant--a predator, natural disaster, another hostile human, and an incredible range
of diseases and natural processes, ranging from heart attacks and cancer to AIDS. If
we are "lucky" we realize that our bodies will just wear out and we will slowly fade
away as we gradually lose our most basic functions. Not a very pretty picture. TMT
posits that this clash of a core desire for life with awareness of the inevitability of
death created the potential for paralyzing terror. Although all animals experience fear
in the face of clear and present dangers to their survival, only humans know what it is
that they are afraid of, and that ultimately there is no escape from this ghastly reality.
We suspect that this potential for terror would have greatly interfered with
ongoing goal-directed behavior, and life itself, if it were left unchecked. It
may even have made the intellectual abilities that make our species
special unviable in the long run as evolutionary adaptations--and there are
those who think that the fear and anxiety that results from our sophisticated
intelligence may still eventually lead to the extinction of our species. So humankind
used their newly emerging intellectual abilities to manage the potential
for terror that these abilities produced by calling the understandings of reality that
were emerging as a result of these abilities into service as a way of controlling their
anxieties. The potential for terror put a "press" on emerging explanations for reality,
what we refer to as cultural worldviews, such that any belief system that was to
survive and be accepted by the masses needed to manage this potential for anxiety
that was inherent in the recently evolved human condition. Cultural worldviews
manage existential terror by providing a meaningful,  orderly,
andcomforting conception of the world that helps us come to grips with
the problem of death. Cultural worldviews provide a meaningful explanation of life
and our place in the cosmos; a set of standards for what is valuable behavior, good
and evil, that give us the potential of acquiring self-esteem, the sense that we are
valuable, important, and significant contributors to this meaningful reality; and the
hope of transcending death and attaining immortality in either a literal or symbolic
sense. Literal immortality refer to those aspects of the cultural worldview that
promise that death is not the end of existence, that some part of us will live on,
perhaps in an ethereal heaven, through reincarnation, a merger of our consciousness
with God and all others, or the attainment of enlightenment--beliefs in literal
immortality are nearly universal, with the specifics varying widely from culture to
culture. Cultures also provide us with the hope of attaining symbolic
immortality, by being part of something larger, more significant, and more
enduring than ourselves, such as our families, nations, ethnic groups, professions,
and the like. Because these entities will continue to exist long after our deaths, we
attain symbolic immortality by being valued parts of them.

Social hierarchy and domination are part of human nature- attempts to resist
them inevitably increase aggression- group observation proves
Thayer 2k
Bradley A., Senior Analyst @ National Institute for Public Policy, Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary
Theory, Realism, and International Politics, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Autumn,
2000), pp. 124-151
Evolutionary theory can also explain the trait of domination. In evolutionary theory, domination usually means that

particular individuals in social groups have regular priority of access to

resources in competitive situations. For most social mammals, a form of
social organization called a "dominance hierarchy" operates most of the time.45 The
creation of a dominance hierarchy may be violent and is almost always competitive. A single leader, almost always male

(the alpha male), leads the group. The ubiquity of this social ordering
strongly suggests that such a pattern of organization contributes to
fitness. Two principal types of behavior are evident among social mammals
in a dominance hierarchy: dominant and submissive. Dominant mammals have enhanced access to
mates, food, and territory, thus increasing their chances of reproductive success.46 Acquiring dominant status

usually requires aggression. Dominance, however, is an unstable condition; to maintain it, dominant individuals must be
willing to defend their privileged access to available resources as long as they are able. Ethologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson explain why an
individual animal vies for dominant status: "The motivation of a male chimpanzee who challenges another's rank is not that he foresees more matings or
rewards explain why . . . selection has favored the
better food or a longer life."47 Rather "those

desire for power, but the immediate reason he vies for status . . . . is
simply to dominate his peers."48 Dominant animals often assume
behavior reflecting their status. For example, dominant wolves and rhesus monkeys hold their tails higher than do other
members of their group in an effort to communicate dominance. A dominant animal that engages in such

displays is better off if it can gain priority of access to resources without

having to fight for it continuously. Submissive social mammals recognize
what is permitted and forbidden given their place in the hierarchy. They often
try to be as inconspicuous as possible. This behavior signals that the subordinate accepts its place in the dominance hierarchy and at least temporarily will
dominance hierarchies evolve
make no effort to challenge the dominant animal. Ethologists and sociobiologists argue that

because they aid defense against predators, promote the harvesting of

resources, and reduce intragroup conflict.50 A species that lives
communally has two choices: either it accepts organization with some
centralization of power, or it engages in perpetual conflict over scarce
resources, which may result in serious injury and thus deprive the group of the benefits of a communal existence. Ethological studies have
confirmed that a hierarchical dominance system within a primate band minimizes

overt aggression; aggression increases, however, when the alpha male is

challenged. The dominance hierarchy has had a profound effect on
human evolution. As cognitive psychologist Denise Dellarosa Cummins argues,
"The fundamental components of our reasoning architecture evolved in
response to pressures to reason about dominance hierarchies, the social organization
that characterizes most social mammals."52 Her study and others have found that dominance hierarchies contribute

to the evolution of the mind, which in turn contributes to fitness.

 Realism
The alternative to realism is an idealism that results in morally grounded
intervention- this inevitably leads to genocide and instability
Bacevich 5
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University, Boston Globe,
11-6-05,
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/06/the_realist_persuasion/?
page=1
In fact, when it comes to moral issues, realism has gotten a bum rap. As the
events of the post-Cold War era have reminded us, idealism-whether the left liberal
variant that emphasizes humanitarian interventionism or the neoconservative version
that urges using American power to promote American values-provides no escape
from the moral pitfalls of statecraft. If anything, it exacerbates them.
Good intentions detached from prudential considerations can easily lead
to enormous mischief, both practical and moral. In Somalia, efforts to
feed the starving culminated with besieged US forces gunning down
women and children. In Kosovo, protecting ethnic Albanians meant collaborating
with terrorists and bombing downtown Belgrade. In Iraq, a high-minded crusade
to eradicate evil and spread freedom everywhere has yielded torture and
prisoner abuse, thousands of noncombatant casualties, and something
akin to chaos. Given this do-gooder record of achievement, realism just
might deserve a second look.
Realism best preserves hegemony, solves overstretch, and avoids conflict- it
avoids war except as a last resort
Bacevich 5
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University, Boston Globe,
11-6-05,
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/06/the_realist_persuasion/?
page=1
Realists in the American tradition are similarly circumspect when it
comes to power. On the one hand, they prize it. On the other hand, they view it is
a fragile commodity. The prudent statesman deploys power with great care. These realists appreciate that ''greatness'' is transitory.
The history of Europe from 1914 to 1945 testifies to the ease with which a few arrogant and short-sighted statesmen can fritter away advantages accumulated
over centuries, with horrific consequences. Determined to husband power, realists cultivate a lively awareness of
what power-especially military power-can and cannot do. They agree with Kennan, principal
architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, who wrote in his book ''American Diplomacy'' (1950), that ''there is no more

dangerous delusion...than the concept of total victory.'' At times, war

becomes unavoidable. But realists advocate using force as a last resort-
hence, the dismay with which they view the Bush doctrine of preventive
war. To the extent war can be purposeful, realists see its utility as almost
entirely negative. War is death and destruction. Politically, it can reduce, quell, eliminate, or intimidate. But to wage war in order to
spread democracy, as President Bush says the United States is doing in Iraq, makes about as much sense as starting a forest fire to build a village: It only gets
you so far, and the costs tend to be exorbitant.Costs matter because resources are finite. In the formulation
of foreign policy, realists emphasize the importance of ''solvency.'' Lippmann, who in maturity abandoned the Wilsonian views of his youth to advocate
realism, gave particular weight to this theme. This means ensuring that a nation's commitments don't outstrip its resources.
Anti-Realist methods of prediction are flawed and universalize our historical
prejudices- this turns the kritik and makes their impact claims suspect
Solomon 96 – gender modified
Hussein, Senior Researcher, Human Security Project, Institute for Defence Policy, "In Defence of
Realism," African Security Review, Vol 5, No 2,
http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/ASR/5No2/5No2/InDefence.html
Moreover, in the last years of Dulles’ life, he came to see that internal changes within
communist states might alter their external behaviour more rapidly than the
deliberate application of pressure without.54 History has proven Dulles correct in
asserting that economics and ethnicity, internal as opposed to external forces, will
result in the demise of the Soviet superpower. What the above illustrates is the lie in
George’s statement that from a realist perspective there can be no ‘rational
explanation for Soviet behaviour in peacefully relinquishing its power status and
systemic authority other than in traditional power politics terms.’ But the question is,
did the post-modernists predict the demise of the Soviet superpower and the end of
the Cold War? This question, however, raises another one: what sort of
methodology do critics of realism employ in order to ‘objectively’ predict
the future? Since Gaddis is quoted by George, above, as revealing the essential
‘nakedness’ of traditional international relations theory, it is to his methodology that
we turn. Gaddis posits the view that individuals and nations have ‘limited
capacity’ for self-analysis. A good way of putting things into proper
perspective is by stepping back to take in a wider view. For Gaddis ‘stepping
back’ means moving forward in time or as he puts it, "... imagining
ourselves at some point in the future ... looking back on the present and
the sequence of events that led to it."55 By employing this ‘method’ Gaddis asserts
that we will "... gain insights into our present condition from the detachment of
temporal distance..."56While this may be an imaginative way of viewing things, it is a
‘method’ left best to the realm of imagination. Trying to apply such a ‘method’ to
serious academic discourse is foolhardy in the extreme. [Hu]Man is a
temporal and a spatial being and wish as much as we can, we cannot
negate that fact. It is difficult to believe that were we simply to project ourselves
forward in time and look back we would gain objectivity. Were we to project
ourselves into the future we would also be projecting our individual
twentieth century pride and prejudices (our patterns of socialisation, if you will)
with us.
Anthro
 Perm
Permutation solves – absolute rejection is unnecessary
Barry 99 –Lecturer in Politics
John Barry, Lecturer in Politics @ Keele, 1999, Rethinking Green politics, pg. 35
We may think of environmental virtue as having to do with the refinement of moral
discernment in regard to the place of nature as a constitutive aspect of the human
good. The cultivation of environmental virtues can then be regarded as a matter of
discerning the place nature has within some particular human good or interest. A
more positive statement would be to say that those who destroy nature are motivated
by an unnecessarily narrow view of the human good, and that 'what they count as
important is too narrowly confined' (Hill, 1983: 219). In so doing the inherent
plurality of the 'human good' is occluded. That is, forms of anthropocentrism which
narrow the human good and human interests can be criticized as vices, or potential
vices. At the same time, those who destroy nature also often have a mistaken
appreciation of the 'seriousness' (Taylor, 1989) of the human interest or good in the
service of which nature is destroyed. However, to reject anthropocentrism is not
the solution, but is rather itself a vice of which we need to be aware. A virtue
approach is thus anthropocentric in that its reference point is some human good or
interest, but as argued in the next chapter, this ethical (as opposed to metaphysical)
anthropocentrism is compatible with including considerations of non-human
interests and welfare.

The affirmative espouses ecological stewardship – this is compatible with and

more ethical than
Barry 99 –Lecturer in Politics
John Barry, Lecturer in Politics @ Keele, 1999, Rethinking Green politics, pg. 7-8
Ecological stewardship, unlike ecocentrism, seeks to emphasize that a self-reflexive,
long-term anthropocentrism, as opposed to an 'arrogant' or 'strong'
anthropocentrism, can secure many of the policy objectives of ecocentrism, in terms
of environmental preservation and conservation. As argued in Chapter 3, a reformed,
reflexive anthropocentrism is premised on critically evaluating human uses of the
non-human world, and distinguishing 'permissible' from 'impermissible' uses. That is,
an 'ethics of use', though anthropocentric and rooted in human interests,
seeks to regulate human interaction with the environment by distinguishing
legitimate 'use' from unjustified 'abuse'. The premise for this defence of
anthropocentric moral reasoning is that an immanent critique of 'arrogant humanism'
is a much more defensible and effective way to express green moral concerns
than rejecting anthropocentrism and developing a 'new ecocentric ethic'. As discussed
in Chapters 2 and 3, ecocentric demands are premised on an over-hasty dismissal of
anthropocentrism which precludes a recognition of the positive resources within
anthropocentrism for developing an appropriate and practicable moral idiom to
cover social-environmental interaction.

ONLY the perm solves – absolute non-anthro disables ALL green politics by
erasing the human ability to correct problems we created
Dobson, 2k – Professor of Politics at the University of Keele
Andrew, “Green Political Thought,” 3rd ed., pg. 55-56
The reason for dwelling on this is that the green movement may be doing itself a
disservice by what has been seen as its insistent distancing from the human. In the
first place it is self-contradictory. Charlene Spretnak, for example writes that “Green
politics rejects the anthropocentric orientation of humanism a philosophy which
posits that humans have the ability to confront and solve the many problems we face
by applying human reason and by rearranging the natural world and the interactions
of men and women so that human life will prosper. (Spretnak and Capra, 1985, pg.
234). There is evidently a reasonable green rejection of human-instrumentalism here,
but also a disturbing hint that human beings should abandon their pretensions to
solving problems they have brought upon themselves. This suspicion is reinforced by
comments of the following kind: “In the long run, Nature is in control” (Spretnak and
Capra, 1985, p. 234). If Spretnak really believes this, one wonders why she bothers to
write books persuading us of the merits of green politics. The fact of her involvement
implies a ebleif that she has some control, however minimal, over the destiny of the
planet. Overall, of course, it is the generalized belief in the possibility of change that
makes the green movement a properly political movement. Without such a belief, the
movement’s reason for being would be undermined. From this perspective, the
recognition that weak anthropocentrism is unavoidable may act as a useful political
corrective to the idea that ‘Nature is in control’: at least it reintroduces the human on
to the agenda—a necessary condition for there to be such a thing as politics.

Absolute rejection of use of nature is ludicrous –regulation of abuse is sufficient

Barry 99 –Lecturer in Politics
John Barry, Lecturer in Politics @ Keele, 1999, Rethinking Green politics, pg. 57-58
For example, by claiming part of nature as property people are obliged to treat it
differently than if it were unowned. Individuals now stand in a different relation to
that part of nature, because they now stand in a different relation to other humans.
Thus, the treatment of nature viewed purely as a human resource can be guided, at
least in part, by ethical considerations. In discussing the question of how we ought to
treat the non-human world the focus should be on the evaluation of the reasons given
for particular types of usage. Much of environmental ethics concerns itself with
establishing that treatment be premised on the independent moral status of non-
humans, rather than focusing on the primacy of the relational character of
human/nonhuman affairs. One possible reason for this proprietarian view suggested
earlier is the non-anthropocentric conviction that a human-centred environmental
ethic, resting on human interests in and valuations of nature, cannot guarantee the a
priori preservation of nature from human use that many deep ecologists and
environmental ethicists see as the mark of any 'true' environmental ethic.
Anthropocentric moral reasoning is held to be a precarious and insufficient ethical
basis for the protection of nature. If, however, we reject the notion that an
environmental ethic must be judged by whether or not it secures this a priori
protection for the natural world, and instead see the job of any environmental ethic as
regulating actual human uses of nature and identifying abuses, then
anthropocentrism per se (as opposed to particular conceptions of it) need not stand
accused of being part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is the
conviction of those who believe that non-anthropocentrism is necessary for an
environmental ethic that leads to an emphasis on the non-anthropocentric powers,
values or capacities, and which marks much of what I have called the proprietarian
strand of environmental ethics. This nonanthropocentric ethic presents us with a
picture of the world in which humans are disinterested valuers. The naturalistic
anthropocentrism of an ethic of use sees humans as 'interested and partial valuers',
and active transformers of that world. Because a relational view ultimately turns on
human interests and concerns, it is viewed as capable only of an 'ethic for the use of
the environment' as opposed to a genuine 'environmental ethic' (Regan, 1982),
defined as an ethic which gives non-anthropocentric reasons for the protection of
nature. What I wish to do in this section is to argue that an 'ethics of use' which
regulates social-environmental interaction is a sensible ethical platform upon
which actual, concrete human-nature conflicts and decisions can be resolved, and
upon which green politics can base itself.

The alternative is not politically viable – prefer the affirmative’s material

protection of the environment
Light 2 – Professor of environmental philosophy
Andrew Light, professor of environmental philosophy and director of the Environmental
Conservation Education Program, 2002, Applied Philosophy Group at New York University,
METAPHILOSOPHY, v33, n4, July, p. 441
Even if Katz and Oechsli's arguments are technically correct as a possible statement of
the implications of anthropocentrism in environmental policy and environmental
activism, the facts of the case do not bear out their worries. And we can imagine this
to be so in many other cases. Even if sound nonanthropocentric motivations can be
described for other policies or acts of environmental heroism, at best we would expect
that any motivation for any action would be mixed, especially when it is a human
performing that action. An environmental ethic that ignored this lesson would be one
that would be ill fitted to participate in policy decisions where the context always
involves an appeal to a variety of intuitions and not only to a discrete set. We must ask
ourselves eventually: What is more important, settling debates in value theory correct
or actually motivating people to act, with the commitment of someone like
Mendes, to preserve nature? The pressing timeframe of environmental problems
should at least warrant a consideration of the latter.
 Humans first
Preventing human extinction is necessary in an eco-centric framework
Baum 9 – PhD @ Penn State University
Sean Baum, PhD @ Penn State University, 2009, “Costebenefit analysis of space exploration:
Some ethical considerations,” Space Policy, Vol. 25, Science Direct
It is of note that the priority of reducing the risk of human extinction persists in forms
of CBA which value nature in an ecocentric fashion, i.e. independently of any
consideration of human interests. The basic reason is that without humanity leading
long-term survival efforts (which would most likely include space colonization), the
rest of Earth life would perish as a result of the astronomical processes described
above. This point is elaborated by futurist Bruce Tonn, who argues on ecocentric
grounds for reorienting society to focus on avoiding human extinction through both
immediate avoidance of catastrophe and long-term space colonization [40]. Tonn
dubs this process of surviving beyond Earth’s eventual demise ‘‘transcending
oblivion’’ [41]. There is thus some convergence in the recommendations of the
common anthropocentric, money-based CBA and the ecocentric CBA described here.
This convergence results from the fact that (in all likelihood) only humans are capable
of colonizing space, and thus human survival is necessary for Earth life to transcend
oblivion.

*CBA = Cost-Benefit Analysis

Concerns over humans create an a priori environmental consciousness – solves
the impact
-only focusing on anthropocentrism allows egocentrism and ethnocentrism to greatly damage
the environment
Johnson 96
Pamela C. Johnson, Development of an Ecological Conscience: Is Ecocentrism a Prerequisite?
The Academy of Management Review – peer reviewed journal, July, JSTOR
3. Anthropocentrism, especially when motivated by concerns about intergenerational
equity and justice, can be a strong foundation for the development of an ecological
conscience. If one elevates the well-being of the entire human species, now and in the
future, to the center of moral consideration, it becomes impossible to escape the
conclusion that the well-being of humans and the well-being of the ecosystems on
which we depend are inextricably linked. We have one small planet, and as a
species we are interconnected with other species in a complex set of ecological
relationships about which we have only limited understanding. It seems to me that
egocentrism and ethnocentrism are more ecologically problematic than
anthropocentrism. If we can get over the anthropocentric/ecocentric divide, we
can begin to address some more pressing issues hinted at by Hanna (1995: 797) when
he asked, for example, "What level of environmental disturbance would make it
appropriate to close a plant or shut down a business (thereby significantly stressing
and placing at risk a human community)?" Specific questions about the ethical
principles and reasoning processes we use to mediate interspecies conflicts
(particularly between "vital interests" of humans and other species) are the tough
ones. Paradigm definition is necessary but insufficient to address such issues.
Questions such as these are where the hard work of operationalizing an ethic or a
paradigm really begins.

Use of nature is moral and solves extinction

Younkins 4 – Professor @ Wheeling
Edward, Professor @ Wheeling, THE FLAWED DOCTRINE OF NATURE'S 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 man’s 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.
Environmentalists erroneously assign 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 that have 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 to some 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 exist independently of 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. Man’s 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 beings have 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, man 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. 
 Anthro inev
Embracing animal suffering as inevitable is net-better for animal welfare
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
The animal rights movement's laudable goals include, patently enough,
protecting the welfare of a few familiar animals. The movement's
methods to reach those goals include the promulgation of legislation that
penalizes the neglectful, the abusive, and the downright malicious. The movement
contributes unevenly to the ongoing public debate over what to do with and about
animals. n102 The moment the movement flounders into rights territory, it
misapprehends the police power of the state and the protection of the citizenry
and exponentially compounds problems by offending the biological understanding of
what is an animal. At that moment, the movement's methods immediately
outstrip and disserve its goals. The problem is not that the movement's analysis
in this area is somehow faulty; the problem is that there is no analysis at all.
Tort, property, contract, and ownership laws, respecting the objective
value of a smallish amount of animal life at the expense and allowance of
the destruction of many other animals, serve law, science, logic, and
"animal welfare" far better by embracing the realities and necessities of
complex animal-environmental interactions and attending to the welfare
of humans through the vehicle of law.

Human separation from nature is inevitable and good- the transition to small ag
leads to poverty and environmental destruction
Bailey 6 – Economic Philosopher
Ronald, Economic Philosopher and Science Editor for Reason Magazine, The Lingering Stench of
Malthus, http://www.reason.com/news/show/117481.html
The further good news is that the movement of humanity's burgeoning population
into the thousand of megacities foreseen that Rifkin is part of a process that
ultimately will leave more land for nature. Today cities occupy just 2 percent of the
earth's surface, but that will likely double to 4 percent over the next half century. In
order to avoid this ostensibly terrible fate Rifkin proclaims, "In the next phase of
human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the
living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our
fellow creatures." Actually, he's got it completely backwards. Humanity must not
reintegrate into nature-that way lays disaster for humanity and nature. Instead we
must make ourselves even more autonomous than we already are from her. Since
nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers,
boosting agricultural productivity is the key to the human retreat from wild nature. As
Jesse Ausubel, the director for the Program for the Human Environment at
Rockefeller University, points out: "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of
today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people
now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds
Amazonia." Similarly all of the world's industrial wood could be produced on an area
that is less than 10 percent of the world's forested area today leaving 90 percent of the
world's forests for Nature.
 Alt fails
Dubbing people “anthropocentric” because they didn’t talk about animals
makes the creation of an effective environmental movement impossible, and
isn’t accurate
Lewsi 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 Nature’s Sake—And Humanity for Humanity’s It is widely accepted that
environmental thinkers can be divided into two camps: those who favor the
preservation of nature for nature’s sake, and those who wish only to maintain the
environment as the necessary habitat of humankind (see Pepper 1989; O’Riordan
1989; W Fox 1990). In the first group stand the green radicals, while the second
supposedly consists of environmental reformers, also labeled “shallow ecologists.”
Radicals often pull no punches in assailing the members of the latter camp for
their anthropocentrism, managerialism, and gutless accommodationism—to some,
“shallow ecology” is “just a more efficient form of exploitation and oppression”
(quoted in Nash 1989:202). While this dichotomy may accurately depict some
of the major approaches of the past, it is remarkably unhelpful for devising the
kind of framework required for a truly effective environmental movement . It
incorrectly assumes that those who adopt 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 structures of representative
democracies as thereby excluding all nonhumans from the realm of moral
consideration. Yet no convincing reasons are ever provided to show why
these beliefs should necessarily be aligned in such a manner. (For an
instructive discussion of the pitfalls of the anthropocentric versus nonanthropocentric
dichotomy, see Norton 1987, chapter ir.)

Their ethic is biologically impossible

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
Those of us at the heart of the animal law movement envision a world in
which the lives and interests of all sentient beings are respected within the legal
system, where companion animals have good, loving homes for a lifetime, where wild
animals can live out their natural lives according to their instincts in an environment
that supports their needs - a world in which animals are not exploited,
terrorized, tortured or controlled to serve frivolous or greedy human
purposes. This vision guides in working toward a far more just and truly humane
society. n83  A workable definition of "sentience" or "sentient beings"
notwithstanding, one would have to ignore the last hundred and fifty years
of accumulated rigorous scientific study of how evolution by natural
selection actually works in the natural world to sincerely make such a
[*197]  plea. n84 A world "in which animals are not exploited, terrorized,
tortured or controlled to serve frivolous or greedy human purposes" n85
is an unobtainable, inherently biologically impossible world. Moreover, the world
of nature to which Tischler fervently hopes to return animals already is a world in
which animals are "exploited, terrorized, tortured or controlled" n86 to
serve the frivolous or greedy purposes of other animals, including
conspecifics and kin.

Morality fails to apply across animalia – other animals won’t 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 entire animal world must be seen to be inherently immoral
because the new "rights" will never be respected between and among
animals other than humans. n89 God 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 major division 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" n91 that make human parallels appear trivial in comparison.
Prokaryotes destroy other 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 ill-
advised laboratory technicians could only dream about, and
fundamentally alter the biotic and abiotic world in doing so. n92
Turns
 Captivity good
Attempts to free animalia does not produce a true freedom – enclosure is
simply a benign replacement for the harsh natural world
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
It is crucial to animal rights advocates' general theme that they
deliberately overlook that evolution shaped the wild with abusive, cruel,
predatory, and destructive activities through natural selection. While
observations of the natural world can certainly be ignored over the short
term, the truths they convey cannot ultimately be eluded over the long
term. It cannot be denied that animals, whether in the wild or in enclosed
environments, must live through a constant bevy of unavoidably vicious
experiences: microscopic predators erode them; parasites weaken them;
vegetation restricts them; substrates degrade them; other animals pirate
their resources; toxins invade them; hunger shadows them; their abiotic
physical environment strains them; their biotic organic environment
burdens them; and conspecifics, kin, and potential mates exploit them.
n79 Through evolutionary processes, the natural world is an environment in
which competition for resources makes life unrelentingly harsh and
terminate early. It brooks no permanent relief from pain and decay. The careless
and intentional acts of other living things, in trying to keep their own
bodies alive, are regularly the cause of each trouble encountered. n80 An
artificial enclosure such as a home, zoo, laboratory,  [*196]  or kennel, may
indeed reduce those impacts or, at worst, perhaps simply replace those
impacts with different ones. Whatever the enclosure, opening its door
and allowing the animal "to go free" does not send the animal into any
more free or favorable environment in any respect worth describing.

Removal from captivity leads to increased pain and suffering

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
The animal rights movement would rather "bowdlerize" evolution by
natural selection or nature (often unrealistically defined as animal life outside of
human influences) through what science writer Matt Ridley has called
"condescending sentimentalism" by "desperately playing up the slimmest
of clues to animal virtue ... and clutching at straws suggesting that
humankind somehow caused aberrant cruelty." n81 Animal rights
advocates work hard to discount the reduction of the natural horrors that
captivity, farming, and ranching has effected on animals. They prefer
instead to trumpet the benefits that freedom has brought to humans and
then apply the false syllogism that those benefits are readily translatable
to animals. In doing so, they mistake what life is like for an animal who is
"truly free." This in turn, threatens to expose animals to higher levels of
pain and suffering than they currently experience in captivity, on farms,
on ranches, and in our homes. n82
 Lab
Turn – laboratory use
Cohen 86 – Professor @ U of M
Carl, Professor @ UMich, http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil1200,Spr07/cohen.pdf
Humans owe to other humans a degree of moral regard that cannot be
owed to animals. Some humans take on the obligation to support and heal
others, both humans and animals, as a principal duty in their lives; the
fulfillment of that duty may require the sacrifice of many animals. If
biomedical investigators abandon the effective pursuit of their professional objectives
because they are convinced that they may not do to animals what the service of
humans requires, they will fail, objectively, to do their duty. Refusing to recognize
the moral differences among species is a sure path to calamity. (The largest
animal rights group in the country is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; its
co- director, Ingrid Newkirk, calls research using animal subjects "fascism" and
"supremacism." "Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal," she
says, "so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A
rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.") Those who claim to base
their objection to the use of animals in biomedical research on their
reckoning of the net pleasures and pains produced make a second error,
equally grave. Even if it were true--as it is surely not--that the pains of all
animate beings must be counted equally, a cogent utilitarian calculation
requires that we weigh all the consequences of the use, and of the nonuse, of
animals in laboratory research. Critics relying (however mistakenly) on animal
rights may claim to ignore the beneficial results of such research, rights
being trump cards to which interest and advantage must give way. But an
argument that is explicitly framed in terms of interest and benefit for all over the long
run must attend also to the disadvantageous consequences of not using animals in
research, and to all the achievements attained and attainable only through their use.

Turns their morality claim

Cohen 86 – Professor @ U of M
Carl, Professor @ UMich, http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil1200,Spr07/cohen.pdf
The sum of the benefits of their use is utterly beyond quantification. The
elimination of horrible disease, the increase of longevity, the avoidance of
great pain, the saving of lives, and the improvement of the quality of lives
(for humans and for animals) achieved through research using animals is
so incalculably geat that the argument of these critics, systematically
pursued, esablishes not their condusion but its reverse: to refrain from
using animals in biomedical research is, on utilitarian grounds, morally
wrong.
 VTL
Animal equality leads to no value to human life
Schmahmann and Polachek 95
Partner and Associate in Legal Firm, 22 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 747
Singer is right, of course, that once one dismisses Hebrew thought; n22 the teachings
of Jesus; n23 the views of St. Aquinas, St. Francis, Renaissance writers, and Darwin;
n24 and an entire "ideology whose history we have traced back to the Bible and the
ancient Greeks" n25 -- in short, once one dismisses innate human
characteristics, the ability to express reason, to recognize moral
principles, to make subtle distinctions, and to intellectualize -- there is no
way to support the view that humans possess rights but animals do not.
In the end, however, it is the aggregate of these characteristics that does
render humans fundamentally, importantly, and unbridgeably different
from animals, even though it is also beyond question that in individual
instances -- for example, in the case of vegetative individuals -- some animals
may indeed have higher cognitive skills than some humans. To argue on
that basis alone, however, that human institutions are morally flawed
because they rest on assumptions regarding the aggregate of human
abilities, needs, and actions is to deny such institutions the capacity to
draw any distinctions at all. Consider the consequences of a theory which
does not distinguish between animal life and human life for purposes of
identifying and enforcing legal rights. Every individual member of every species
would have recognized claims against human beings and the state, and perhaps other
animals as well. As the concept of rights expanded to include the "claims" of
all living creatures, the concept would lose much of its force, and human
rights would suffer as a consequence. Long before Singer wrote Animal
Liberation, one philosopher wrote: If it is once observed that there is no
difference in principle between the case of dogs, cats, or horses, or stags,
foxes, and hares, and that of tsetse-flies or tapeworms or the bacteria in our own
blood-stream, the conclusion likely to be drawn is that there is so much
wrong that we cannot help doing to the brute creation that it is best not to
trouble ourselves about it any more at all. The ultimate sufferers are
likely to be our fellow men, because the final conclusion is likely to be, not
that we ought to treat the  [*753]  brutes like human beings, but that there
is no good reason why we should not treat human beings like brutes.
Extension of this principle leads straight to Belsen and Buchenwald,
Dachau and Auschwitz, where the German and the Jew or Pole only took
the place of the human being and the Colorado beetle. n26
 Veg
TURN – the alternative leads to more animal death – eating animals is the most
ethical thing to do
Pollan 6 – Professor @ Berkeley
“An Animal’s Place,” 11-10, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9500efd7153ef933a25752c1a9649c8b63&pagewanted=6.
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 grass into
protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.  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 manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that
you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and
support local food production. 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 of part of our identity -- our own animality.  Surely this is one of the
odder paradoxes of 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 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. 
Coercion
 Turns
Crunch is coming – the negative’s disdain for “coercion” makes extinction
inevitable
Hardin 2k
Garrett, Ecologist, “the Ostrich Factor” June 7
http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/revs/nf_ostrich_factor.html
For emotional people, lay or lawyerish, the word coercion has, as the political
scientist William Ophuls admits, "a nasty fascist ring to it." But Ophuls is not
satisfied with this condemnation. some qualification is needed, because "political
coercion in some form is inevitable." and the act "is an inextricable part of
politics, and the problem is how best to tame it and bend it to the common
interest." Yet probably not one person in a hundred has realized that coercion is
inescapable. [William Ophuls has just written a book entitled Requiem for Modern
Politics, ($22). This book is a sequel to the out-of-print Ecology of and the Politics of
Scarcity]. In the Introduction to the latest review by Ophuls, he quotes Robert Kaplan
who wrote: "It is time to understand the 'environment for what it is: the national
security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact
of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion,
water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical,
overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh -- developments that
will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts -- will be the
core foreign [policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate,
arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold
War." [For mote information see The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of
the 21st Century, ($12)]. The effect of scale is, of course, an important thread that
runs through the tapestry of change. A changes that is possible with a small number of
participating citizens may be difficult or impossible with a larger number. All
persuasion takes place through coercion. The persuading act may be as gentle
as a sweet young thing's "Pretty please!" or as savage as an official's lash in Singapore,
but the object of attention is offered a choice. Fear of disapproval is the major force
that keeps a society intact: fear of God, fear of the police, and fear of the judgment of
neighbors. Intuitively, it should be obvious that the ability to escape society's
punishment is directly related to the density of the community's population. To
insist on unanimous agreement would be to make all forms of government
impossible. The formula for a working society of our sort is quite simple:
Mutual coercion mutually agreed upon. To condemn the coercion of the individual by
the group is to reject democracy. Realists who, abandoning the ostrich stance,
rudely mention diseconomies of scale are called pessimists. Tragically, in the short
run, economic rewards favor those who believe in the illusion of perpetual growth.
The assumption that passes the ecological test for a default position is this: The
maximum is not the optimum. Accepting the fact that the world available to human
beings is a limited one will be one of the most difficult tasks ever tackled by our
species. The intermediate costs will be high; the ultimate reward will be
survival itself. Persuasion plus legal punishment can accomplish a great
deal if both approaches are well designed. Neither alone is enough. Propaganda in
favor of reducing fertility must be accompanied by repressive legal
measures. (There is much room for inventiveness here.) Individuals need to
willingly give up some of the control of their fertility in order to benefit from an
improvement in the prospects of the community--and to improve the prospects of
their children's future.

The crunch makes worse forms of totalitarianism inevitable –

Ophuls 92 – Professor of Political Science @ NU
William, Professor of Political Science @ Northwestern, Politics of Scarcity Revisited
Other visions of the minimal, frugal steady state are possible, but the foregoing should
suggest that feelings of despair and impotence are not appropriate responses to the
crisis of ecological scarcity. True, the transition to any conceivable form of steady-
state society is likely to be wracking and painful, but some measure of destruction
is a precondition of rebirth, and the industrial era was a necessary but in many
respects ugly and disagreeable phase in human history that we should
rejoice to put behind us. Moreover, if we act wisely and soon, the transition
need not involve unbearable sacrifices or frightful turmoil. Indeed, we are
confronted not with the end of the world (although it will surely be the end of the
world as we have known it) but with an unparalleled opportunity to share in
the creation of a new and potentially higher, more humane form of post-
industrial civilization. But we must not delay, for unless we begin soon, an
ugly and desperate transition to tyrannical version of the steady state may
become almost inevitable.

The impact is oppression, war and slavery

Ophuls 92 – Professor of Political Science @ NU
William, Professor of Political Science @ Northwestern, Politics of Scarcity Revisited
It was suggested in the Introduction that scarcity is the source of original political sin:
Resources that are scanter than human wants have to be allocated by
governments, for naked conflict would result otherwise. In the words of the
philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651, p.107), human life in an anarchic
“state of nature” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and shot.” To prevent the
perpetual struggle for power in a war of all against all there must be a civil
authority capable of keeping the peace by regulating property and other scarce
goods. Scarcity thus makes politics inescapable. Presumable, the
establishment of a truly just civil authority would eliminate all the political problems
that arise from scarcity. With all assured of a fair share of goods, social harmony
would replace strife, and people would enjoy long and happy lives of peaceful
cooperation. Unfortunately, this has never happened. Although they have certainly
mitigated some of the worst aspects of the anarchistic state of nature (especially the
total insecurity that prevails in a war of all against all). civilized policies have always
institutionalized a large measure of inequality, oppression, and conflict. Thus, in
addition to being the source of original political sin, scarcity is also the root of
political evil. The reason is quite simple. For most of recorded history,
societies have existed at the ecological margin or very close to it. An equal
division of income and wealth therefore, would condemn all to a life of shared
poverty. Not unnaturally, the tendency has been for political institutions to further
impoverish the masses by a fractional amount in order to create the surplus that
enables a small elite to enjoy more than its share of fruits of civilized life. Indeed, until
recently energy has been so scare that serfdom and slavery have been the
norm – justifiably so, says Aristotle in his Politics, for otherwise genuine civilization
would be impossible. Except for a few relatively brief periods when for some
reason the burden of scarcity was temporarily lifted, inequality, oppression,
and conflict have been very prominent features of political life, merely
waxing and waning slightly in response to the character of the rulers and
ephemeral factors.

The call for individual subjectivity papers over the importance of future
generations – makes environmental devastation the norm
--majority approval will never willingly limit growth and consumption
Stein 98
Stein (Tine, Constellations, Vol 4, No. 3, 1998) 1998
To be able to see the difficulties that emerge from this mechanism, one must first
follow some basic assumptions that have been formulated by the economic theory of
democracy.23 In general, these assumptions have to do with human behavior and, in
particular, with the behavior of politicians and the electorate. It is assumed that
individuals behave like self-interested rational actors; they act rationally and with a
present preference in the utility function, meaning they act myopically within the
short term. People who act myopically will judge today’s loss as more important than
tomorrow’s profit and vice versa; for them today’s profit is more important than a
future loss. When this problem is transferred to the sphere of democratic politics, the
voting behavior of the electorate is more easily understood. Voters will choose
those options which promise to maximize the health and well-being of the
people, and also for those that avoid any sacrifices. If the representatives wish
to hold their political power or to get political power, they must fulfil the voter’s
expectations.24 To avoid misunderstandings, it must be said that it is not impossible
for unpopular policies to be carried out. Policies that impose costs and demand
sacrifices, however, can only be successful in a democracy when a sufficient number
of voters is at the same time compensated.25
In order to reduce those gases that are dangerous to the atmosphere, the high
levels of consumption must be reduced and sacrifices such as abstaining from
luxurious fonns of living must be made. In other words, people must alter their
life-styles. Or even more simply put: we must bid the affluent society
farewell. The problem, however, is that there would be almost no material
compensation for people if they were to sacrifice their luxurious way of
living. Moreover, those who benefit from a radical ecological policy with regard to
the climate problem are the future generations. But future generations are not
part of the electorate. Thus one can assume that politicians risk losing their power
should they try to weaken those policies that benefit the present. Producing policies
that are mainly beneficial in the long run is a form of electoral suicide. If the
government tries to effect the steps required to form a firm ecological
policy, the opposition will criticize it and promise the opposing policy, for
which the majority will vote. Therefore, one can say that in a competitive
democracy the scope of action is framed by the limits of majority
approval.26 And as long as the majority of the electorate does not take responsibility
for the consequences of its action in the long run, the less likely it is that politicians
will pass and effect laws that alter those problems which are leading to the ecological
crisis.27

Individual autonomy ruins the environment – coercion solves

Ophuls ‘92 (William, Professor of Political Science @ Northwestern, Politics of Scarcity
Revisited)
It therefore appears that if under conditions of ecological scarcity
individuals rationally pursue their material self-interest, unrestrained by
a common authority that upholds the common interest, the eventual
result is bound to be common environmental ruin. In that case, we must
have political institutions that preserve the ecological common good from
destruction by unrestrained human acts. The problem that the
environmental crisis forces us to confront is, in fact, at the core of political
philosophy: how to protect or advance the interests of the collectivity
when the individuals who make it up (or enough of them to create a
problem) behave (or are impelled to behave) in a selfish, greedy and
quarrelsome fashion. The only solution is a sufficient measure of coercion.
According to Hobbes, a certain minimum level of ecological order or
peace must be established; according to Rousseau, a certain minimum
level of ecological virtue must be imposed by our political institutions. It
hardly needed to be said that these conclusions about the tragedy of the
commons radically challenge fundamental American and Western values.
Under conditions of ecological scarcity, the individuals, possessing an
inalienable right to pursue happiness as they define it and exercising their liberty
in a basically laissez-faire system will inevitable produce the ruin of the
commons. Thus the individualistic basis of society, the concept of inalienable
rights, the purely self-defined pursuit of happiness, liberty as maximum freedom of
action, and the laissez-faire principle itself all become problematic. All require
major modification of perhaps even abandonment if we wish to aver
inexorable environmental degradation and eventual extinction as a
civilization. Certainly democracy as we know it cannot conceivably
survive.
Ableism
 Rhetoric
Rhetoric isn’t important – the k overfocuses on disability – the inevitability of
linguistic slip ups makes this more confusing
Rose '04 Damon Rose "Don't call me handicapped!"Editor of BBC disability website Ouch!
Monday, 4 October, 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3708576.stm
Due to popular rubbishing of what is referred to as "political correctness', many disabled
commentators now publicly say they don't care how people refer to them . But privately they fume if
someone calls them "handicapped" or "brave". Last year Ouch! ran a poll to try and determine what really are the most vilified words
and expressions around disability. Unsurprisingly "retard" came top as the most offensive followed by "spastic".When breaking down
the figures though, it was interesting to see that disabled people had voted "special" as fifth most offensive. "Special service", "special
school" and "special needs" are phrases used in an attempt to be positive about disability. But in the same way women don't like being
elevated to "lady", disabled people find it patronising to be lifted to the status of special. It differentiates them from normal, but in a
saccharine manner. Disabled people are different, but not better or more important. Besides , putting
them on a pedestal does not appear to be shifting attitudes or solving the appalling disability
unemployment situation. Clearly, language in this field is a hotch-potch of confusion.

Language is reversible – The introduction of injurious language

simultaneously introduces the prospect of contestation – Their erasure avoids
the prospect of contestation
Butler 97 Judith Butler, 1997, EXCITABLE SPEECH- politics of speech, ,KL
One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and
demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a name, one is
also, paradaoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that
exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it
hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then
the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter
the offensive call. When the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one in injures.
 Perm
Rejection of policymaking dooms the affirmative- disrupting the inequitable
social constructions of people with disabilities is insufficient and leaves the
disabled people excluded. Only focusing on practical politics can produce
empowerment for the disabled while disrupting oppressive norms
Dewsbury et al 2k4
(Guy, Lancaster Univ, Karen Clarke, Lancaster Univ, Dave Randalll, Manchester Metropolitan
Univ, Mark Rouncefield Lancaster, Ian Sommerville, Lancaster, The anti-social model of
disability, Disability & Society, 19.2 March)
We do not share all these concerns as they apply to the social model of disability, for we are not menaced by
constructionism, nor do we wish to promote one variety of truth claim over another. We are concerned specifically with how this
helps. The constructionist focus, we feel, has altered our perspective on expertise such that where we had previously
unquestioningly accepted the professional expertise of medical practitioners, we now
equally unquestioningly accept the expertise of the sociologist who wishes to undermine it.
The social constructionist, that is, provides professional explanation by revealing the hidden
nature of the social world in and through a number of typical steps. These include: 1. Showing
that definitions of a given concept are shifting, especially historically. Many social constructionist studies draw attention
to the ways in which explanations that were accepted as matters of fact were embedded in the ideologies or discourses of the time and
can now be clearly seen as absurd or wrong. 2. Deriving from this that ‘things could be otherwise’ insofar as
new and ‘constructionist’ models can be used contrastively with models that have preceded them, including models that still have a
currency. 3. Arguing that in some way this challenges the ‘social reality’ of the concept in question. 4.
Suggesting that this challenge to the social reality of any given social fact has important
political consequences and that the social constructionist is pivotal in the realization of these consequences. We think
there may be problems here, mainly with steps 3 and 4. As Hacking (1999) has convincingly shown the validity and
importance of challenges to social reality depend very much on what kind of challenge they are. Equally, we will suggest that the
apparent political importance of the constructionist position is largely rhetorical . This is not to
understate its importance, for rhetoric is a powerful force, but it does not assist us with our ‘what to do next’
problem. In explicating the various ways in which disability is a social construct the Social Model highlights the social features of
what, on first consideration, might appear as a purely physical problem. As Humphrey argues: ‘… the social model harbours a number
of virtues in redefining disability in terms of a disabling environment, repositioning disabled people as citizens with rights, and
reconfiguring the responsibilities for creating, sustaining and overcoming disablism’ (Humphrey, 2000, p. 63). Again, there are self-
evident, political, advantages in adopting this position. As Hacking suggests, ‘it can still be liberating suddenly to
realize that something is constructed and is not part of the nature of things , of people, or human
society’ (Hacking, 1999, p. 35). However, the metaphor has grown tired, if not tiresome, and in the
matter of what we call ‘practical politics’, that is the quite ordinary business of making-do,
managing, coping (and obviously everyone ‘makes do’, not just disabled people) that might inform the design-
related questions we want to ask, it is for the most part empty. In order to pursue this theme, we need
to examine the sense in which the ‘social model’ can be seen as ‘radical’ , for as with so many
similar avowals there is less to this than meets the eye . Despite the supposedly ‘radical’
nature and claims of the social model of disability it clearly engages in the ordinary business
of sociology and, as Button (1991) suggests, any radical claims are readily absorbed into everyday
sociological debate. That is, radical political commitments are not radical sociologies —they
are, from within a sociological perspective, unremarkable. Radical causes are the very stuff of conventional sociology,
conducted along conventional lines. Even, for example, the argument that some current sociological
approaches propagate a ‘disablist’ view of society that legitimates the treatment of disabled
people, whilst simultaneously obscuring their real position within society is but a pale
imitation of earlier, similar, Feminist and Marxist arguments. The application of the idea
may be new but the idea itself, and the argument presented, is not.
Alt
 Turn
Your privileging of the heterogeneity of the disability community backslides in
factionalism as identity boundaries lead to the exclusion of certain disabilities
as non-disabled based on under-examined power dynamics. The inability to
interrogate the hierarchy of oppression within the disabled community by
reducing disability oppression to social forces driven by the non-disabled
ensures that assistance will only perpetuate the marginalization of disabled
populations
Humphrey, 2k
(Jill C. Faculty of applied social science @ the Open University, Researching disability politics,
or, some problems with the social model in practice, Disability & Society 15.1)
The medical model posited an essentialist conception of impairment, elaborated complex typologies of diagnoses and treatments, and erased the experiences of disabled people
Disabled people are
from the medical map. The social model sequesters impairment from disability and vests control of the latter in disabled people themselves.

ipso facto in a privileged ontological and epistemological position in relation to disability ,

insofar as they know when they encounter disabling societal barriers, and it is their experiential knowledges which should guide all debates on why society is disabling and how to
erase disablism from the social map. The proliferation of groups run by and for disabled people—in the service of practical and social support, as well as cultural and political
pursuits—suggests that they are rapidly consolidating themselves into an ethnos. This is a term used by Anthias & Yuval-Davis (1992) to denote a distinct people with a distinct
culture, although this should be understood in social constructionist, rather than essentialist terms—a collectivity is not a pre-given essence, but rather only exists to the extent that
The boundaries of any
its members demarcate criteria of inclusion and exclusion as part of their reflexive appropriation of their identity and heritage.

given community are in this sense 'artificial' constructs, and therefore contestable and
changeable. The disability community has already made enormous efforts in recognising its
own heterogeneity and in accommodating to those with multiple identities—hence, the sub-groups for disabled black and/or Asian people (e.g. Priestley, 1995)
and those for disabled gay and/or lesbian people (e.g. Shakespeare et al.t 1996). This is a positive development in terms of understanding the multifaceted nature of identities and
It may become problematic if such
oppressions (see Vernon, 1999), and the variegated impacts of policies and practices (see Drake, 1999).

sub-groups splinter apart from the main movement(s) which gave birth to them, or if they
prioritise one aspect of their identity or oppression above another , as indicated by Vernon (1999). However,
there is another boundary problem which is arguably more germane to the disability
community, since it pertains to the boundaries of disability itself . From the 'inside', there are
deaf people who are classified as disabled in legislation and by society, but who repudiate
the disabled identity on the grounds that they constitute a distinct linguistic and cultural
minority (e.g. Harris, 1995). There are also people who are coming to see themselves as disabled in
spite of not being recognised as disabled in official or traditional discourses —hence, the thought-provoking
question from Cooper (1997) 'Can a fat woman call herself disabled? ' There is also a potentially vast, but largely

untapped liminal space inhabited by people who have journeyed from a disabled to a non-
disabled identity and sometimes back again, and by those whose disabilities are hidden from
the gaze of others (cf. French, 1993; Druckett, 1998). The UNISON group is grounded upon the principle that anyone who self-defines as
disabled is disabled and is therefore eligible to join the disabled members group. In theory, this seems to be a self-evident truism; in practice, it
may well 'work' for many people; to articulate an alternative maxim would be inconceivable and, I would argue, undesirable.
Nevertheless, during the course of the research project I was led, unexpectedly, to problematise this maxim. First, it transpires
that there is an element of compulsion in adopting a disabled identity , which may be one aspect of what
Shakespeare (1997) has dubbed the ' "Maoism" in the Movement'. Many members of the UNISON group refuse to accept the self-

definitions of deaf members as 'deaf not disabled' , insisting that they are deaf and disabled, or indeed that they are first and foremost
disabled, and only secondarily deaf. Moreover, one interviewee who worked in a voluntary agency run by and for disabled people claimed that their policy was to refer to all
service-users as disabled people, regardless of the fact that many service-users repudiated this label. Whilst some did not regard themselves as 'disabled', others continued to use
The danger
'inappropriate' terminology to refer to their impairments, such as 'handicapped', and here the social model was deployed to over-ride self-definitions.

here is that the political principles of more powerful disabled actors can be prioritised over
the personal perceptions of less powerful disabled actors until the principle of self-definition
lapses into self-contradiction: DW [W]e work with a lot of disabled people who are not interested in the
social model or anything like that. What we've said is we won't use the language they've asked us to use about them—we'll just call them their
name—it's not that difficult—you don't have to refer to that language necessarily, because you have to hold on to your principles as well. Second, we can witness
the silencing of impairments, as impairment is relegated to a clandestine and privatised
space, an effect which Hughes & Paterson (1997) have attributed to the social model, and its dualism between
impairment and disability. Whilst some interviewees were explicit about their impairments, these were people with apparent impairments in any event.
One interlocutor enshrouded her impairments in layers of secrecy so that after 2 hours of otherwise frank and detailed dialogues I was still bemused as to which impairments she
had experienced. Whilst I was led to believe that different impairments had impacted differently upon her career in workplaces, trade unions and civil rights politics, the discursive
absence around impairments in their specificity prevented me from developing an accurate or adequate understanding of her narrative: JCH: I find it interesting that you had, like,
an invisible impairment that became, kind of, visible— DW: No, that was a different thing. JCH: Oh, that was a different thing—right. W: So then I was diagnosed as having
something completely different. I've still got this other things but at the moment it's not so visible. (Emphases added.) At the time, my concerns that explicit interrogations could
become oppressive intrusions meant that I accepted the veil of ignorance and castigated myself for my curiosity. Subsequently, I discovered that it was not just 'outsiders' who
could be perplexed by these 'impairments with no name'. A blind man discussed his frustration with other disability activists who challenged his inquiries as to the nature of their
impairments—his standard reply was that it was an access issue not only for him, in virtue of his blindness, but also for them, in virtue of his role as a service-provider and access
advisor. At the same time, this interviewee exhibited a more general awareness that both disability politics and disability theory had been dominated by people with particular
It's very convenient for people with apparent disabilities or impairments
disability identities like his own: DM:

to operate a social model which says. 'We don't want to discuss things in terms of
'impairments'. Because these people have got priority anyway, and impairment-related
provision [in UNISONJ ... The trouble with it [the social model] is that it's very difficult ... for people
with learning difficulties or other conditions ... which are not catered for ... to raise their
concerns as things which need dealing with on a service level, without feeling that they're
breaking the law and talking about impairments. Third, the right to self-define as disabled has as
its logical corollary the duty to accept others' self-definitions, but suspicions that people are
not who they claim to be circulate around the disabled community in UNISON. Casting aspersions upon the
purported disability of other group members in veiled or outright manners, with or without names attached, arose spontaneously during interviews. In my naivete, I neither
comprehended nor challenged this at the time, but from re-reading and de-coding interview transcripts, I can discern three themes as follows: a self-defined disabled person may be
suspected of not being disabled when they harbour a non-apparent impairment, and/or express views which diverge from the prevailing consensus, and/or simultaneously belong to
These themes, in turn, suggest the operation of hierarchies of impairments,
one of the other self-organised groups.

orthodoxies and oppressions, respectively. This is a strange juncture, where the propensity to treat
only tangible impairments as evidence of a bona fide disability identity clearly marginalises
those with non-apparent impairments, such as learning or mental health ones, whilst the
reluctance or refusal to differentiate between impairments by identifying them bolsters up
the claims by people with apparent impairments that they represent all disabled people . The
twist in the tale is that when other disabled people do become visible and audible in interrogating the

hierarchy of impairments. they may find themselves once again marginalised as the other
hierarchies of orthodoxies and oppressions come into play. For one thing, people with learning or
mental health difficulties may speak with a different voice, given the qualitatively different
stigmata attached to different impairments and given the fact that the social model has been
developed by those with physical impairments, so that their contributions may be
interpreted as deviating from prevailing orthodoxies. For another, people who belong to another
oppressed group may be all too visible in their difference, but their blackness or gayness
may be construed as detracting from their contributions as disability activists, given the
propensities of each group to prioritise its own specific identification-discrimination nexus .
The following interviewee testifies to some of these dynamics: DM: People have the right to self-define. But what we've never said is who has got the right to challenge. So if
somebody says 'I'm a disabled person; I've come to this disability group' I don't know how you can deal with your suspicion that they're not. In fact you can't deal with it. And you
there are lots of people who don't
have to ask yourself why you want to deal with it ... [names mentionedj ... But I'm absolutely convinced that

come to groups because they're frightened that they don't look disabled enough. Indeed, this
hierarchy of impairments and this 'policing' of the disability identity does act to exclude
UNISON members who believe that they experience the disabling effects of an impairment, but

who suspect that they would not 'count' as disabled people according to the prevailing
criteria in the disabled members' group. Evidence for this emerged during a detailed case-study of the lesbian and gay group, and two
examples should suffice. The first example is of a lesbian who had been dyslexic since childhood, who had experienced a range of discriminations in education, employment and
everyday life, and who was registered as disabled with the Department of Employment. She sought to engage in her local disabled members' group, but disengaged after the first
meeting: DL: I'm also disabled with an invisible disability, dyslexia ... I have to educate people about dyslexia as well ... An invisible disability is very difficult for people to cope
with—you have to tell each new person, and then they each interpret it differently, and then they can forget ... And it's a fluid disability as well—it's manageable sometimes and
unmanageable other times ... and people can't deal with that either ...' JCH: Did you ever go to the disabled members' group? DL: I did. And I got stared at when I walked in. By
people who really should know better. JCH: Sorry. Why did you get stared at? This is not obvious to me! DL: Because I didn't look like I was disabled. The second example is,
perhaps paradoxically, someone whose impairment was visible, but who dared not join the disabled members' group on the grounds that it was not 'severe' enough to be taken
seriously by other group members. The impairment in question was skin allergies over her entire body, including facial disfigurement which is recognised under the Disability
Discrimination Act 1995, as one of its few token gestures towards the social model of disability (Hqual Opportunities Review, 1996). Nevertheless, this interviewee's self-
definition as disabled was confounded and then crushed by her convictions that disability activists would define her as non-disabled: DL: 'I get quite bitter sometimes. I don't think
I'm disabled, because I don't think that what I've got prevents me from functioning, or society doesn't prevent me from functioning. But it probably does ... And my skin tissue
scars very easily, and I've got visible marks on my face, and people do look, and I do feel conscious of it, and I'm made to feel conscious of it. But I would feel like I was—what's
the word?—an impostor if I attended a disability caucus for those reasons. I feel that the disability caucus excludes people like that ... Nobody takes things like that into account.
JCH: The crazy thing is, that until people like you get involved in the disability movement in the union, then they won't take things like that into account! But that does put a big
burden on you—or on people in your position—to come out and say 'Hey! We're here too! What about us?' DL: But I feel like mine is a minimal complication. Or whether I'm

made to feel that way ...? The argument here is that the social model as operationalised within the UNISON group has both reified
the disability identity and reduced it to particular kinds of impairments—physical,
immutable, tangible and 'severe' ones—in a way which can deter many people from
adopting a disabled identity and participating in a disability community. Whilst this indicates that the social
model may harbour its own set of indigenous essentialisms and exclusions, the solution is not to capitulate to the other-imposed essentialisms and exclusions of the medical model,
but rather to work towards a more inclusive model. This will entail a more welcoming stance towards all those who self-define as disabled whatever their impairment might be and
towards those who experience impairments and who want to combat discriminations, but who do not choose to identify as 'disabled' for whatever reason. It is time for people to
ask 'What do we mean by "our" community? Are its building-blocks safe or its boundaries sensible?' There may be merit in reflecting upon Young's (1990a) warning that
communities are often fabricated out of the yearning to be among similar-and-symmetrical
selves, to the point where members respond to alterity by expelling it beyond their border .
Clearly, a self-perpetuating spiral can be set in motion, whereby the tighter the boundaries are

drawn, the more those included will normalise their sameness and exclude others , the more
the excluded will become estranged others, and the less the community will be informed by
experiences of and reflection upon diversity, etc. This should not be misread—the UNISON group, like many other disabled people's
organisations, is at least as democratic as any other social or political group in its constitution, and it is at least as diverse as any other in respecting multiple identities.
Paradoxically, some disabled people's organisations may have expended more energies in reaching out to black and gay people who harbour specific impairments than in reaching
'Who is to "count" as a member
out to differently disabled people whatever their other oppressions. Of course, we must do both. But the question

of the disability community?' is not as strange as it may sound and may even be the Achilles
heel of disability politics to date.
 Solvency
Alt doesn’t solve- exposing disability oppression does not lead to social change,
non-disabled won’t surrender power
Donoghue, 2k3
(Christopher, Fordham University, Challenging the authority of the medical definition of
disability: an analysis of the resistance to the social constructionist paradigm, Disability &
Society 18.2)
In an effort to debunk the entrenched authority of the medical model, a social
constructionist paradigm has been adopted by many disability theorists and activists. They have suggested that
society normally creates a negative social identity for people with disabilities (Gergen, 1985; Fine & Asch, 1988; Scotch, 1988;
Brzuzy, 1997). Through the construction of this identity, which is typically characterised by
deviant or abnormal behaviour, the non-disabled majority is granted a legitimate means to
exclude and isolate people with disabilities. As removed members of society, their contributions are often
discredited and their successes are treated as aberrations. Likewise, the expectations of people with disabilities are chronically low,
and there is an ever-present suggestion that their lives are not necessarily worth living. This identity has been argued to derive from
the medical model, which defines a disability as a deficiency that restricts one’s ability to perform normal life activities. By adopting
the social constructionist viewpoint, theorists and activists have contended that society has created disability by choosing not to
remove structural constraints that would enable more people to participate and gain access to social resources. The social
constructionist approach was an effective ideological rejoinder to the established medical
model. Yet the question of how to convince the non-disabled majority that society has disabled certain individuals has not been
adequately resolved. The activists attempted to adopt the social constructionist theory as a basis for a minority group model of
disability. They would use this model to support a plea for action to people with disabilities as a
mechanism to overcome the oppression being inflicted upon them by the non-disabled
majority. While it is clear that such a transformation of the definition of disability among academics and disability activists has
clearly taken hold, the disability movement appears to have achieved only limited success in
changing the views of the non-disabled majority. By accepting the reward of civil rights protection without
insisting that the medical model be publicly dismantled, the hopes of the disability activists to change the views of the broader public
may have been sacrificed. The willingness to make this concession may have stemmed from the belief among social
constructionist theorists that society will change its perception of disability if it is merely
demonstrated that the prior notion has been made unjustly. From a structural point of view, it would
seem to take much more to convince a dominant group in society that it needs to
redistribute power and access to its treasured resources. The more desirable arrangement
to the non-disabled majority is one that maintains the superiority of people with ‘normal’
abilities. As a result, the disabled are typically described as dysfunctional and are often
perceived to be incapable of understanding the world in the same way that ‘normal’ people
do. Although social constructionists argue that such judgements regarding how people should be able to think or act are
subjective notions that stem from dominant social ideologies, they may be said to underestimate the extent to which
those ideologies are created and legitimated by the non-disabled majority because they best
serve their interests.
 Env securitization
Environmental securitization is necessary to accurately represent the link
between climate and conflict
Mazo 10 – PhD in Paleoclimatology from UCLA
Jeffrey Mazo, Managing Editor, Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and
Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, 3-2010, “Climate
Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it,” pg. 12-13
The expected consequences of climate change include rising sea levels and population
displacement, increasing severity of typhoons and hurricanes, droughts, floods,
disruption of water resources, extinctions and other ecological disruptions, wild- fires,
severe disease outbreaks, and declining crop yields and food stocks. Combining the
historical precedents with current thinking on state stability, internal conflict and
state failure suggests that adaptive capacity is the most important factor in avoiding
climate-related instability. Specific global and regional climate projections for the
next three decades, in light of other drivers of instability and state failure, help
identify regions and countries which will see an increased risk from climate change.
They are not necessarily the most fragile states, nor those which face the greatest
physical effects of climate change. The global security threat posed by fragile and
failing states is well known. It is in the interest of the world’s more afflu- ent
countries to take measures both to reduce the degree of global warming and climate
change and to cushion the impact in those parts of the world where climate change
will increase that threat. Neither course of action will be cheap, but inaction will be
costlier. Efficient targeting of the right kind of assistance where it is most needed is
one way of reducing the cost, and understanding how and why different societies
respond to climate change is one way of making that possible.

Climate and security are linked – Darfur proves environmental concerns were
central
Mazo 10 – PhD in Paleoclimatology from UCLA
Jeffrey Mazo, Managing Editor, Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and
Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, 3-2010, “Climate
Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it,” pg. 84-85
A contrasting illustration is provided by UNEP’s analysis of conflict and the
environment in the Sudan. In this case, the authors are primarily interested in the
specific environmental aspects of recovery, reconstruction and development, and they
explicitly exclude other factors to focus on the environmental dimensions of conflict.
43 Like de Waal, they note that environmental problems affecting pasture and
farmland occur throughout Sudan and are ‘clearly and strongly linked to conflict in a
minority of cases and regions only’, but that nevertheless ‘there is substantial
evidence of a strong link between the recent occurrence of local conflict and
environmental degradation ... in the drier parts of Sudan’. 44 Like de Waal, they
discuss the breakdown of traditional systems of mediation and dispute resolution
after 1970 and the influx of small arms into the region, ‘with the unfortunate result
that local conflicts today are both much more violent and more difficult to contain
and mediate’. 45 Although they also recognise that land degradation ‘does not appear
to be the dominant causative factor in local conflicts’, they conclude that: There is a
very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur.
Northern Darfur – where exponential population growth and related environmental
stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by
political, tribal or ethnic differences – can be considered a tragic example of the social
breakdown that can result from ecological collapse. Long-term peace in the region
will not be possible unless these underlying and closely linked environmental and
livelihood issues are resolved.
Generic turns of K impacts
 Biod
Biodiversity collapse solves war
Deudney 91 - Hewlett Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at the Center for Energy and
Environmental Studies, Princeton
Daniel, “Environment and security: Muddled thinking,” Book
Even if environmental degradation were to destroy the basic social and economic
fabric of a country or region, the impact on international order may not be very great.
Among the first casualties in such a country would be the capacity to wage war . The
poor and wretched of the earth may be able to deny an outside aggressor an easy
conquest, but they are themselves a minimal threat to other states. Contemporary
offensive military operations require complex organizational skills. Specialized
industrial products, and surplus wealth.
 Deforestation
Deforestation is key to food production, economic growth, and resources
Fiset 7 – MD
Nathalie Fiset, M.D., “Benefits of Deforestation” March 2007. http://ezinearticles.com/?
Benefits-of-Deforestation&id=504455)
Whenever people talk about deforestation, usually the things that spring to mind are
negative thoughts brought on mostly by media hypes and environmentalist drives.
People think about global warming, depletion of natural resources, and the casual
extinction of indigenous fauna and flora. Yet people don't seem to realize that there are
actually quite a few benefits of deforestation. One of the easiest benefits of deforestation
to spot are the economic ones. Lumber products are one of the most staple constructive
materials in human society. Whether it's raw lumber used for making tables and houses,
or paper and other wood by-products, we simply cannot live without the use of lumber.
Like steel and stone, wood is one of the most basic natural resources, and unlike steel
and stone, it is renewable simply by growing more trees. The only real trick to
balancing it's consumption is to grow more trees to replace the ones taken. On a
similarly related note, keep in mind that a lot of jobs revolve around the use of lumber.
Wood cutters aside, there are those who work in processing plants to make glue from wood
sap, process pulp into paper, and others. This is another benefit of deforestation; it opens more
job opportunities for people who would otherwise be unemployed. These job
opportunities are more than simply a humanitarian concept; society at large would
suffer if all of the people working in the wood industry were to suddenly find themselves
jobless. This benefit of deforestation not only covers the people who cut down trees and
process them, but also extends to the people who "clean up" after them. For every patch of
forest cut down, arable land becomes available for farmers, or can be used as an area to
place urban living sites like apartments, houses, and buildings. The number of people
employed by such a construction project are many and varied. Or, if the
city/government mandates replanting trees to replace the lost ones, then jobs are also
provided for those people who do the seeding after a patch of forest is stripped.
Thinking about it, the cleared areas are places which provide a lot of potential for growth,
and this is yet another benefit of deforestation. As stated above, arable land is valuable, and
the act of deforestation to clear a place for farm land provides a much needed additional food
source for man. More often than not, the soil in a forest is much richer than that of
regular farm lands because of the wide variety of life it supports. This new land area
grants a much needed place to grow a food supply to deal with the planet's steadily
expanding population of humanity. Then, of course, there is the fact that these cleared
areas may be razed for urban renewal. Given our burgeoning population growth,
additional living areas made on cleared forest land is another benefit of deforestation. These
places can be converted into more than just housing areas. Buildings which can house
offices for work, or factories to produce clothing and other essential items, or even
research facilities for things like new medical or technological advances can be placed
in these deforested areas. Lastly, another benefit of deforestation to consider is the access it
provides to other natural resources that may lay within the forest's land area. Some places
with heavy forests are home to iron ore, mineral, and even oil deposits which can be used for
man's needs. These natural resources would otherwise lay dormant and untapped unless
people access them. The act of deforestation may not be entirely necessary to get at
these deposits sometimes, but coupled with the advantages given above, the
combination of opening up a new mine or oil well when taken with extra living spaces
or farm lands for food makes a lot of sense. So, given all of the benefits of deforestation
outlined above, you can see that more often than not, the good outweighs the bad . The
planet's environment may indeed suffer from the effects of deforestation, but that is
due to irresponsible use of the resources and other benefits provided, not the
deforestation itself. As people living on the planet, our duty is not to "hold back" and
stop cutting trees. It is to use what we glean from the Earth responsibly and wisely for
humanity and the planet's benefit.

Kills billions, and escalates to full scale conflict – risks extinction

Klare 12 - professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College
Michael, “The Hunger Wars in our Future,” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-215_162-
57489345/the-hunger-wars-in-our-future/?pageNum=1&tag=page
The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its
consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America's counties
designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other
food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food
prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income
Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported
U.S. grains.¶ This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history
is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest
and violent conflict.¶ Food -- affordable food -- is essential to human survival and well-
being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the
United States, food represents only about 13% of the average household budget, a
relatively small share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly
taxing for most middle- and upper-income families. It could, however, produce
considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources.
"You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets," commented Ernie Gross, an
agricultural economist at Omaha's Creighton University. This could add to the
discontent already evident in depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps
prompting an intensified backlash against incumbent politicians and other forms of
dissent and unrest.¶ It is in the international arena, however, that the Great Drought is
likely to have its most devastating effects. Because so many nations depend on grain
imports from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests, and because intense drought
and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink
and prices to rise across the planet. "What happens to the U.S. supply has immense
impact around the world," says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by the drought, corn and
soybeans, disappear from world markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including
wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to those who already have trouble
affording enough food to feed their families. ¶ The Hunger Games, 2007-2011¶ What
happens next is, of course, impossible to predict, but if the recent past is any guide, it
could turn ugly. In 2007-2008, when rice, corn, and wheat experienced prices hikes of
100% or more, sharply higher prices -- especially for bread -- sparked "food riots" in
more than two dozen countries, including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti,
Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In Haiti, the rioting became so violent and public
confidence in the government's ability to address the problem dropped so
precipitously that the Haitian Senate voted to oust the country's prime minister,
Jacques-Edouard Alexis. In other countries, angry protestors clashed with army and
police forces, leaving scores dead.¶ Those price increases of 2007-2008 were largely
attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food production more expensive.
(Oil's use is widespread in farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and pesticide
manufacture.) At the same time, increasing amounts of cropland worldwide were
being diverted from food crops to the cultivation of plants used in making biofuels. ¶
The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely associated with climate change.
An intense drought gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of 2010,
reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting
Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China's grain harvest, while
intense flooding destroyed much of Australia's wheat crop. Together with other
extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more
than 50% and the price of most food staples by 32%.¶ Once again, a surge in food
prices resulted in widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in North Africa
and the Middle East. The earliest protests arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and
then Tunisia, where -- no coincidence -- the precipitating event was a young food
vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting himself on fire to protest government
harassment. Anger over rising food and fuel prices combined with long-simmering
resentments about government repression and corruption sparked what became
known as the Arab Spring. The rising cost of basic staples, especially a loaf of bread,
was also a cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other factors, notably anger
at entrenched autocratic regimes, may have proved more powerful in those places, but
as the author of "Tropic of Chaos," Christian Parenti, wrote, "The initial trouble was
traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread." ¶ The Hunger Games,
2012-??¶ If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world
would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect to bounce back in the
years to come. Unfortunately, it's becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is
not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence
of global warming which is only going to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just
more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just
in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.¶ Until recently, most
scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming.
Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be
demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events
in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain's National Weather Service concluded that
human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced
in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that
the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have
been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in
Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming. ¶ It
is still too early to apply the methodology used by these scientists to calculating the
effect of global warming on the heat waves of 2012, which are proving to be far more
severe, but we can assume the level of correlation will be high. And what can we
expect in the future, as the warming gains momentum? ¶ When we think about climate
change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged
droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things,
this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of
course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all
inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The
purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the
social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state
collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort , up to and including full-scale
 war , could prove even more disruptive and deadly.¶ In her immensely successful
young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" (and the movie that followed), Suzanne
Collins riveted millions with a portrait of a dystopian, resource-scarce, post-
apocalyptic future where once-rebellious "districts" in an impoverished North
America must supply two teenagers each year for a series of televised gladiatorial
games that end in death for all but one of the youthful contestants. These "hunger
games" are intended as recompense for the damage inflicted on the victorious capital
of Panem by the rebellious districts during an insurrection. Without specifically
mentioning global warming, Collins makes it clear that climate change was
significantly responsible for the hunger that shadows the North American continent
in this future era. Hence, as the gladiatorial contestants are about to be selected, the
mayor of District 12's principal city describes "the disasters, the droughts, the storms,
the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land [and] the brutal
war for what little sustenance remained."¶ In this, Collins was prescient, even if her
specific vision of the violence on which such a world might be organized is fantasy.
While we may never see her version of those hunger games, do not doubt that some
version of them will come into existence -- that, in fact, hunger wars of many sorts will
fill our future. These could include any combination or permutation of the deadly
riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti's government, the pitched battles between
massed protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring
developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed croplands and water sources that have
made Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or the inequitable
distribution of agricultural land that continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-
inspired Naxalites of India.¶ Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that
persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to abandon their
traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums
surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those already living there. One such
eruption, with grisly results, occurred in Johannesburg's shantytowns in 2008 when
desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon,
beaten, and in some cases burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified
Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging mobs, said she fled her
country because "there is no work and no food." And count on something else:
millions more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging from drought and
flood to rising sea levels, will try to migrate to other countries, provoking even greater
hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in our hunger-
games future.¶ At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate
consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and
rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that
undoubtedly won't begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013.
Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the
coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent
droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people .