1AC

1AC
 1AC---Colonialism
Contention One is Colonialism:

Snake River Salmon are on the brink of extinction.

Whitworth, et. al, 21 (April 23, 2021, 3:37 PM, Kayna Whitworth,Alyssa Pone, andHaley Yamada, “Snake
River among top 10 most endangered rivers in the US, conservation group says; A series of dams is
threatening the local salmon population,” https://abcnews.go.com/US/snake-river-top-10-endangered-
rivers-us-conservation/story?id=77277094, JMP)

Conservation group American Rivers has named Snake River, which passes through four Western states, the most
endangered river in the country due to a series of dams that it says are threatening the existence of the
river’s native salmon population.

“They’ve never been closer to extinction than they are today. We’ve got to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River,”
said Amy Souers Kober, an American Rivers spokesperson.

The Snake River Basin is home to half of all Pacific salmon in the lower 48 states, the group wrote in a
statement.

Dying Salmon populations are an existential threat to the Nez Percé---removal of the
Dams solves.
Rice, 21 (Apr. 13, 2021, Doyle Rice, “The Snake River in the Pacific Northwest is the nation's 'most
endangered river' of 2021,” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/13/most-
endangered-rivers-snake-river-tops-list-american-rivers/7191736002/, JMP)

The Snake River in the Pacific Northwest is the nation's most endangered river of 2021 , according to a report released
Tuesday by the environmental advocacy group American Rivers.

" Rarely has a river been in such need of bold, swift action than the Pacific Northwest’s Snake River," American Rivers
said in a statement. "Once the largest salmon producer in the Columbia River Basin, today Snake River salmon
runs are at the brink of extinction . The loss of salmon is an existential threat to Northwest tribes who
depend on the fish for their cultures and identities ."

Salmon are a crucial component of the Northwest’s economy. Recreational fishing in the Pacific
Northwest generates more than $5.3 billion a year in economic benefits and supports more than 36,000
jobs, according to American Rivers.

The report suggests that to solve the problem, removing four dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington is
essential , along with increasing flow over downstream dams. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, proposed a $33.5 billion framework to remove
the dams, recover salmon and revitalize the region’s infrastructure and economy.
They’re key to the broader ecosystem AND indigenous culture.
Fisher, 20 (July 30, 2020, Lawrence M. Fisher - writes about business for The New York Times and other
publications, “To Dam or not to Dam?” https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/to-dam-or-not-to-dam,
JMP)
The battle over hydropower looks quite different in the United States than in much of the rest of the world because there are no large dams in
the works in the lower 48 and just one advancing in Alaska. With no new construction to oppose, anti-dammers have
focused on removal . They have been quite successful; according to American Rivers, an environmental advocacy group, 1,199 dams
have been removed in the United States since 1999. The year with the most dam removals was 2018, with 99 removed, followed closely by
2017, with 91. Most of these dams, it should be noted, were small and did not contain hydroelectric turbines. But the movement’s greatest
success story to date was the elimination of two huge dams on the Elwha River in western Washington State in 2011, both of which were still
producing electricity.

Efforts continue to remove power dams on the lower Snake River (a tributary of the Columbia River) – the one immortalized in Woody Guthrie’s
song about the Grand Coolie Dam. Guthrie’s song was “Roll On Columbia.” Like
the Elwha dams, the Snake River dams are
implicated in the decimation of the local Chinook salmon population . Chinook are vital to parts of the
economy of the Pacific Northwest, not to mention to the culture of indigenous people – and the only
food of the regional Orca population , which had dwindled to just 73 animals as of August 2019 . The
litigation surrounding these dams is now in its third decade.

This spills over to wider colonial violence:

FIRST, is environmental domination. The dams specifically fuel unsustainable global
market expansion---questioning entrenched narratives is key---anything else risks the
Nez Percé culture.
Colombi 06 – Ph.d. (this is his dissertation), Fulbright Scholar for indigenous studies, associate professor
at Arizona (Benedict J., 2006, “The Nez Perce Tribe Vs. Elite -Directed Development in the Lower Snake
River Basin: The Struggle to Breach the Dams and Save the Salmon,” Washington State University,
ProQuest via UMich Libraries, p. 86-93)//kh

For the Nez Perce Tribe, the dams in the lower Snake River basin violate affirmed nineteenth century
U.S. treaty rights and they additionally negate the Tribe’s guaranteed treaty right to “hunt and fish at
usual and accustomed places.” From an indigenous perspective, the dams represent a failed twentieth
century development scheme because they generate and diffuse virtually catastrophic negative costs
to a non-elite, native minority and to the environment .

Furthermore, the
commonly-held belief in the commercial world is that a “fish is just a fish.” This view
contrasts with a Nez Perce tribal belief that incorporates fish and more specifically several species of Pacific salmon as
paramount symbols of Nez Perce society, economy, and religion (Figure 4.1). Nez Perce traditional and
neo-traditional perspectives demand specific rights and obligations for “animal peoples” or salmon,
because “animal peoples” came before “human peoples.” Water is considered sacred , animals were
here first, and it is the responsibility of the “human peoples” to care for their surviva l—since the survival
of Nez Perce culture is inseparable from the survivability of salmon . To be sure, a Nez Perce cosmological
worldview contradicts the order of creation in the commercial world . In the Book of Genesis, humans have “dominion
over nature” and humans must “subdue the earth,” thus Judeo-Christian cultural survival has no direct link to the survival of salmon.
In the commercial world, ideological power (Figure 4.2) is fueled by the belief in “progress.” Nineteenth century
social scientists (Marx and Engels 1948; Morgan 1985) saw society as evolving towards an increasingly more
complex whole through the process of European-directed growth and development . Marxist theory and
unilineal evolution marked a transition in Euroamerican thought by projecting the idea that humans will
invariably evolve out of the tribal world (e.g. savagery) and into a more “complex” and “culturally advanced”
large-scale system (e.g. industrial capitalism or socialism). This cultural ideal fails to address the costly reality that increasing the scale of
society, either through large-scale models of capitalism or socialism, can be expected to concentrate social power and diffuse the costs to a
non-elite majority.

On the Lower Snake River growth ideology fueled the post World War II, ColdWar economy. The
idea of transforming the Snake
River into a series of large dams and reservoirs was justified by political and commercial elites as a
progressive movement that encouraged continued commercial growth and the expansion of global
markets . Local and supralocal power-elites convinced their political representatives that the development of
water-related resources in the lower Snake River basin was a necessary and inevitable component of
commercial growth in the Pacific Northwest. The major ideological tenants of “progress” are evident in
the pervasive public opinion that the dams and the decline in salmon were “bound to happen” and
moreover that wild, naturally reproducing salmon and hatchery reared salmon are more or less the same fish. Perhaps the
root of this perspective is functionally supported by the belief that at present most Pacific Northwest citizens fail
to have a symbolic relationship or any kind of relationship with Pacific salmon — simply because wild
salmon populations are neither sustainable nor harvestable at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Growth ideology in the commercial world additionally skews how rate-payers of Inland Northwest
hydroelectricity view energy consumption . The dominant ethos is that regional citizens are afforded
“ inexpensive energy costs” due to the socialized benefits of hydroelectric production, for example, on the Lower
Snake River. The reality is that the peak annual capacity of the Lower Snake River dams is at best only 5
percent or 3,000 megawatts of all the hydroelectricity generated in the Pacific Northwest (Marcus and Garrison 2000). If the dams are
removed and electricity is no longer generated, the
electricity will likely be replaced with energy from preexisting
sources on the western grid (e.g. main-stem Columbia River dams) or from natural gas power plant production .
Moreover, Marcus and Garrison (2002) in their technical report, Going with the Flow: Replacing Energy from Four Snake River Dams, argue that
more competitively priced energy can be imported from available sources outside the region, with replacement
energy costs via
the greater Pacific Northwest power grid determined at less than $2 dollars per month for the average
consumer.

A recent public policy campaign has emerged in defense of large dams in the Inland Northwest . This ideology stems from
a worldview to “dominate nature.” According to the Nez Perce Tribe’s Fisheries director, Dave Johnson (personal communication,
June 2004), Euroamericans came to Indian country with the expressed desire to “kick Mother Nature’s
ass.” This ideology is encapsulated in the Save Our Dams campaign, a grass-roots, pro-dam
organization, located in Ephrata, Washington. The organization believes that the dam breaching movement is a campaign of
“misinformation and manipulation” and they argue that it is fundamentally possible to have both energy producing dams and sustainable
populations of salmon (Save Our Dams 2005).

The premise for the Save Our Dams organization is the belief that without dams there will be no farms .
Previous research (Colombi 2004, 2005) demonstrates that largescale farms are predicated on the widespread
use of fossil-fuel intensive agricultural technology , which was gaining importance with U.S. farmers by the 1930s. The switch
from small-scale agrarian societies to large-scale agribusinesses correlates with pre- and post-World War II agricultural economics. As shown in
chapter three, after World War II the size of farms in the Palouse region of southeast Washington and north-central Idaho grew exponentially
while small farms became increasingly rare. Theirony of the Save Our Dams argument is that prior to the
construction of the first dam on the Lower Snake River, small-scale farms were already declining
throughout the region and furthermore that all regional farmers managed to get their crops west to
Portland, Oregon by either railcar or steamship. In fact, railway shipment of grain was the modus operandi of transportation during the first
half of the twentieth century and steam powered barges predate the rail system were used for global export of grain via the Lower Snake River
corridor during much of the nineteenth century. Initial shipments of global-bound wheat left Portland, Oregon’s harbor in 1869 for Liverpool,
England and the first waterborne shipment of wheat on the Lower Snake River left Almota, Washington via river barge steamships in 1876
(Petersen 1995). The belief that the Lower Snake River dams are necessary for a regional agricultural
economy to survive represents ideological power in the service of elite-directed projects .

For example, evidence suggests that regional agricultural production will not be reduced if the dams are
bypassed . The jobs lost in the agricultural economy will directly impact remaining small and medium
sized farmers and the regional water transport econom y (e.g. dam operations and local ports). Economic research shows
that bypassing the dams “will generate broader local and regional opportunities to participate in the
expanding retail trade, finance, service and government sectors of the economy, that are driving
economic growth across the Northwest” (Niemi and Whitelaw 1999:1). In addition, RAND, an independent and international,
non-profit analysis and research firm found that 15,000 new jobs could be produced and sustainable economic
development could be generated, by removing the four Lower Snake River dams and replacing that
energy with more efficient and renewable energy (Pemin et al. 2002). Unlike the present economic realities that rely on
large-scale industrial farming and industrial manufacturing, the new shift in the regional and local economy will likely
produce measurable economic benefits to the greatest number of individuals while implementing
renewable and clean energy, healthy basins, smaller scale farms , and sustainable populations of wild
salmon . For example, small farm operators may thrive by shifting from wheat for global markets to diverse, organically produced crops for
local and regional consumption, thus requiring few fossil-fuels and fewer chemical inputs

In August 2003, at Ice Harbor lock and dam on the Lower Snake River, President George W. Bush (White
House 2005) stated the administration’s position regarding large dams in the lower Snake River basin: I
said, look, we are concerned about the fish. We're also concerned about the citizens of Washington
State who depend upon the dams for electricity, and the water to water their land so we can have the
crops necessary to eat in America. But the economy of this part of the world has relied upon the steady
supply of hydropower. And we've got an energy problem in America. We don't need to be breaching any
dams that are producing electricity. And we won't. The president’s statement is supported foremost by
a powerful but numerically small elite-directed agricultural and industrial economic constituency. These
elites disproportionately benefit from agricultural and hydroelectric energy subsidies. In all, both the
agricultural and industrial economic sectors claim dependency in the 92 Reproduced with permission of
the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. maintenance and
perpetuation of the four dams on the Lower Snake River and to a lesser degree in the additional four
dams in the Clearwater and Hell’s Canyon subbasins.

The remainder of this chapter will demonstrate how collective social power is wielded by those who monopolize
meaning and ideology . Power-elites who influence what people think , make, and do, have a clear route
to power. Power must be legitimate and support for the eight dams in the lower Snake River basin has a
non-native , group consensus. On the contrary, the Nez Perce, both publicly and privately, maintain that the
dams are a clear violation of their established 1855 treaty rights. These legal rights are predicated on
the treaty-based economic and social rights (article 3, section 1) to “hunt and fish at all usual and accustomed
places,” which must include both clean water and annually returning Pacific salmon.

That form of domination renders lands a standing reserve, which leads to broader
forms of violence.
Liboiron, 21 [Max Liboiron, Dr. Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and is formerly the
Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University. Liboiron is Métis/Michif
(Woodman via Red River) who grew up in Lac la Biche, Treaty 6 territory. “Pollution is Colonialism,” May
2021, Duke University Press]//Townes

When Nature becomes robust within limits and threshold theories of harm are dominant, land
relations become managerial rather than reciprocal. In colonial understandings of Nature, (certain) humans can
protect, extend, augment, better, use, preserve, destroy, interrupt, and /or capitalize on robust-within-limits Nature . That is, Land becomes
a Resource . Resources refer to unidirectional relations where aspects of land are useful to particular (here, settler and colonial) ends. In
this unidirectional relation, value flows in one direction , from the Resource to the user, rather than being reciprocal as legal
scholar Andrew Brighten (unmarked) notes in his interpretation of court proceedings on xwməθkwəy’əm relations to salmon:

The court quickly moves past a scant two sentences referencing the Musqueam social ontology of salmon and humans bonded in a reciprocal
relationship, then distills this relationship to the activity of “taking”— directly opposed to the Musqueam understanding of being given—salmon for

food, social and unspecified “ceremonial purposes.” The court then repeatedly characterizes Musqueam interaction with
salmon as participation in an “ economically valuable” “ natural resource ,” [and] “ recognizes ” the desires
of “ numerous interveners representing commercial fishing interests.” . . . This “ resource management ” mindset
is not unique [to this court case].84

This passage documents the flattening of Land relations into Resource relations. In a colonial worldview, a Resource relation is good
and right . A body of excellent scholarship critiques this notion of Resource as a colonial, settler, and imperial concept.85 Building from this work, I will
specifically focus on how the colonial logics of Resource are reproduced in practices and concepts of modern
environmental pollution .
Standing Reserve

In “The Question concerning Technology,” philosopher Martin Heidegger (unmarked)86 describes a Resource-based arrangement of
relations as a “ standing reserve.” 87 He writes that creating a resource begins with “ enframing ,” an act where “the
energy concealed in nature is unlocked , what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn,
distributed , and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are
ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. . . . Everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by , to be immediately at
hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering .”88 Heidegger calls the constantly deferred result of
enframing the creation of a “standing reserve.” He argues that modern technology’s main task is to transform and stockpile Nature
as a standing reserve via enframing . To paraphrase, this process makes the various relations of Land into a unidirectional relation called
Resource for anticipated settler use. He illustrates his theory with the example of coal mining: coal is dug out of the ground not to be present as coal, but to be
stockpiled and used at an unforeseen but anticipated occasion.89

The transformation of Land into Resource is achieved not only through the arrangement of space but also through the arrangement of time. The

temporality of Resource is anticipatory— it makes and even aims to guarantee colonial futures .90 Crucial to this
temporality is the belief that this future can be chosen and that the present can be directed toward it via
management practices .91 As such, Resources eclipse other possible relations with Land both now and in the future. The
future is reserved for settler goals, colonized in advance . The landscape cannot support other relations, activities, or futures that
might interfere with future use. If a river is for waste assimilation, it can only be a fishing spot if those activities do not preclude its role as a sink.92 Fostering

some futures and eclipsing others is a key technique of the managerial ontologies that characterize
Resources and pollution. Risk management, disaster plans, homeland security ( and other securities)93 all share
managerial ontologies dedicated to containing time for chosen futures.
One method for detecting plastics in biota such as mussels is to dissolve them in KOH (potassium hydroxide). One of my students
wanted to use it for her thesis—it speeds up the process considerably, since instead of dissecting fish guts and spending hours
staring over a sieve, you put the guts in a jar in an incubator and come back a week later to nothing but clear liquid, a bit of fatty
residue, and some nice floating plastics. Sure, I said. As I ordered her supplies and went through university protocols for hazardous
materials, I began to realize how toxic KOH was. For the first time in clear’s history, we had to order hazardous waste containers and,
when they were full, pay for them to go . . . somewhere. I was surprised by how easy it was to just get rid of the waste—just fill out a
form and call a guy. Bam! Gone! (Somewhere!) It seemed antithetical to create hazardous waste as a lab dedicated to mitigating
pollution. Worse, it was rude to dissolve our relatives and have them leave the lab as hazardous froth.

When I say that colonialism means ongoing settler access to Land for settler goals, this includes access to futures . Settlers do not have to set
foot on the Land, own the Land, or even use the Land as a Resource so long as the Land is available for settler futures. You can just order KOH whenever you want,
because the infrastructure anticipates its use and disposal as hazardous waste.94 You can also choose not to, but Land is still arranged as a standing reserve, just in
case you change your mind. In this way, a seemingly simple and certainly common scientific research method that produces hazardous waste is involved in colonial
Land relations, even though its users are also likely invested in environmental goods and perhaps see themselves as Indigenous allies—or are Indigenous scientists

themselves. Colonialism is not an event, not an intent. It is “not even a structure, but a milieu or active set of relations that we can push on,
move around in, and redo from moment to moment.”95

Property

Pollution is a property right . In The Colonial Lives of Property, Brenna Bhandar (unmarked) describes property ownership as “a bundle of rights
that can be rearranged and redistributed depending on the social and political norms that legislators aim to
promote. . . . The degree to which each of these rights is protected varies; the ‘stringency’ with which each of these rights in the bundle, such as the right to use,
possess, exclude, devise, alienate, etc., can be understood as existing in a hierarchy whereby some rights . . . are more powerful than others.”96 This

hierarchy is codified in most environmental regulations: “It is legal for some pollution to occur under
Canadian and U.S. environmental law. Under the permission-to-pollute system in Canada, some effluents can be released to a certain amount,
and spills and leaks are considered acceptable risks even though they happen regularly. . . . [This right supersedes] the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous People and the right to free, prior and informed consent. This includes consent to be polluted or not.”97

Under current settler state laws in Canada and the United States, the twinned values of appropriation
and possessiveness allow different acts of pollution to make logical and even moral sense . The Foundation for
Economic Education, a libertarian think tank, teaches, “ If I deliberately pipe sewage into a pond on my own land,
presumably I consider using the pond as a cesspool to be its optimum use. Hence, there is no abuse, no pollution. If
however, either purposely or inadvertently I allow my sewage to flow into a neighbor’s pond, against his [sic] will, I am without question polluting. I am lowering the
value of his [sic] property.”98 In short, land is pollutable (so pollutable it can barely be considered pollution!) because a property owner has designated its pollution
a best use, but only to the point that it would not infringe on another landowner’s right to appropriation and possession.

In 1919, before he had provided empirical evidence for the threshold theory of pollution, Phelps wrote,

It is good law as well as good economics that a riparian owner is entitled by right to any proper use of the stream that flows by his
land, with due regard to the exercise of a similar right on the part of lower riparian users. This dictum of the common law has been
interpreted by the courts in some extreme instances to mean that there shall be no appreciable reduction in the flow or alteration in
the quality of the water by any user. Such extreme interpretation, however, would of itself defeat the very purpose of the law by
prohibiting almost every valuable use of the water.99

For Phelps, use was paramount to defining pollution. In his mind, water was a Natural sink.
Yet specific uses did not matter as much as access to water for those uses . That is, access to land for settler goals guided his
convictions about pollution and resource. Tuck and McKenzie write, “The most important aim of recasting land as property is to make it ahistorical in order to hack

away the narratives that invoke prior claims and thus reaffirm the myth of terra nullius,”100 allowing settlers to think of their uses of
land , for pollution or otherwise, as proper and right because it belongs to them and their goals and
futures , whether individual or collective .

This is not an abstract claim. I cannot overemphasize how assumed access to land is foundational to so many settler
relations . Land relations are central not only to Indigenous worlds, but also to settler worlds. To illustrate this with an example about research itself, the
following story is by Lauren Watwood (settler), an anthropology master’s student who is using clear as a “field site”101 for her ethnographic research. The story is
from her first full day in the lab:

Tuesday morning. I’m sitting in the lab. My mind voraciously cataloguing every interaction, every gesture, every idea discussed as I
listen to Max efficiently plow through Natasha, Kaitlyn, and Charlotte’s list of items to be discussed. “My, my.” I think to myself. “I
am doing quite a good job being an anthropologist! Mhhmm. Look at all this gold I’ve already collected.” After logistics are attended
to, Max settles down in a chair to my left.

“OK, what do we need to talk about?” she asks. I say, “Let’s discuss our expectations for what I am doing here at the lab.” We chat
for a few moments and she innocuously asks, “Have you already been collecting data?” Proud of myself and my anthropological
ways, I reply, “Yes, I have!”

She replies calmly, deadpan: “That’s stealing.”

My brain goes blank. I can’t comprehend what she said. I recognize the words to be English, my mother tongue. . . . Yet, I don’t
understand what they mean in this context.

“That’s stealing,” Max reiterates, likely repeating her words in response to my utterly vacant face. “You came in assuming
entitlement to extract data and acted in a deeply colonial, imperialist manner. You thought you could come in here and take
information from us without our consent, even after we’ve talked about needing to have a consent process in place. That’s harm
ful.” Her delivery of this news was not overtly aggressive, nor accusatory. She was simply explaining the fact of the matter.

“No!” I think, grasping for words that would make her understand. “No! No, not at all! I’m not stealing! I’m doing research!” I
screech in my mind, the words clawing to escape my throat, so Max will understand. Please, understand. I wasn’t ready to concede
that what I had said and done was wrong or was out of alignment or was unethical. Because I couldn’t think straight. I felt like I was
being attacked and was terrified and pissed and defensive and upset.

Later, I realize: I claimed what wasn’t mine to claim and never once questioned my methods. That is colonialism.102

To her credit, Lauren looked composed during this exchange, even if her eyes were a little big. When I told her she had to apologize to the lab and see what the lab
collective wanted to do with the data she had already collected, she went off and crafted an apology,103 presented it at a lab meeting a couple of hours later, and

was welcomed into the lab. Dominant science, and research in general, plays multiple roles in colonial practices
of settler access to Land under the logics of property and Resource .

Streeter and Phelps’s work was paramount in abstracting Land into quantified and codified entities like assimilative
capacity that could then be used to regulate industry’s access to Land for effluents so rivers could be
used —but not overused —to their fullest extent . Their scientific contribution was to coordinate
access, not question it . This propertied, colonial orientation to research continues today, as Lauren
discovered.104

Maximum Use

Streeter didn’t advocate for just any kind of Resource relation— he advocated for “ maximum advantageous use of the
streams .”105 Building on the work of Streeter and Phelps, in 1950 the chairman of the Department of Public Health Statistics at the University of Michigan, C.
J. Velz, wrote a treatise on the importance of precisely calculating assimilative capacity so as “to take fullest advantage of the inherent resources available” in rivers
as sinks. His concern was that “natural
purification capacity is not being fully utilized ,”106 particularly during seasonal
events that swelled rivers with extra water . In response, he perfected the sigmoid curve introduced by
Streeter and Phelps. No water was to be wasted that was not adding to assimilative capacity!
Economic geographer Morgan Robertson (unmarked) writes that such mathematics were part of “creating a world in which we
[settlers] see ourselves as utility-maximising and self-interested , or of rendering the entirety of the
biophysical world as classifications and functions , [which occurs] through rather mundane and incomplete
acts of reduction and simplification .”107 Extending this, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (unmarked) writes about how colonists
encounter forms of life (including L/land) that are not organized on the basis of market values as irrelevant, as
irrational, and even as security risks .108 Today, the logics, techniques, and infrastructures (in forms from pipelines
to policy ) of maximum use of sinks uphold land as something that is not only pollutable, but properly so.
The Morality of Property

Maximum use has a morality. Using a Resource to its maximum potential is good ; to squander it is bad. Philosopher
John Locke (unmarked) says so: “Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, wast [sic];
and we shall find the benefit of it amounts to little more than nothing.”109 A lot of Europeans were into Locke, and the legacy of those ideas is strong today.

In his work on the British privatization of common land and its relationships to concepts of waste and wasting, geographer Jesse Goldstein (unmarked) outlines how

land that was being used as a commons but not as a Resource became “a landscape of wasted potential ”
that specifically wasted “the improvers’ economic right—presented as a natural right —to realize the maximum productive
potential of all things , at all times, and in all ways.”110 When British peasants “failed” to extract maximum value from a shared landscape, they were
removed, the land was enclosed and privatized , and the peasants were reintroduced to the enclosures as wage labourers on newly Resource-
rich land. Goldstein argues, “Enclosure was a transformation from one moral conception of value to another.”111

More “than a particular historic technique of land reform in feudal England, and more than a collection
of individual acts of theft or an uneven distribution of land and resources,” dispossession and enclosure
of land as Resource is “a general way of seeing the world ” based on “a particular (and persistent) logic
of expropriation , produced in and as part of the land itself .”112

The logic of maximum extraction of value was at work not just in Britain, but also in its colonies. There, the moral imperative to improve land,
to rearrange Land into Nature and Nature into Resource , was a primary (though not the only) refrain for dispossessing
Indigenous peoples from their Land . Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) contends, “property, as has been argued by Indigenous
scholars and their allies, is distinctly a European notion that locks together (pun intended) labor, land, and conquest. Without labor to tame the land, it is closely
assigned the designation ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness.’”113 Tiffany Lethabo King (Black) agrees, writing that “within this Lockean formulation, Indigenous subjects who do

not labor across the land fail to turn the land into property and thus fail to turn themselves into proper human subjects.”114 Civilization and its
opposite become identified with land use aligned with creating standing reserve to procure maximum
economic value.
In 1876, an Indian reserve commissioner on Vancouver Island in the region currently known as Canada addressed members of “a Native audience” (Nation unspecified), who were being moved

, “The Land was of no value to you. The trees were of no value to you. The
to reserves that were a fraction of the size of their previous Land bases. He explained

Coal was of no value to you. The white man came he improved the land you can follow his [sic] example.”115 This settler
commissioner, along with many of his contemporaries, thought “that until Europeans arrived, most of the land was waste, or, where native people were obviously using it, that their uses were

inadequate.”116 The virtue of “good use” “functions as a usable property to dispossess Indigenous peoples
from the ground of moral value” 117 through an “ ideology of improvement that privileges European
forms of cultivation as proof of ownership .”118 This is only possible when0 there is one right land relation, accomplished via universalism.
In A Third University Is Possible, la paperson writes, “Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that

legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve and spread ,”119 in
this case to pollution via modern environmental sciences.120
That violence culminates in ecocide---most likely cause of extinction---BUT, cultural
impact is on-par with it.
Mitchell 17 (Audra Mitchell, CIGI Chair in Global Governance and Ethics, Balsillie School of International
Affairs, and Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, former Senior Lecturer in International
Relations, department of Politics, University of York, Ph.D. Queen’s University of Belfast, “Decolonizing
against extinction part I: extinction is violence,” Worldly, 7-28-2017,
https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2017/07/28/decolonizing-against-extinction-part-i-extinction-is-
violence/)KMM

Western scientists are proclaiming the start of a ‘sixth mass extinction event’ that may involve the
destruction of more than three quarters of earth’s currently-existing life forms. In their attempts to
explain this phenomenon, most scientists have converged around four major, interlinked drivers:
climate change , habitat destruction , species exchange , and the direct killing of plants and animals . In
these drivers are understood as the unintended consequences of generic ‘human’ activity, and as
most cases,

a result of desirable trends such as development or urbanization (Wilson 2002; Barnosky 2014; Ceballos 2016). A crucial
driver is missing from this list: transversal structural violence against Indigenous peoples and their
relations , and colonial violence in particular. ‘Structural violence’ involves systemic forms of harm,
exclusion and discrimination that disproportionately affect particular groups, and which can take many
forms (physical, psychological, economic, gendered and others). They are embedded in and expressed through political, cultural,
economic and social structures (Farmer 2009) that can persist across large spans of time and space. I use the term
‘transversal’ to refer to forms of structural violence that extend across multiple boundaries – not only those of nation-states, but also other kinds of nations (human and otherwise),

communities or kinship groups, and temporalities. Prime examples of transversal structural violence include: settler
colonialism , colonial genocides (Woolford et al 2014); environmental racism or ‘slow violence’ , including
toxification and pollution ; and complexes of sexual, physical, communal, spiritual and land-based
violence associated with the extractive industries. Each of these forms of violence is ecologically
devastating , and their convergence in European projects of colonisation is even more so. Many
formations of transversal structural violence are significant causes of the so-called ‘four horsemen’ of
extinction mentioned above. For instance, ‘direct killing’ is carried out to clear land for settlement , and it
occurs as a result of ecological damage caused by resource extraction . Settler colonialism, carbon-based
economies and regimes of environmental racism also support forms of socio-economic organization (for
instance, carbon and energy-intensive urbanized societies) that intensify climate change and increase habitat destruction . Meanwhile,

colonization has played a significant role in the ongoing transfer of life forms across the planet – whether
unintentionally (e.g. the transfer of fish in the bilge water of ships); as an instrument of agricultural settlement (e.g. cattle ranching), or as a
deliberate strategy of violence (e.g. smallpox). However, transversal structural violence is a driver of extinction in
itself, with its own distinct manifestations . First, it involves the disruption or severance of relations and
kinship structures between human communities and other life forms , and the dissolution of
Indigenous systems of governance, laws and protocols that have co-created and sustained plural
worlds over millennia (Borrows 2010; Atleo 2012; Kimmerer 2013). Second, the destruction of Indigenous knowledges through
policies of assimilation, expropriation, cultural appropriation and other strategies undermines these
forms of order and the relationships they nurture . Third, the displacement of and/or restricted access
to land by Indigenous peoples interferes with practices of caring for land or Country that are necessary
for the survival of humans and other life forms (Bawaka Country 2015). Colonial genocides embody all of these
forms of destruction by killing or displacing Indigenous communities, undermining Indigenous modes of
governance and kinship systems, systematically destroying relationships between life forms and erasing
knowledge. All of these modes of violence weaken co-constitutive relationships between Indigenous
communities, other life forms and ecosystems that have enabled their collaborative survival . This results in
disruptions to ecosystems – and climate – that Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte (2016) has recently argued would have been considered a dystopia by his Ancestors. In other words,

transversal structural violence , and colonial violence in particular, are fundamental drivers of global
patterns of extinction . It stands to reason, then, that responses to extinction that focus on managing
endangered species or populations, or ‘backing up’ genetic material, are insufficient : they leave the
structures of violence intact and may add to their power. Instead, efforts to address extinction need to
focus on identifying, confronting and dismantling these formations of violence, and on restoring or
strengthening the relations they sever . Yet responses to global patterns of extinction are
overwhelmingly rooted in Western scientific concepts of conservation – a paradigm that emerged within
20th century European colonial government structures (Adams 2004). Contemporary conservation approaches
– from the creation of land and marine parks to the archiving of genetic materials – may exacerbate the
destruction of relations between Indigenous peoples and their relations. For instance, conservation strategies often involve
displacing Indigenous peoples from the land that they care for (Jago 2017, Brockington and Igoe 2006), or curtailing of processes such as subsistence hunting, fishing or burning that have
enabled the co-survival of Indigenous groups, plants, animals and land for millennia. Meanwhile, ex situ and genetic forms of conservation (including zoos and gene banks) may violate these
relationships by instrumentalizing or commodifying kinship relations. Increasingly popular conservation approaches based on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) approaches claim to center
Indigenous communities and knowledges. However, they ultimately instrumentalize fragments of Indigenous knowledge systems (for instance, data on climatic change) to test or support
Western approaches. As such, they leave the structures of colonization and other forms of transversal structural violence untouched, and may even exacerbate them. All of this suggests that

confronting global patterns of extinction calls for decolonization and other ethos that work to
eliminate transversal structural violence – and I don’t mean this metaphorically . Enabling the restoration
of relations that can enable the ongoing flourishing of life on earth will require the transfer of land and
power back into plural Indigenous peoples and their distinct modes of sovereignty, law and
governance (Tuck and Yang 2012). These relationships and forms of order have enabled plural Indigenous peoples
and their multitude of relations to co-flourish for millennia, including through periods of rapid climate
change, and they are needed to ensure the continuation of this co-flourishing. This means that
decolonization is not simply related to global patterns of extinction: it is necessary to ensuring the
ongoingness of plural life forms on earth .

SECOND, is militarism---they serve as a manifestation of state sponsored militarism

that is the basis for further colonial expansion.
Colombi 06 – Ph.d. (this is his dissertation), Fulbright Scholar for indigenous studies, associate professor
at Arizona (Benedict J., 2006, “The Nez Perce Tribe Vs. Elite -Directed Development in the Lower Snake
River Basin: The Struggle to Breach the Dams and Save the Salmon,” Washington State University,
ProQuest via UMich Libraries, p. 117-23)//kh
Militarism is a blunt and concentrated form of coercive social power. As defined here, military power is the control over the organized use of force or violence, or threats of force or violence.

Military power is obvious during wartime but is pervasive as well in peacetime. This fact alone requires an analysis of how
military and economic power functions in the defense related federal agency— the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—
and the construction , maintenance , and perpetuation of large dams in the lower Snake River basin.
An absolute measurement of military power is by the scale of total budgets (Figure 4.10). In 2003 the annual Department of Defense budget was roughly $422 billion (United States
Department of Defense 2005). The Department of Defense’s annual expenditure exceeds the revenues of many of the world’s most powerful transnational corporations and the gross national
product (GNP) of most of the world’s nations. In 2003, for example, the GNP of the United States was $10.5 trillion. Out of the world’s roughly 216 countries, the United States ranks number
one. If one ranks the $422 billion U.S. Department of Defense budget with individual GNP by country, the Department of Defense ranks higher than 203 out of 216 countries. To put this in
perspective, the United States Department of Defense’s annual budget has more financial power than 93 percent of the world’s economies. Hence, the Department of Defense is a highly
“concentrated, intensive, authoritative power” that yields “disproportionate results” (Mann 1986:26). The aforementioned scenario is unprecedented in the scale of human history; and the
world’s single superpower, the United States, can effectively wage force or violence and threaten others with
force or violence at will.

in the lower Snake River basin, the Nez Perce and their natural world were suddenly
In terms of coercive power

altered by state sponsored military power beginning in 1805. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the
Corps of Discovery were the first non-natives to venture into the Inland Northwest . As mentioned in the introduction of
this essay, Lewis and Clark’s primary goal was one of commerce and state supremacy , and Lewis and Clark and the Corps of

Discovery were by definition a military campaign that took military risks for commercial gain . Thus, in order to
understand the process of cultural and environmental change in the lower Snake River basin , one
must concede that military power was the initial instrument for U.S. colonial expansion .
To be sure, the Nez Perce incorporated a form of military power on the plateau prior to Euroamerican encroachment; albeit the social power was small in scale and less violent. The
introduction and use of the horse by about 1700 AD increased the rate at which the Nez Perce could acquire resources and social prestige, and wage small-scale war. War in the tribal world,
however, is more accurately defined as feuding and raiding. This type of warfare contrasts greatly with that of a large-scale, intensive, and full-time military campaign— a necessary component

during
of state expansionist regimes. Nineteenth century U.S. military force preceded non-native settlement and commercial enterprise in Nez Perce tribal-traditional territory. Moreover,

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, U.S. hegemonic control of the Columbia and Snake rivers
replaced the Indian wars of the nineteenth century —ultimately a campaign that utilizes strategies of
direct and indirect use of military force.
For instance, much like the Department of War financing the military reconnaissance of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, the United States continues in a similar vein with the

The United States Army

Department of Defense financing the Army Corps of Engineers. The agency built five out of eight large dams in the lower Snake River basin.

Corps of Engineers is organized within the Department of Army and ultimately in the Department of Defense. This fact alone supports the notion that the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers has tremendous social power in the lower Snake River basin, which is largely a function of an
annual defense budget that exceeds $400 billion. In other words, United States defense related entities (e.g. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) have the

necessary ability to achieve personal goals in relation to other people , even when others might object .
At present, the United States Army Corps of Engineers employs roughly 35,000 individuals, many of whom have specialized training in biology, engineering, geology,
hydrology, and natural resource management. The Corps of Engineers confront the environment with technological know how and are chiefly responsible for the
following three objectives: (1) to plan, design, and build and operate water resources and other civil works projects (e.g. navigation, flood control, environmental
protection, disaster response, and so forth); (2) to design and manage the construction of military facilities for the Army and Air Force; and (3) to design and
construct management support for other federal agencies and the Department of Defense (United States Army Corps of Engineers 2005).

In the twenty-first century, the top leader in the hierarchy for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, after commander in chief George W. Bush, is Donald H.
Rumsfeld—the secretary of defense for the Bush Administration and a former chief executive officer for General Instrument Corporation, a defense contractor that
is now commonly known as Motorola. A second leader in the chain of command for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers is Thomas E. White, Jr., Secretary of the Army
from 2000 to 2004 and a subordinate to the secretary of defense. Prior to his nomination as Secretary of the Army, White was vice president of operations, chair,
and chief executive officer for the Enron Corporation— a defense contracting multi-national corporation charged with international human rights violations and
large-scale corporate fraud (Human Rights Watch 1999). In 2004, on the cusp of the Bush Administration’s second-term, the Secretary of the Army, Thomas E. White
Jr., was replaced by Dr. Francis J. Harvey. Secretary Harvey earned a doctorate in metallurgy and material sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and has held
executive positions with the defense contracting corporation, Westinghouse. In fact, immediately prior to serving as Secretary of Army, Harvey was director for
Duratek, a company that handles the storage of nuclear and hazardous waste (United States Department of Army 2005).

The top decision maker for the Army Corps of Engineers is the commander and chief of engineers— a position that holds a staff office in the Pentagon and an
individual that leads a large-scale army command. In 2005 the Army Corps of Engineers’ lieutenant general is Carl A. Strock, a career enlisted army officer who holds
a master’s degree in civil engineering from Mississippi State University (United States Army Corps of Engineers 2005). Lieutenant General Strock oversees regional
districts in the United States and major engineering projects in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

In the lower Snake River basin, the regional and local office for the Army Corps of Engineers is the Northwest Division in Seattle, Washington and the Walla Walla
District in Walla Walla, Washington. The Walla Walla district, located near the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers, employs roughly 650 individuals and
commands oversight of a 107,000 square mile area. The Walla Walla district’s vast area is demarcated by the Snake River Basin, including rivers that drain significant
portions of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, and, to a lesser degree, parts of northern Nevada and northern Utah. The commander and district engineer
for the Walla Walla district is Lieutenant Colonel Randy L. Glaeser. Lieutenant Glaeser is a career military officer who received a master’s degree in civil engineering
from the University of Missouri at Rolla, and who is generally responsible for the regional management of five large dams in the lower Snake River basin.

For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District manages eight large dams in total: McNary Dam on the Columbia River; Ice Harbor, Lower
Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite dams on the Lower Snake River; Dworshak Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater River; and Lucky Peak Dam on
the South Fork of the Boise River. The Walla Walla District’s impact on the basin is measured by the magnitude of natural resource modifications, and the impact
this has had on basin related ecosystems. For instance, the total reservoir surface area for all eight dams covers 92,600 acres and has an aggregate annual
generating capacity of 4,514.5 megawatts of hydroelectric energy. Revenues reported for hydroelectric operations in FY 1998 totaled $456.9 million, and the annual
budget in 2003 for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and total costs for the Walla Walla District was $12 billion and $99 million, respectively (United States Army Corps
of Engineers 2003, 2005).

In sum, the military component in the lower Snake River basin is predicated on a concentration of social
power , which is based on a system of winners and losers in a competitive economy backed by
military strength . In the lower Snake River basin, state-sponsored military power commenced in 1805 with Lewis and
Clark and the Corps of Discovery, and, in the twenty-first centur y, newer, more concentrated , and
increasingly more complex sources of military power operate in the Columbia and Snake river basins.
Large dams are financed, constructed, managed, and perpetuated by the strength of the U nited S tates
military and defense-related agencies more specifically.

US militarism is an unsustainable fungibility machine---extinction.

Mercer '5/13 [Matthew; 5/13/21; writer for Red Flag; "How militarism is killing the planet,"
https://redflag.org.au/article/how-militarism-killing-planet/]

Military production depends on the consumption of large quantities of fossil fuels and involves countless
other environmentally destructive processes. The mining , refining and production of some of the key
resources employed in military production, like aluminium, steel and nickel, are highly energy intensive, producing massive
emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases .
Over half the energy required for aluminium smelting is currently produced by burning coal, and the perfluorocarbons released during the
smelting process are between 6,500 and 9,200 times more potent as drivers of global warming than carbon dioxide. Nickel mining emits
millions of tonnes of toxic sulphur dioxide per year, and has a history of severe pollution of the land, air and water surrounding mines—such as
when a major spill from the Norilsk nickel factory in Russia turned the Daldykan river bright red in 2016.

Steel production contributes 3.3 billion tonnes annually to global carbon emissions. The iron and steel industries are estimated by the
International Energy Agency to be responsible for around 6.7 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

Then there are nuclear weapons . Even if we discount the possibility that the thousands of nuclear
warheads currently armed and ready to deploy around the world will one day lead to the destruction of all
human civilisation , we must factor in the poisonous industry that produces them. Whatever the industry’s
backers might say, the risks involved in mining uranium, producing power in nuclear reactors and dealing with radioactive waste are all too
obvious from the history of highly destructive accidents—from the Ranger uranium mine spill in 2013, to the catastrophic meltdowns at
Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The US military is both the world’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels and its largest producer of
carbon emissions. The five largest US chemical companies combined produce only a fifth of the military’s
emissions.
Multiple studies show a correlation between states’ increased military spending and high emissions. Armies internationally are also responsible
for two-thirds of global emissions of chlorofluorocarbons—a volatile derivative of methane that, in addition to contributing to global warming,
destroys the ozone layer that protects Earth from damaging ultraviolet light (a major cause of skin cancer). These substances were banned
under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, but the military use of them goes on.

And all this concerns only the day to day “peacetime” operations of the military. War itself, as well as
killing, maiming and destroying human lives, is catastrophic for the environment , flattening landscapes and
poisoning the air.
Environmental destruction can be a conscious tool of warfare. During the Vietnam War, the US sprayed an estimated
20 million gallons of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange across the country in order to clear forest canopies providing cover to North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops and to cripple agriculture. The toxic effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam’s environment, farming and human
life continue to today.

Even when not purposefully destroying nature , warfare causes irreparable environmental damage . The
US bombing campaigns in Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s created extensive pollution and environmental degradation. The use of ammunition
tipped with depleted uranium contaminated possibly tens of thousands of hectares of Iraqi land and led to elevated levels of birth defects in
communities where the bombing was most intense.

And the initial destruction wrought by wars has massive roll-on effects . After the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 US
invasion, cases of typhoid increased tenfold among the Iraqi population as a result of water pollution due to the destruction of sewage systems
and other basic infrastructure.

Similar damage occurred in Afghanistan. Already in 2003, just two years into a war that has now dragged on for two decades, a United Nations
Environment Programme report found that the war, combined with a lengthy drought , had “caused serious and widespread land
and resource degradation , including lowered water tables , desiccation of wetlands , deforestation
and widespread loss of vegetative cover, erosion , and loss of wildlife populations”.

The settler imagery of nuclear war is an illusory claim that ignores the all-ready
nuclear conflict against indigenous peoples.
Kato 93 – Ph.D., political science from the University of Hawai’i, M.A., social cultural anthropology from
Hiroshima University, M.A., political science from University of Hawai’i (Masahide, 1993, “Nuclear
Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze”, Alternatives 18, 1993,
p. 346-349, ProQuest via UMich Libraries, recut by kh)
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for

The penetration of capital

incorporating every fabric of the society into the division of labor but also by the desire for “pure” destruction/extermination of the periphery?

into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not
separable. However, what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital
is no longer interested in incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of
labor. The emergence of such “ pure ” destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained , at least
partially, by another problematic of late capital ism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the, mass production of the means of destruction.” Particularly, the latest
phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of the “ultimate” means of destruction/extermination, i.e., nuclear weapons.

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of “strategy” changed its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by

the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically
contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the First World
community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant

only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy , for instance, apocalyptic

imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of
“nuclear testing” since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945Z As of 1991 1,924 nuclear explosions
have occurred on earth?* The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the U nited S tates ( 936 times ), the former
Soviet Union (7l5 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times).P8 The primary targets of warfare (“test site” to use Nuke Speak

terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples . Thus history has
already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36
times)?O Moreover, although I focus primarily on “nuclear tests” in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel
cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous
Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole , nuclear war , albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and
Indigenous Nations . The dismal consequences of “intensive exploitation,” “low intensity intervention,”
or the “nullification of the sovereignty” in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a
form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.

Thus,from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has
never been the “ unthinkable ” single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and

ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and
consciousness of the First World community . Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the “ real ” of
nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth’s Nuchar Playground, which extensively covers the history of “nuclear
testing” in the Pacific:

Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our

survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against
nature itself.”
Although Firth‘s book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of “nuclear testing” in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the “nuclear explosions” and the nuclear

war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuc lear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject (“we”) is
located higher than the “real” of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value . This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing procetses of the
destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated
and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/ obliteration of the “real” of nuclear. warfare has
been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism . Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear
catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations
almost on a daily basis.

Extinctions are all around us now---BUT, settler claims towards “future disposability”
masks genocidal violence.
Ahuja, 15 [Neel Ahuja, Professor in the English department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
“Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” 2015, Duke University Press]//Townes
Thinking beyond the Freudian formulation of a traumatic encounter with objects that moves the subject into a narcissistic fortress of identity, Bersani hopes to

dissolve the subject by theorizing an abstract space of “death” or “the nonhuman.” But for those colonized, made into waste , and
resurrected as parasite , there is no hope for transcendence . Fanon argues that, in expanding and mastering the
world , the settler enacts a racial ecology that both feeds parasitically on the colonized and reproduces
the dependent conditions that justify their constant displacement . From here, I suggest reading Bersani’s references to the mosquito
and the settler as meditations on the reproductive force of the living, a force that may casually extinguish life in the name of a
mythic freedom .
Lateral Reproductions

Three decades after the onset of the AIDS crisis, the climate crisis presses queer theory for a planetary account of reproduction. The present essay attempts to
recuperate, by tracing reproductive figures like the mosquito and the settler through contemporary climate discourses, an ecological dimension of queer critique.
The persistent opposition of life and death , relation and negation in queer critical discourses is a symptom of a
field’s attempt to articulate an antihumanist ethic in the absence of a materialist account of ecological space and
interspecies relation . Such an account is especially pressing given that any vision of freedom in today’s global North—including visions of
freedom both staked on the reproduction of the nuclear family and on the refusal of it— are imbricated in racialized forms of carbon
privilege that disperse social and biological precarity .6 Thus Fanon’s emphasis on colonialism’s spatial reproduction of
racial disposability must be rethought in relation to today’s carbon-fueled exterminations of peoples, species, and
entire ways of life.
In this essay I explore relations between reproduction and extinction through a specific environmental crisis: fears of mosquito-borne diseases in a warming
atmosphere. To understand this arena of crisis—in which carbon wastes trap solar heat, driving the transborder migration of insects that feed on and reproduce
through human bodies—it is necessary to reconfigure notions of intimacy and reproduction across the planet: minerals, mosquitoes, settlers, gases, solar rays, and
other bodies share in reproductive metabolisms crossing scales, species, and systems, invigorating “performances of adjustment that make a shared atmosphere
something palpable.”7 Atmosphere, then, has a double valence: it signals both the interspecies
intimacy structured by
geophysical forces of the earth and the ambient senses of crisis, withering, and extermination that intensify as the
underside of neoliberal freedom. Atmospheric intimacies signal that the reproductive forces and waste effects of carbon intensify
contradictions between precarity and freedom, reforming the political through a model of action distinct from the agency of the human sovereign. Drawing on

Lauren Berlant’s conception of a “lateral” biopolitics in which subjects manage “the difficulty of reproducing contemporary life” in “ a mode
of coasting ,” I question both the xenophobic rendering of the environmental parasite in climate discourse and the sovereignty of the antirelational stance
against reproduction in queer theory.8 I argue instead that neoliberal subjects (including queer subjects) are engulfed by processes
linking the reproduction of the ordinary and the extermination of various life-forms and forms of life. 9
Carbon-fueled forms of neoliberal freedom at once unleash waste and precarity on far-flung bodies while expanding the potential of others, reformulating

racialized divisions between surplus and waste .10

Given that the reproduction of late-carbon liberalism , its “ parasitic ” relation to the earth, exterminates through its very
processes of reproduction , it is no surprise that today visions of the future human , including the post-HIV queer subject as human,
often evoke crisis and the imagery of detritus and death . While his polemic in No Future illuminates how futurity is wagered on normalizing
strategies, Edelman’s refusal of those strategies as constituting “life” and his resulting embrace of “death” narrows the richness and interrelation of “life” and
“death” that we encounter in the contemporary biological sciences, including climate science. We might thus benefit from thinking more broadly about
reproduction than Edelman does, recognizing that bodies and atmospheres reproduce through complex forms of socio-ecological entanglement. In what ways, we
may query, is an anthropomorphic and gendered conception of reproduction complicit with masking the violence of neoliberal systems for conducting life?

Ecological thought refuses an “outside” to reproduction, a sovereign space of ethical hygiene from which to
queer.11 Liberalism thrives on masking violence through ruses of the individual’s transcendence , the refusal of the
“promiscuous” interspecies connections that make bodies, according to Donna Haraway, “constitutively a crowd.”12 Within queer studies, Tim Dean’s unique study
Unlimited Intimacy resists this tendency by offering an ecology of gay social reproduction linking bodies, species, technologies, and social spaces.13 Dean’s
examination of “bug chasers”—men who seek HIV infection, in the process creating networks of kin filiated through viral transmission— shows that social and
biological reproduction can be deeply intertwined via forms of interspecies entanglement. In this case, men describe contracting the virus through metaphors of
viral impregnation, digestion, and kinship. From another entry point, scholars working at the intersections of trans studies and science studies document biology’s
queer reproductions, noting that intersex embodiments and homosexuality are completely mundane evolutionary events sustaining species and life systems.14 Not
all publics denominated as “queer” engage reproduction in such explicit terms. But in the production of waste and the consumption of goods, queer publics are
deeply linked in ecosocial processes of reproduction.

Karl Marx once explained that capitalism was alienated from “nature” by using the digestive metaphor of an
overactive metabolism , an extractive potential that could outpace the soil’s normative reproductive rhythms .
Today it is alternatively said that life itself poses reproductive constraints on the form of capital.15 Contemporary visions of ecological waste and scarcity as “limits

to capital” reflect that ecocidal violence is more often narrated as a crisis of overconsumption than as a problem of enclosure or of
racialized divisions of carbon privilege and waste effects. Environmentalist views of capitalism as frenetic overconsumption link the unequal
processes of surplus extraction to the aesthetics of “wasteful” bodies expanding uncontrollably in space. This development takes on a loaded moral and ideological

character when metaphors link species, nations, races, populations, or subcultures to the opprobrium of the fat or
unconstrained body , an opprobrium that outside environmental debates is elsewhere visited on immigrants or the recipients
of social welfare who are racialized as leeches on the social body. This is one example of how neoliberal debates over
environmental crisis are saturated with analogies of the parasite : they name how some bodies are made to expand and
crowd out the reproductive futures of others .
Bersani outlines two forms of parasitic replication we might follow laterally against Edelman’s conception of sovereign reproduction. In the image of the mosquito,
we find the contagious virus associated with speed, engulfment, and mutation, which crosses bodies whose own temporalities may be interrupted or radically
shortened by the transformations of contact. Alternatively, the settler commits extractive displacement, occupying a host ecology to appropriate energy and matter,
even if, Scrooge-like, it collects only to deprive others.16 Parasites produce curious archives—sometimes residing in bodies rather than texts, often displaced or
disposed from sites of contact. These ideologically loaded figures pose some ambivalent and contradictory logics, ones that increasingly render neoliberal life queer
not through trumpeted expansions of formal human rights or homonormative kinship with children but through the lateral connections between distant bodies that
appear violent as an inherent feature of their shared existence.17 I am completely convinced by left ecological injunctions to battle against capitalism’s rendering of
high-energy-input consumption as freedom and to refuse the unjust international divisions of life and the dumping of wastes that racialize the effects of climate

change. That said, I am attuned to the genocidal, fascistic, and xenophobic logics converging in the idea of
the parasitic environmental body . In queer theory, I seek a critical discourse that inquires more deeply into the micropolitics of reproduction
and extinction, where racial divisions of climate emerge in the intimate scales of contact between human social forms and ecologies of production and waste. If, in
the ecological metaphors of literary criticism described by Valerie Rohy, “homosexuality” has long appeared “as a sort of parasite, feeding off of the failure of
normative sexuality,” a queer-theoretical response to late-carbon liberalism might involve thinking reproduction as an interspecies entry point into entangled forms
of violence—forms often distorted by moralizing and universalizing figures of the parasite.18

To Kill Softly

Media representations of climate change struggle to grasp the enormity of killing . The planetary scale of
carbon amplification , its association with expanding bodies and displaced destruction, coincides with a spectacular trauma of
extinction : ecologically violent uses of land, chemicals, and carbon are accelerating the sixth major extinction event in earth’s history. This
“event” (if we can stomach the cool rendering of mass death as a singularity) will commit 18–35 percent of extant animal and plant species to extinction by 2050.19
Perhaps one million species will disappear, and countless billions of living bodies will be denied the conditions of life or prematurely killed. Climate-related disasters
are accelerating threats to already precarious lifeways: Inuit
nations face melting Arctic ice; Maldivians and other islanders lose ground to rising
seas; vulnerabilities to infectious disease grow with shrinking water supplies; the world’s agrarian poor face crop

diseases, drought, desertification, and food price instability; and all countries face increased weather disasters. The large number of people who
depend on subsistence agriculture are already living outside the ecological “boundary parameters” that enabled the rise of modern human societies.20 In this

sense, we are already living the future of extinction . The planetary present —not some speculative future—exhibits a
staggering scale of “reproductive failure,” human and nonhuman.

Settler imaginative extinction is symbolic preservation which preserves the status quo.
Dalley, 18 —Assistant Professor of English at Daemen College (Hamish, “The deaths of settler
colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature,” Settler
Colonial Studies, 8:1, 30-46, dml)
In this way, these settler-colonial narratives of extinction begin as a contemplation of endings and end as a way
for settlers to persist . As in the classical solution to the settler-colonial paradox of origins, the native must be invoked and disavowed ,
and ultimately absorbed into the settler-colonial body as a means of accessing true belonging and the
possibility of an authentic future in place. Veracini’s description of the settler-colonial historical imagination thus applies, in modified but no less
appropriate form, to visions of futurity haunted by the possibility of death: Settler colonial themes include the perception of an impending

catastrophe that prompts permanent displacement , the tension between tradition and adaptation and between sedentarism and nomadism, the
transformative permanent shift to a new locale, the prospect of a safe ‘new land’, and the familial reproductive unit that moves as one and finally settles an arcadia that is conveniently
empty.67 And yet that parallel means that it is not entirely true to say that settlers cannot contemplate a future without themselves, or that they lack the metaphorical resources to imagine

their own demise. It is in fact characteristic of settler consciousness to continually imagine the end . But it does so through a
paradox that echoes the ambivalence of Freud’s death drive: it is a fantasy of extinction that tips over into its opposite and
becomes a method of symbolic preservation , a technique for delaying the end , for living on in the
contemplation of death .68 The settler desire for death conceals that wish – the hope that, between the
thought of the end and the act , someone will intervene , something will happen to show that it is not
really necessary , that the settlers can stay , that they have value and can go on living . In this way, they
make their own redemption , an extinction that is an act of self-preservation , deferring the hard
reckoning we know we lack the courage to face, and avoid making the real changes – material ,
political , constitutional , practical – that might alter our condition of being and set us on the path to
a real home in the world. We dream instead of ends , imagining worlds without us, thinking of what it
would be like not to be . But at every moment we know that that the dream is nothing but a dream ;
we know we will awake and still be here , unchanged, unchanging, living on, forever. Thus settlers
persist even beyond the moment of extinction they thought they wanted to arrive.

Util causes atrocities.

Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra,
“Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 , http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php,
basednewJY

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity
by destroying part of it . This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need
to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it
is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism , with the genocide of indigenous
peoples , and the African slaves . This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of
deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism , with the Gulag
and in Nazism , with the holocaust . And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective
sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask
whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion , and what its scope might be. It is above all
appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the
western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from
a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day
reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of
development to its ultimate consequences . If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third
World, this is not the result of market failures ; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having
been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate
it ; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all
terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and
knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives ; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to
infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has
experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history:
Stalinism , with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism , with its logic of racial superiority;
and neoliberalism , with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved
the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy , disarming it in the face of social
actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour.
I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion,

worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death
drive , a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable
by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective
suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization,

neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea
of " discardable populations ", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as
workers and consumers, to the concept of " collateral damage " , to refer to the deaths, as a result of
war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental
Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war
will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically,

sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor
force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural
exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian
illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in
decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation , legitimizing the most shameful
violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In
today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization
with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and
destruction.

You have a structural bias against the AFF---correct towards prioritizing settler
violence.
King 20, PhD, professor in the Liberal Studies department at Grand Valley State University (Sarah, “What
We’re Talking about When We’re Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint,
Michigan,” in The Wonder of Water, UMich Libraries)//BB

For many North Americans, reflecting on and analysing their role as settlers in colonial nations2 – and about their
relationship to place in this context – is a fundamental challenge. The liberal discourse of equality often denies that
racism is a systemic or everyday problem, promoting instead a “‘national story’ of benevolence and generosity” (Srivastava
2005, 35). Srivastava suggests that Canadians operate within “contemporary national discourses of tolerance, multiculturalism and
nonracism” that mask ongoing racialized conflicts (35). Addressing the racialized structure of society is profoundly challenging

because Canadian and American moral identity is so tied up in a vision of equality, a vision that, like all national visions,
“ requires not only sameness and communion but also forgetting difference and oppression” (Benedict Anderson, in Srivastava
2005, 39). This vision of sameness and nonracism is fundamental to the vision that the Canadian government sought to uphold in Esgenoôpetitj,
and that the Michigan government used to frame its emergency manager laws. Confronting the racism inherent in North American
relationships with Indigenous peoples requires confronting fundamental questions about the history and legitimacy of the colonial states of

Canada and the US. Taiaiake Alfred, an Indigenist academic, argues that most Settlers are in denial . They know that the
foundations of their countries are corrupt, and they know that their countries are “colonial” in historical
terms, but they still refuse to see and accept the fact that there can be no rhetorical transcendence and
retelling of the past to make it right without making fundamental changes to their government, society,
and the way they live ... To deny the truth is an essential cultural and psychological process
in Settler society . (2005, 107) Many settlers know Canada/the US as their only home, and wonder, as some of the people I interviewed
in Burnt Church did, why they must pay for the sins of their forefathers. But the problems inherent in settler relationships
with Indigenous peoples are not only historical; they exist in individual, social, and political lives in the
present . The fundamental discomfort of reflection on race and racism makes it difficult for many to
reflect upon their shared position in the colonial present .
 1AC---Plan
The United States federal government should substantially protect its water resources
by regulating the use of the lower four dams on the Snake River in the United States.
 1AC---Solvency
Contention Two is Solvency:

Plan is key to sustainable ecosystems---solves spiritual and cultural concerns.

Chaffin and Gosnell 17 – Ph.D., Geography, associate professor of water policy and governance @
University of Montana; Ph.D., geography, professor w/ tenure @ Oregon State (Brian C. and Hannah,
2017, “Beyond mandatory fishways: Federal hydropower relicensing as a window of opportunity for
dam removal and adaptive governance of riverine landscapes in the United States,” Water Alternatives
10(3), ProQuest via UMich Libraries, p. 830-831)//kh

DISCUSSION: FERC RELICENSING AS A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY FOR DAM REMOVAL AND THE
INSTITUTIONALISATION OF ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE

Dam removal is often characterised as a means to pursue the ecological restoration of degraded river
systems. Post-dam removal monitoring and assessment of rivers previously fragmented with large dams (some hydroelectric) has clearly
shown the biophysical benefits of dam removal, specifically in terms of fish population resurgence (e.g. Poulos et al., 2014; Null et al., 2014;
Quinones et al., 2015) and renewed physical dynamics such as sediment transport (e.g. Warrick et al., 2015; Magilligan et al., 2016b). Although
the term restoration is contested given our limited understanding and conceptualisations of pre-historic ecological conditions and human
influences (Bliss and Fischer, 2011), today it is easy to recognise a dam as a physical barrier to the natural spatial and temporal processes that
define connected river networks. What
is more difficult to recognise without substantial social and economic
investigation is the degree to which dams can both stifle and support human systems through the
provision of marketable economic goods (e.g. fish species, hydroelectricity, property values), nonmarket values (e.g. cultural and
spiritual resources, recreation opportunities, aesthetic value) and potentially marketable services (e.g. clean water, flood control). In some
cases dams are critical to producing services necessary to support established human communities; for example, a single dam can be a source
for hydropower, flood control, recreation and even drinking water. In other cases a dam that has outlived its structural life may pose a physical
hazard to communities downstream, or a climatic shift causing decreasing annual precipitation may render a dam obsolete for its intended
purpose, such as flood control, hydropower or recreation. Either way, given the regulatory structure of hydropower licensing in the US and its
interaction with environmental legislation such as the ESA, NEPA and the CWA, the periodic re-evaluation of dam infrastructure is less a
diametric decision over dammed versus free-flowing rivers and more a negotiation over changed and changing social and ecological values of
river systems, associated resources and services. Dam removal is thus distinctly a question of changing environmental governance. The
recent and increasing decisions to remove dams, both in the US and globally, may signal the emergence
of adaptive governance toward the pursuit of sustainability and the restoration of social-ecological
resilience in degraded river basins.
Evidence from the Pacific Northwest cases that dam removal may signal a transition toward adaptive governance of river landscapes starts with
the underlying perception that each river basin was socially and ecologically degraded prior to dam removal vis-à-vis the loss of fish species and
aquatic habitat, the loss of cultural identity and culturally important resources or simply that the river system no longer addressed major
societal needs or reflected societal values. From
this perception of degradation or crisis aspects of adaptive
governance began to emerge, such as charismatic leadership, shadow networks of informal governance
actors, and diffuse, multi-sectoral attempts to institutionalise a change in river management ( e.g. Gosnell
and Kelly, 2010; Guarino, 2013; Chaffin et al., 2014a). Each case highlights a relatively different pathway from the emergence of these initial
aspects of adaptive governance to dam removal as institutionalised adaptive governance, but across all four cases the FERC ALP stands out as a
window of opportunity linking the two key phases of the governance transition. The
unique aspects of the FERC ALP in each
case may help scholars of adaptive governance to better understand windows of opportunity and why
they are rarely utilised to address social-ecological degradation (see Olsson et al., 2006; Huitema et al., 2009; Walker et
al., 2010).

As a goal of adaptive governance, social-ecological

restoration can serve as a helpful mediating concept to better
understand the potential of dam removal as a window of opportunit y (Higgs, 2005; Gosnell and Kelly, 2010).
Restoration implies a return to a previous condition, i.e. a historic baseline, but can also be interpreted as
renewing desired functionality through structure and process in both human and biophysical aspects of
systems (Higgs, 1997). Dam removal can facilitate this type of restoration in river systems as evidenced by the rapid return of previously
extirpated anadromous fish in both the White Salmon and Elwha River systems post-dam removal. But the ecological renewal of
these rivers post-dam removal is also partly social renewal ; in both cases salmon and steelhead species
are culturally and spiritually significant to Native American tribes , who retain lands and fishing rights in
these watersheds. In addition, restoration of the Elwha River has enhanced the biophysical integrity of Olympic National Park, land
reserved for public enjoyment of its natural character. The White Salmon River is an important river for whitewater recreation, serving as a
social draw to the region as well as an economic engine for local communities; the removal of Condit Dam opened up additional kilometres of
whitewater boating access.

Solves salmon.
Golden 21 (Hallie, 6-9-2021, "Salmon face extinction throughout the US west. Blame these four dams,"
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/09/salmon-future-us-dams)//kh

Today, experts have voiced concern that the salmon are headed toward a point of no return .

The loss
of these anadromous fish along a waterway that twists through western Wyoming, Idaho,
Washington and Oregon, would wreak havoc on over 130 species that depend on salmon – from
salamanders to whales – and leave a gaping hole in a region that prides itself on hosting them. Thirteen populations of Columbia-
Snake salmon and steelhead are protected under the Endangered Species Act.

But for the Nez Perce community and other Columbia River basin tribes, whose physical sustenance and cultural and spiritual
practices have been tied with salmon for millennia, it would be pure devastation .

“It puts us in a situation where we start asking the question, who would we be if we didn’t have salmon? If
they became extinct, then as
salmon people , who would we become?” said Alyssa Macy, CEO of the Washington Environmental
Council and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs . “Obviously, that’s a question that none of us want to
answer.”

Just as the situation reaches a fever pitch, an unlikely pair of bipartisan US congressmen out of Idaho and Oregon have come on to the scene, championing a
$33.5bn solution centered on breaching – that is, dismantling – the four dams.

Mike Simpson, the Republican congressman from Idaho who first introduced the proposal,
is resolute in his efforts to get ahead of
what he described as an impending “train wreck”: the Bonneville Power Administration – the federal
agency which markets electrical power from 31 hydroelectric dams – facing key financial problems due in part to salmon
mitigation costs, or the dams being removed without any thought to the communities and industries that rely on

them, or ultimately the salmon disappearing altogether.

While many different political choices can be made, “salmon don’t have a choice ”, he said. “They need a river. And right
now, they don’t have a river.”

The dams back up the water flow for miles, increase water temperature and create an overall much
longer and thus more dangerous journey for them, explained Jay Hesse, director of biological services for the Nez Perce tribe.
Mitigation efforts involve a complex and costly system of fish ladders for adults, spillways for juveniles to get through, a barge transporting them down river, and
even wires and loud noises to keep predators away.

The proposal to breach the dams is timely : the Biden administration has signaled an appetite for big
spending on infrastructure ; the flood of renewables have created uncertainty for hydropower; and
leaders in a wide array of sectors have signaled interest in finding solutions , explained David Moryc, senior director of
wild and scenic rivers and public lands policy at the non-profit conservation organization American Rivers.

In other words, he said, there’s a unique merging of both crisis and opportunity .

In north-east Oregon, the

creation story for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation begins
with a sacrifice by the salmon, explained Don Sampson, a member of the tribe and an advisory board member for the Northwest Tribal Salmon
Alliance. Out of a crowd of animals, they were the first to respond to a call from the Creator warning that

the humans were coming and would need nourishment.

The story goes that the salmon’s responsibility would be to travel through the waters, ingesting food in
order to provide nourishment to humans. In exchange, the tribe was given the sacred duty of taking care of
the salmon and honoring them through prayer and ceremony.

“ This is part of our religious belief. We do it every Sunday at our church,” said Sampson. “We sing our ceremonial songs.
We teach our kids about who they are by these religious beliefs and the relationship to the animals and the plants. And that is our identity.” Similar

stories can be found across the Pacific north-west.

For thousands of years, both the salmon and humans remained largely in step. The Native communities
would eat what they needed, while large portions of the population would be left to complete their
lifecycle of hatching in fresh water, traveling downstream to the ocean and then returning to their birthplace to spawn and die.
But a little over a century ago, the situation started to shift. Initially, largely unregulated commercial fishing fueled by the expansion of salmon canneries resulted in
the population declining. In the years that followed, the runs were further strained by habitat loss.

By 1975, the US army corps of engineers completed construction of a series of four dams across just 137 miles of the lower Snake River in Washington in an effort to
produce renewable energy while facilitating barge transportation.

After construction of the dams was completed, wild salmon returns fell by more than 90%, according to
American Rivers. The Idaho Conservation League reported that before the dams, about 1.5 million spring-summer chinook
salmon returned each year to the Snake River. By 2017, only about 5,800 wild spring-summer chinook
completed that journey.

The impact is especially evident when looking at the smolt-to-adult returns below the dams, compared with above. While
3.5% of salmon survive
the ocean and make it through three dams to return to the John Day River to spawn, only 2.4% return to
the Yakima River after passing through four dams (2% is considered the minimum needed for salmon
persistence). By comparison, less than 1% of salmon return to the Snake River after crossing eight dams ,
according to Trout Unlimited, a conservation non-profit organization.

The dams are spaced so closely that they have created a type of “pressure point” for the salmon population, explained David Montgomery, author of King of Fish:
The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. Removing
them wouldn’t get rid of all of the historical impacts that there have
been, according to him, “but it’s an impact that can be undone in a single stroke that is acknowledged
to be very likely to have a major effect”.

Last February, 68 of the country’s top salmon and fisheries experts sent a letter to north-west leaders
stating that in order to avoid extinction and restore the once abundant salmon runs, these four dams
would need to be removed . Two months later, American Rivers listed the Snake as the country’s most
endangered river, citing the dams, along with the climate crisis and poor water quality, as its biggest threats .
A Columbia River system impact statement last year reported that breaching these dams would have
the greatest positive impact on Snake River salmon. But the report, which was authored by the US army corps of engineers, Bureau
of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration, ultimately did not endorse such a plan due to the “adverse impacts to other resources such as transportation,
power reliability and affordability, and greenhouse gas emissions”.

In 2016, it was reported that the four dams were producing on average over 1,000 megawatts of energy each year – or enough to power 800,000 American homes.
But as the renewable energy sector continues to shift and hydropower competes against low-cost
renewable energy, including solar and wind, there is some uncertainty when it comes to what the future
will look like for the industry.

Against this backdrop, more than $17bn has been spent in recent decades as part of federal salmon recovery
efforts.

The local tribes have contributed through habitat recovery efforts and extensive salmon hatchery work.
The Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery has been working toward releasing 825,000 Spring Chinook this year –
200,000 more than last year.
Erik Holt, a member of the Nez Perce tribe and its fish and wildlife commission chair, was seven the first time he caught a salmon. It was the summer of 1977, and
he and his family had hiked the two miles up to the Blue Hole on the Imnaha River, a tributary of the Snake River, in Oregon.

Clutching an 18ft gaff and tied to his grandpa to make sure he didn’t fall in, Holt struggled against the strength of the creature.

“I could feel the power and the spirit of it all because it just absorbs you,” Holt said. “Even as a young boy, I could feel that.”

Since then, he’s worked to introduce the tribe’s younger generations to fishing, including his 10-year-old nephew. He’s taught him the basic mechanics of the
practice, and also about how to treat such a sacred place:

“When you get to the river, you pray for your pole and then you put it in the water and you say another prayer … [Then] you got to get in the water yourself. And
that’s what we call washing the bad medicine away. Before you even go fishing, you get in that water, you wash off and purify yourself.”

Holt’s nephew was excited to travel out to the Clearwater, a tributary of the Snake in Idaho, to carry on the tradition. He had his hook, line and mini dip net ready to
go when Holt broke the news that the fishery had been closed because of the lack of salmon.

He said it was “devastating” to have to explain it to him and see the forlorn look on his face.

Already this season, the Nez Perce tribe has closed virtually all of the lower Snake River to fishing, along
with most of the middle and upper parts of the Salmon River, in an effort to protect the salmon. The
Clearwater has recently been opened, but with very limited harvest.

These closures can affect Native families’ ability to travel out together to fish and share songs and
prayer, and also the tribe’s ability to feature the salmon in their first foods ceremonies and funeral
services, explained Shannon Wheeler, the Nez Perce tribal vice-chairman.

The possibility of losing salmon altogether also gets in the way of treaties the federal government
signed with Nez Perce and many other local tribes. About 150 years ago, they fought to secure rights to
fish these waterways. Having to close down fisheries because there’s not enough salmon is a huge
infringement on crucial contracts.

“In that treaty, we bargained for a way of life, ” said Wheeler. “We ceded well over 13m acres of land to the
United States government, to be held in trust for our way of life. That way of life included salmon.”

The fight to remove these dams is more than just about the survival of salmon .
It’s also about the cultural impact these structures have had on the surrounding
Native community.
Standing on a dock in the middle of a largely motionless section of the Snake River in Colton, Washington, Louis Reuben looked out on to what had once been his
ancestors’ home. He pointed out the spot he believed had held a series of rock formations perfect for fishing, and the hills that may have housed graveyards.

“The dams displaced us, disconnected us from our place of origin for me,” said Reuben, a Nez Perce tribal member and descendant of the Wawawai Band of the Nez
Perce. “It’s difficult to go back to a place that’s underwater. It really kind of put a huge dent in my identity as an Indigenous person.”

For Reuben, a free-flowing Snake River would finally give him the chance to return to the cave where his great-grandfather was born, and the place where his
ancestors lived before being moved on to the reservation.

In April, representatives from 12 tribes located throughout the north-west devoted two days to
discussions on dismantling these dams and the overall proposal first presented by Mike Simpson and
then supported by Congressman Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon.
Simpson is resolute in his effort. “Everything we do on the Lower Columbia and Snake River can be done differently if we choose to do it,” he told the Guardian.

Kat Brigham, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation board of trustees chair, said that they support the proposal, applauding the lawmakers for
thinking outside the box. She highlighted the fact that there have been periods where parts of the Columbia River basin had no salmon runs, but they were able to
rebuild them.

“We know it’s possible,” she said. “But we have to do it together. No tribe, no state, no federal agency , or no individual organization can
rebuild these runs. It has to be collaborative, partnership approach.”
In addition to breaching the dams, the proposal would include funds to replace the energy lost and help the agricultural community reconfigure transportation. But
it would also involve waiting about 10 years before the dams are breached, offer a 35-year license extension for other dams in the Columbia River basin and provide
a 35-year dam litigation moratorium.

Some stakeholders still have plenty of questions about its viability.

In May, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, and Senator Patty Murray released a statement rejecting the proposal.

Kristin Meira, executive director for Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, made up of ports, barge companies, steamship operators and farmers, also spoke out
against the proposal, citing the toll it would take on hydropower and barge transportation.

More than a dozen environmental organizations sent a letter in March to Democratic lawmakers in Washington and Oregon explaining that while they support
removing the four dams, it should not be at the expense of environmental protections.

Simpson said that he put the proposal out there to continue the discussion and is open to hearing ideas and suggestions. But
after about 500
meetings with tribes, environmental groups, state representatives and a variety of other stakeholders
over the last three years, he said it was clear that salmon recovery will need to involve removing these
dams .
Back at Rapid River, Tuell lifted up his dip net and began the short walk with Nat’aani through the high grass away from the river. The sound of water crashing
against rocks and branches slowly began to dim.

Nat’aani turned to Tuell: “Next week might be better.”

The two continued on in silence. The uncertainty of the season ahead hung in the air.

The Nez Percé are advocating for the plan---now is key.

Souers Kober 21– Vice president of communications for American Rivers, a national conservation
organization, BA from Trinity College (Amy, 6-19-2021, "Biden Has a Chance to Oversee Biggest River
Restoration Project in US History," Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/biden-has-a-chance-to-
oversee-the-biggest-river-restoration-project-in-history/)//kh

“ We Choose Salmon ”
For decades, Northwest tribes have been spearheading salmon recovery solutions in the Columbia-Snake River Basin and regionwide. The Nimíipuu, or Nez Percé, Tribe adopted its first
resolution advocating for the removal of the four lower Snake River dams in 1999. Removing these dams would restore 140 miles of the lower Snake River and improve access to more than
5,000 miles of pristine habitat in places like Idaho’s Salmon and Clearwater River systems.
 Wheeler, then chairman of the Nez Percé Tribal Executive Committee, said, “We view
In a 2020 statement, Shannon F.

restoring the lower Snake River as urgent and overdue . To us, the lower Snake River is a living being,
and, as stewards, we are compelled to speak the truth on behalf of this life force and the impacts these
concrete barriers on the lower Snake have on salmon, steelhead, and lamprey, on a diverse ecosystem,
on our Treaty-reserved way of life, and on our people .”

Today, tribal leaders are raising their voices again. In May 2021, the
Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians — a group
representing 57 Northwest tribal governments — passed a resolution calling for the breaching of the
lower Snake dams . The resolution calls on Congress and the Biden administration to “seize the once-in-a-
lifetime congressional opportunity to invest in salmon and river restoration in the Pacific Northwest,
charting a stronger, better future for the Northwest, and bringing long-ignored tribal justice to our
peoples and homelands.”

“Restoring the lower Snake River will allow salmon , steelhead and lamprey to flourish in the rivers and
streams of the Snake Basin,” said Kat Brigham, chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) Board of
Trustees in a February 8 press release. “This has long been a priority because these are the CTUIR’s ancestral traditional use
areas, such as the Grande Ronde, Imnaha, Lostine, Minam, Tucannon and Wallowa Rivers and their
tributaries.”

“We have reached a tipping point where we must choose between our Treaty-protected salmon and
the federal dams, and we choose salmon ,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman Delano Saluskin,
was quoted saying in a press release.

Other workarounds fail---AND, speed is key.

Leslie, 19 --- book on dams, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the
Environment, won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for its "elegant, beautiful
prose”(OCTOBER 10, 2019, JACQUES LESLIE, “On the Northwest’s Snake River, the Case for Dam
Removal Grows; As renewable energy becomes cheaper than hydropower and the presence of dams
worsens the plight of salmon, pressure is mounting in the Pacific Northwest to take down four key dams
on the lower Snake River that critics say have outlived their usefulness,”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-northwests-snake-river-the-case-for-dam-removal-grows, JMP)
***Note --- Anthony Jones is an independent economist at Rocky Mountain Econometrics who has
studied Bonneville’s finances for more than two decades
In 1993, environmental groups sued Bonneville and other federal agencies for violating the Endangered Species Act in their treatment of Snake
River salmon, beginning a cycle of litigation that continues to this day. On at least five occasions, federal
judges ordered the
agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with
delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the
Endangered Species Act.

Instead of removing the dams, the agencies have installed screens to prevent smolts from being
pummeled by the dams’ turbines. They have placed water tanks inside barges and trucks and
transported smolts in them to bypass the dams. They have built water-filled fish elevators to improve
the survival of adult salmon swimming upstream. And they have installed at least seven hatcheries that
release millions of smolts each year into the Snake. None of this has significantly helped native salmon recover. As
Jones told me, dam removal is the one untried option , and the only one with high promise of benefiting
both salmon and Bonneville’s finances.

Bonneville is deeply entrenched in the activities of the region’s outdoors-minded residents, as it funds
Congressionally-mandated programs for dams, hatcheries, river restoration, Native American tribes, and
a nuclear power plant. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican Congress member from eastern
Washington, spoke for many of Bonneville’s supporters in July, when she said, “For me, dam breaching
is off the table… Bottom line: dams and fish coexist.” She denounced the ECONorthwest report as
“another example of Seattle-based interests seeking to disrupt our way of life in Central and Eastern
Washington.”

For now, Snake River dam removal faces long odds, but for the first time there’s a growing sense that it will
happen sooner or later, once Bonneville comes to terms with the dams’ diminished worth. Whether that
will occur in time to avert orca and salmon extinctions remains unknown.

Only congress can remove federal dams

Crossley, 21 (April 2021, Trista Crossley, “Who has final say? Only Congress can authorize breaching the
lower Snake River dams,” https://wheatlife.org/p_0421_Simpson_authorization.html, JMP)

the lower Snake River dams, it feels like judges hold a significant amount of sway
To anyone following the controversy about

over them. That raises the question, does a judge have the authority to order the dams breached? The short answer is no,
only Congress can do that .

the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) stated that

In the Columbia River System Operations Final Environmental Impact Statement released in 2020,

“significant modifications to completed projects… require authorization by Congress .” Because breaching one or more
of the lower Snake River dams would result in major structural or operational changes, that action is considered a significant modification and would require congressional authorization, a
lengthy, multistep process, said Kristin Meira, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association (PNWA). PNWA is a nonprofit trade association of ports, businesses, public
agencies and individuals who support navigation, energy, trade and economic development throughout the Pacific Northwest. Their members work closely with the Corps and advocate for
funding to ensure federal navigation projects can operate safely and reliably.

They can’t compartmentalize their reps.

Varady et al., 21 [Robert G. Varady, researcher @ University of Arizona in Water governance and policy,
Tamee R. Albrecht, Tamee Albrecht is a Ph.D. student in the School of Geography and Development and
a graduate research associate at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, Chad Staddon is Senior
Lecturer in Geography, in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, Andrea K. Gerlak, researcher @ the University of Arizona
in Environmental Policy and Governance, Collaborative Governance, Water Policy, Institutions, and
Adriana Zuniga-Teran is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Arizona's Udall Center for
Studies in Public Policy, “The Water Security Discourse and Its Main Actors,” June 13, 2021, Springer
Nature]//Townes

This is a chapter about the advent and adoption by water scholars of a new term, “water security.” Language is an organic entity
and it grows and shrinks as some words and concepts enter, evolve, change meaning and , sometimes, disappear . Here,
we explore the discourse surrounding this particular term and the persons and institutions that have found it useful, channeled it, challenged it,
and popularized it.

We are writing about an extended conversation that has been taking place since the start of this century. We hope our narrative will yield some
thoughtful insights, as we tell a story that is an account of the apparent need for a fresh way to characterize an aspect
of water management and use .
8.1.1 The Advent of Framings and Paradigms 95 in Global Water Governance

water shows that water security is hardly the first term to enter the vocabulary of water
A review of the past half- century’s literature on
professionals and observers with the promise of new beginnings, fresh insights, and even intellectual revolutions. It has come on the
heels of a cascade of competing notions, concepts, framings , and paradigms —all seeking some explanatory power over a
ubiquitous, complex, and extensive phenomenon: the role of water in society

Until the rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s, water was chiefly a subject of concern for hydrologists,
hydraulic engineers , irrigation specialists, biochemists, sanitation engineers, public health professionals , and other
technically-oriented practitioners . Most of these specializations are themselves relatively young, tracing their origins only to the
mid- or late- nineteenth century. A key in flection point, the post-World War II period, was characterized as one of “boundless confidence
in the ability of science and technology to transform society and adapt the landscape to human needs ”
(Varady et al. 2008; Staddon 2010). To be sure, there were interfaces between emergent water professions and populations, communities,
households, and livelihoods. But for the most part, the literature of the period concentrates on public works, infrastructure, and what are
termed “supply-side” or “hard-path” approaches to water management — approaches whose primary aim is to assure
sufficient quantities of safe water irrespective of cost, social impact, or environmental consequence.
8.1.1.1 Soft-Path Approaches and the Growing Role of Governance

Already, by the late 1970s, Lovins, looking for unconventional approaches to management—albeit in his case, in the energy sector—coined the
term “soft path” (Lovins 1977). In the water sector, by the late 1980s scholars like Brooks and Peters (1988) were exploring alternatives by
considering what they called the “potential for demand management.” A decade-and-a-half later, Wolff and Gleick, in their biennial publication,
The World’s Water 2002–2003, recognized that potential and, explicitly acknowledging Lovins, called their opening chapter, “The Soft Path for
Water.” At about the same time, Brooks (2003, 2005) had morphed his own demand-management approach towards the Wolff-Gleick concept
of “soft paths for water,” a phrasing that has since caught hold and refers to any measure that does not involve merely building new supply.

Since the mid-1990s, the soft-path approach to managing water that has been arguably the most notable has emphasized the interrelatedness
of the various aspects of water management. This approach has become as Integrated Water Resources
Management (IWRM). Below, we will discuss IWRM in some detail and show how derivative thinking led from IWRM to water security,
the theme of this chapter.

But understanding and appreciating soft-path approaches like IWRM, it turns out, requires a brief intellectual detour and a change in focus.
Instead of seeing water management solely or largely as a means to provide more water, this view stresses the significance of
“ governance ”—yet another term, also deeply complex, that has penetrated the modern vocabulary of water scholarship. Echoing the
theme of ebb-and-flow of linguistic catch phrases, the Finnish scholar Tilhonen (2004), called governance “a term of the day,” questioning its
durability.

Unsurprisingly, like many such all-encompassing expressions, governance turns out to be a slippery and chameleon-like concept. The term has
many definitions, but according to Bevir—a political scientist—in its broadest sense, governance refers to processes undertaken by
“a government, market or network, … a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory and whether through the laws, norms, power
or language of an organized society. In lay terms, it could be described as the political processes that exist in between
formal institutions ” (Bevir 2012). To this rather sweeping and comprehensive—if perhaps unwieldy— 169 definition, Hufty, another
political scientist, adds that governance relates to “the processes of interaction and decision 171 making among the actors involved in a
collective problem that lead to the creation , reinforcement , or reproduction of social norms and
institutions ” (Hufty 2011). Referring specifically to the water sector, Pahl-Wostl and her coauthors term governance, at the global scale,
“the development and implementation of norms, principles, rules, incentives, informative tools and infrastructure to promote a change in
behavior of actors” (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2008). The
key contradistinction here is with “government,” which refers to
the formal institutions, usually defined by elites, that prevail within a community or nation.
Our own definition of governance (Megdal et al. 2015), also tailored to the water sector, is not very different from 184 Pahl-Wostl’s and is
meant to be more functional and real-world applicable: “Water governance is the overarching framework of water use
laws , regulations, and customs , as well as the processes of engaging the public sector, the private sector, and civil society.” Understood
this way, governance can include the coordination of administrative actions and decisionmaking at different jurisdictional levels, it can be
informal as well as formal, and it can include long held cultural apprehensions about water which are often overlooked by analyses treating only
of formally written laws, regulations, and policies. Governance, therefore, can capture what Staddon (2017), Turton and Meissner
(2002) and others have referred to as the hydrosocial contract : the set of understandings and agreements, more or less tacit, that
define the relations between those who make water decisions and those who must abide by those decisions. What’s more, governance is not
only the product of consensus-linked processes, institutions and viewpoints, but often incorporates 202 levels of dissensus, as when state water
schemes provoke opposition that must somehow be accommodated (or overridden). The
clearest examples of these governance
processes involve dam projects (e.g., Narmada in India in the 206 1990s) or water utility privatizations (e.g. Cochabamba in

207 Bolivia in 1999 –2000). These and similar projects were always at least as much about reformulating the hydrosocial
contract as they were about a specific sort of structure ( dams ) or a policy prescription (utility privatization).

All of the above definitions of governance —from the broadest to the most specific— stress the role of
institutions such as legal systems , organizations, laws , customs, and practices —in short, context-
based societal attributes. In the case of water, these are seen to hold strong potential for influencing how much high-
quality water can be, or ought to be, made available to a community or population or to the environment . Tilhonen (2004)
stated that the broad use of the term is clearly an indication of “the need for a change from top-down governing towards more participatory
and down-up governance.” In this sense, these understandings of water governance deliver on Tilhonen’s promise to address management in a
less top-down manner and thereby afford more room for soft-path-cum-demand-management approaches.

8.1.1.2 Framing Mechanisms and Paradigms: 226 An Entrée to Global Governance

The insight provided by the soft-path view of water governance is illustrative of the power of framings in shaping responses to water-related
issues. But the soft-path paradigm has not been the only—or even the latest—such framing mechanism considered. Below, we consider other
ways of looking at and conceptualizing water governance.

The conscious notion that water governance — and similarly water management , consisting of how elements of governance
such as laws and policies are implemented via specific actions on-the-ground (Megdal et al. 2015; Varady 237 et al. 2016)—might be considered
at the global scale arose only in the years 2006–08 (Conca 2006; Newton 2014). This was not formally termed “ global water
governance ” until 2008 (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2008; Schnurr 2008; Varady et al. 241 2008). But well before the use of the term, broad trends
and framings in management approaches were influencing how water was governed around the world . As
Varady and Meehan ( 2006) point out, after 1945 an “apertura” opened for increasingly global-scale, and globalized, water governance.

As Fig. 8.1 (updated from Varady et al. 2009) shows, since the end of the Second World War, global water management has
experienced at least a dozen epistemological frameworks , half of them still current for at least some parts of the global
community. These framings are epistemological rather than merely substantive inasmuch as they shape the channels in
which debate can run, rather than directly shaping the debate itself . While such framings can sometimes
coexist, often they cannot as they imply mutually exclusive conditions or outcomes. An example explored by Staddon
and Everard (2017) discusses the implications for Indian groundwater management of the clash between “Nehruvian” epistemologies of
centralized water management and “Gandhian” epistemologies of self-help and therefore local decentralized water management.

These approaches to water management have generally followed the zeitgeist. The narratives begin with postwar, strongly
centralized, state-dominated, top-down processes mostly bent on expanding physical supply through increasingly grand dam
schemes. A quintessential example of such large-scale, technocratic approaches with a “nation-building” undertone is
the multipurpose development project in the Tennessee River Valley (Grey and Sadoff 270 2007; Staddon 2010). In the 1930s, a massive system
of more than 40 interconnected dams and reservoirs was constructed to support navigable water use, provide flood control, and furnish
affordable electricity for rural areas. Huge investments were made in similar large-scale irrigation, energy, and development
projects in the U.S. and the former Soviet Union (e.g., the Big Volga Project) in the early 20th century under this ‘hydraulic mission’
to ‘tame’ and reap the benefits of nature (Molle et al. 2009).

Next, these framings passed through an extended period of neoliberalism that highlighted the economy and the
private sector , again through dam schemes now recast as investment opportunities, as well as of projections of state
prestige and modernity . Eventually they converged during a period of three decades in which decentralized approaches have held
sway and featured such concepts as sustainability, demand-side approaches, cross-sectoral integration, social wellbeing, and equity (Staddon
2010). And finally, bringing the narrative up to the present day, two new framing concepts began to move center stage: the resource “nexus”
(or the idea that is it important to analyze and manage the interactions between water, food, energy, and other critical domains) and “water
security,” the subject of the present chapter.

Rationality checks nuclear war!

Robinson 1 [C. Paul Robinson, and Director, Sandia National Laboratories, PhD Physics at FSU, Chair of
the Policy Committee of the Strategic Advisory Group for the Commander, US Strategic Command.
“Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the 21st Century,” March 22, 2001,
http://www.sandia.gov/media/whitepaper/2001-04-Robinson.htm.]

Let me then state my most important conclusion directly: I believe nuclear

weapons must have an abiding place in the
international scene for the foreseeable future. I believe that the world, in fact, would become more
dangerous, not less dangerous, were U.S. nuclear weapons to be absent. The most important role for
our nuclear weapons is to serve as a “sobering force,” one that can cap the level of destruction of
military conflicts and thus force all sides to come to their senses. This is the enduring purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons
in the post-Cold War world. I regret that we have not yet captured such thinking in our public statements as to why the U.S. will retain nuclear
deterrence as a cornerstone of our defense policy, and urge that we do so in the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review. Nuclear
deterrence
becomes in my view a “countervailing” force and, in fact, a potent antidote to military aggression on the
part of nations. But to succeed in harnessing this power, effective nuclear weapons strategies and policies are
necessary ingredients to help shape and maintain a stable and peaceful world.
2AC
2AC
 2AC---Extra T---v11
a) Citizenmaking---their attempt to bracket off their research and justifications for
the plan demonstrate a fidelity to settlerism within educative practices
Sanya et al 2018 (Brenda N. Sanya is A. Lindsay O’Connor visiting assistant professor of educational
studies at Colgate University., Karishma Desai holds the Gerardo Marin postdoctoral fellowship at the
University of San Francisco., Durell M. Callier is an assistant professor of critical youth studies and
cultural studies of education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University.,
Cameron McCarthy is communication scholar and university scholar in the Department of Education
Policy, Leadership and Organization (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., (2018) Desirable and disposable: Educative practices and the
making of (non) citizens, Curriculum Inquiry, 48:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2017.1421308)
Our call for papers for this special issue was an attempt to extend our intellectual outreach to a wide range of new critical scholarship that seeks
to engage and transcend disciplinary isolationism in the examination of the production of citizens and (non)citizens in contem- porary
educational research. We
do not assume that schools are insulated from public dis- course, political
movements, and systems of governance. Instead, the articles in this special issue address the dynamic relations
between educative practices instituted through schools and non-formal learning spaces that construct
subject-citizens, and main- stream societal discourses that naturalize an ideal and good citizen and
pathologize others. In this way, “colonization has continued apace” (Razack, 2002, p. 127), and schooling acts as an
intermediary space meting out discipline, surveillance, premature death and mediating the encounters
of citizen and (non)citizens with one another and alongside life opportunities. The articles in this issue
investigate how educational practices discipline and govern, employ and secure regulatory technologies
where marginalized citizens are othered and erased through the production and juxtaposition of the
normal and ideal. In forming the call, we sought articles that attend to these categories of difference in the physical and imagined spaces
of policy documents, legal cases, media campaigns, school curricula, collective memories, citizenship
education programs, archival aporia, and speculative histories. What this collection of articles illustrates is how
discourses of exceptionalism and normalcy are produced and how they mask racialized violence and
geopolitical dynamics . For instance, articles by Shirazi and by El Sherif and Sinke consider the pedagogic work of the US and Canadian
settler colonial states in conferring demarcations of citizenship. El- Sherif and Sinke underscore how the settler state imposes differential spatial
subjectivities that are racialized, and therefore configures bodies as normative and non-normative citi- zens. The pedagogic spaces of the War
Memorial at which the shooting occurs, and the funeral events, are racialized as white Judeo-Christian and subsequently exalt white nor- malcy
and Muslim Other in relation to the polity. Relatedly, Shirazi highlights the violence of conditional hospitality within schools; while schools claim
to integrate immigrant youth, Shirazi finds pedagogical practices such as conditioning speech and space work to main- tain claims to white
indigeneity and suzrentiy. As such, rather than starting from pre-given categories of difference, the articles in this special issue trace the making
of such catego- ries and their consequences. They also collectively attend to the modes by which catego- ries are contested, transgressed, and
transformed, and how centering marginal narratives might unsettle inscribed logics of citizenship. Shirazi and Rios-Rojas allude to the trans-
gressions of transnational youth within spaces of conditional hospitality in schools and outside of the regulating sites of citizenship education
programs that confer conditional forms of citizenship. Bonet highlights Seif’s critiques of the American nation state through his experiences
categorized as a refugee. And Callier moves us towards Black feminist queer pedagogies to reconfigure categories of citizenship and the human.
Schooling always constructs subject positions, fabricating consensus and plucking the delicate chords of
equilibrium that hold mass consumption society together—masking tensions and fracture s. But reciprocally,
schools take on tremendous pressures built up elsewhere in society. As a powerful illustration of the fraught nature of schools, the authors in
this special issue call
attention to the very contentious relationship between citizenship, rights, and
responsibilities. This relationship mediates the guarantees of rights and responsibilities based on one’s
subjective position, compliance with national documentation regulations, and performances that
demarcate “good” citizenship. Even still, Bonet illustrates the impossibility of citizenship despite performances of “good citizen-
ship” in her rendering of Seif’s account. She shows how Seif, who is categorized as refu- gee, is excluded from the right to have rights even
though he feels he has performed the rights and responsibilities of an American citizen. Therefore, Bonet and others in this spe- cial issue show
how practices and beliefs generated from contested negotiations with the state and its hegemonic forms inform the boundaries of cultural
citizenship prosecuted in schools. Therefore, citizenship is not only restricted and policed during border crossings,
or within borders; it is also performed, negotiated, and bound to notions of belonging that we
discursively partake in in the school setting . The relationship between citizenship and education has distinct manifestations in
relation to multiple and overlapping catego- ries of difference. As such, the making of (non)citizens through educative
practices is linked to the impulsive and coercive forces of neoliberalism and settler colonialism, legacies
of colonialism, and the afterlife of slavery to which educational institutions are now fully articulated .
Citizenship is profoundly co-articulated to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. It is through these variables that citizenship is
differentially afforded, experi- enced, and understood. What the articles in this special issue show is that to understand citizenship, we
must
understand the long histories of conquest, imperial exploitation, systems of oppression and the
movements that have resisted those very structures of domination . Importantly, as Lisa Lowe (2015) eloquently
details, the very project of Western liberal citizenship is bound up in in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire. Engaging with what Saidiya
Hartman calls “the continuities of slavery and freedom” (2007, p. 13), citizenship embodies re-inscribed structures of slavery (and colonialism).
 2AC---T Protect---T/L
“Protection” of “water resources” means regulating use by controlling which activities
are permitted involving water.
Salman ‘6 [Salman and Daniel Bradlow; 2006; Lead Counsel and Water Law Adviser with the Legal Vice
Presidency of the World Bank, former Lead Counsel and Water Law Adviser with the Legal Vice
Presidency of the World Bank; Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law in
Washington, D.C and the SARCHI Professor of International Development Law and African Economic
Relations at the University of Pretoria; The World Bank, “Regulatory Frameworks for Water Resources
Management,”
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/ar/605641468341096140/pdf/362160rev0Regulatory0wate
r01PUBLIC1.pdf]

2.1.3 Regulation of Water Uses

2.1.3.1 Ownership of Water and Establishment of Water Rights

Water resources in Armenia are considered, pursuant to article 4 of the Water Code, to be the property of the state . However,
state-owned water systems can be under either state or private management (Water Code, art. 48).

The right to use water is established by obtaining a water use permit unless the Water Code specifically provides that a
permit is not required (Water Code, art. 21). The Water Code establishes six uses for which a permit is not required; these are known as “free water uses.” These
free uses are listed in article 22; they are: uses that do not have a profit-making purpose, recreation, swimming and water sports, nonentrepreneurial fishing and
hunting, use of precipitation on privately held lands, fire prevention, and water flows to maintain the ecological balance for sanitary purposes. The Water Code
provides that the Water Resources Management and Protection Body can make exceptions to the free use of water for these purposes (Water Code, art. 22).

A landowner has the first right to acquire a groundwater use permit relating to groundwater on his or her property. A groundwater use permit
relating to groundwater use on another’s property may only be issued with that landowner’s written permission (Water Code, art. 25).

2.1.3.2 Allocation of Right to Use Water

The Water Code defines “water use” in article 1 as the removal of water from or otherwise reducing water in a water resource, storing water,
impeding or diverting its flow, polluting a water resource, discharging wastewater into a water resource, disposing or storing hazardous
substances in a manner that is detrimental to the water resource, and altering the beds, banks, course, or characteristics of a water resource.

In general, water resources cannot be allocated, extracted, or used in a way that envisages a decrease in the national economy (Water Code, art. 18). Moreover, in

order to establish a right to use water, it is necessary to obtain a water use permit. These permits are issued by either the Water
Resources Management and Protection Body or a Water Basin Management Authority (Water Code, art. 30), pursuant to the
procedures (Water Code, arts. 27–30) and criteria (Water Code, art. 31) established in the Water Code. One requirement of the procedures is that there be public
notice of the permit application (Water Code, art. 20). The permit should describe, inter alia, the types of water uses allowed, the quantity of water that can be
used, the time periods when water can be used, the water standards with which the permit holder must comply, water use permit fees, and the payment schedule
(Water Code, art. 32). The period of permit validity varies from three to forty years, depending on the location of the water resource and the investment costs
involved in the water use (Water Code, art. 33). Permits are renewable pursuant to article 33.

The Water Code also provides for the issuance of water system use permits. “Water systems” are defined as “hydrotechnical structures” that
cause alteration of the water flow, such as dams, dikes, canals, pumping plants, water storage facilities, and the machinery and equipment used
in the construction of such structures.39 A “noncompetitive water supply system” is a system of structures that has as its primary purpose the
storage of water to supply the public with drinking water, wastewater treatment, and irrigation services and that is the only available source of
such services (Water Code, art. 1).

Noncompetitive water suppliers are required, pursuant to article 38, to hold valid water system use permits. These permits describe the rights
of the permit holder to use the water supply system, the tariffs to be charged, and the requirements relating to the quality of services to be
provided by the permit holder (Water Code, art. 38). The Water Code stipulates the form of the water system use permit (Water Code, art. 39)
and the process (Water Code, arts. 40–43) for applying for and obtaining a water use permit, which requires, inter alia, that there be public
notice of the permit application (Water Code, art. 20). One prerequisite for obtaining a water system use permit is that the applicant must first
hold a water use permit that is commensurate with the requirements of the proposed noncompetitive water system’s use and management
(Water Code, art. 42). Water systems use permits are valid for no more than twenty-five years unless initial investment costs warrant a longer
period, in which case the licenses will be valid for forty years (Water Code, art. 45).
Water system managers have the right to use the water system in compliance with the requirements of the Water Code and of their permit and
to enforce their rights under the Water Code and their permits (Water Code, art. 59). They are responsible for providing water users with water
of the quality and quantity specified in their permits, to perform the other duties required by the water system use contracts, and to comply
with applicable environmental rules and regulations (Water Code, arts. 60–61).

2.1.3.3 Transfer of Water Rights

Water use permit holders can sell or otherwise transfer a portion of their permitted water right to a third party, provided they comply with the
procedures established by the government and their permits do not specifically prohibit them from doing so (Water Code, art. 35).

Water system use permits can be sold or otherwise transferred only if this is stipulated in the permit (Water Code, art. 47). If so, the right to use
a water system can be transferred through the use of a trust management contract, a concession agreement, the creation of a commercial
organization, or a lease (Water Code, art. 49).40 Trust management arrangements are established through a tender process (Water Code, arts.
50–52). Concession agreements are concluded between the entity accepting the responsibility to manage the water system through the
concession and the Water Systems Management Body (Water Code, art. 53). The commercial organizations to which water systems use permits
can be transferred can have private persons owning up to 49 percent of the total equity in the organizations, with the remaining equity owned
by the state (Water Code, art. 54). In lease arrangements the lessor is the Water Systems Management Body (Water Code, art. 55).

2.1.3.4 Loss of Right to Use Water

Water use permits can be suspended, amended, or revoked (Water Code, art. 34). Permit holders can also be deemed to have abandoned their
permits if they fail to use a permit for three consecutive years and there is no legal reason that precludes them from making use of the water
right. An abandoned permit is null and void (Water Code, art. 36).

Water system use permits can be suspended, amended, or revoked (Water Code, art. 46). They can also be terminated (Water Code, art. 57).

2.1.4 Protection of Water

Article 99 of the Water Code stipulates that the “ water resources in the Republic of Armenia shall be protected .” In
furtherance of this objective, the Article formulates a series of primary requirements for their
protection . These requirements include that water use is only permitted in conditions that allow for
water resource protection and restoration ; water is a constituent part of the ecosystem and its protection demands the maintenance of
balance within a given ecosystem (Water Code, art. 66)42; water resources are to be protected from pollution , littering,
infection, and depletion ; and specific activities , such as irrigation with wastewater (Water Code, arts. 66, 101), can
be restricted or prohibited in certain water resources. Article 20 requires any person who becomes aware of water pollution or a situation that is adversely affecting
the quality of water to notify the Water Resources Management and Protection Body.

Pursuant to the objective of protecting the nation’s water resources, the Water Code stipulates that the National Water Program, which covers
all water resources within the Republic of Armenia, must establish a “national water reserve.”43

The Water Resources Management and Protection Body and interested state management bodies
are jointly responsible for
developing water quality standards , which may vary according to the specific situation in each water basin
management area (Water Code, art. 66). The standards should address such issues as degradation , depletion and
contamination of water, as well as establishing minimum environmental flows (Water Code, art. 66). The Water Resources
Management and Protection Body is responsible for ensuring that these standards comply with water quality criteria (Water Code, art. 59).

The state body authorized to monitor water resources shall follow all procedures established in law
for monitoring water resources. It shall also provide the data required to create the Water Cadastre (Water Code, art. 19). Moreover, it is worth
noting that the development of the National Water Policy and Program, and of standards for water, is subject to public notice (Water Code, art. 20).
2AC---Security K
 2AC---Privatization CP
a) This CP is a libertarian pipedream that causes racism.
Robert Kuttner, 7-7-2020, Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and
professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of
American Democracy. In addition to writing for the Prospect, he writes for HuffPost, The Boston
Globe, and The New York Review of Books. "Privatizing Our Public Water Supply," American Prospect,
https://prospect.org/environment/privatizing-our-public-water-supply//rLiu

A word about water privatization. About 83

percent of Americans get their drinking water from public systems,
according to an authoritative report by the leading research and advocacy group , Food and Water Watch.
Conversions from public water to private water have been costly fiascos . Privatized systems are
typically less reliable , far more expensive , and prone to corrupt deal-making . The average community
with privatized water paid 59 percent more than those with government supplied water . In New Jersey, which
has more private water than most, private systems charged 79 percent more. In Illinois, they charged 95 percent
more . Private water corporations have also been implicated in environmental disasters . The French
multinational, Veolia, issued a report in 2015 certifying that Flint, Michigan’s water system met EPA standards, but neglected to mention high lead concentrations.
Conversions from public water to private water have been costly fiascos. One
gambit by private water companies following a
privatization is to grab land needed for watersheds, and sell it to developers. Poor cities and Black and
Latino communities are more at risk , according to a report by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In the heavily
Black Philadelphia suburb of Chester, the mayor of the financially stressed town, Thaddeus Kirkland, is proposing to sell its reservoir and municipal water system to
a private company for $200 million. This is a classic pattern in the privatization game. The
city gets a one time infusion of cash which
temporarily gets the current mayor out of a jam —and the residents pay more . There is invariably a
more extreme fiscal squeeze in cities that are Black and poor , and suffer from low income, low tax base,
and inadequate federal support . The color of water, like the color of so much else, is structurally racist . The Chester
system that Mayor Kirkland proposes to sell off has been public for more than a century. But when you’re broke, you start selling off the furniture. The ground has
been softened for the latest privatization initiative by the underfunding of EPA clean water support. Currently, according to the group, In The Public Interest,

there are 1,326 community water systems that are in serious violation of EPA clean water standards. In this context,
private water companies offer to take the problem off local government’s hands. The fallacy, however, is that many privatized systems are also
out of compliance . The key provision in the Duckworth bill would give water systems that converted from public to private an extra three years to come
into compliance. The
bill requires no capital commitment from the private company, and includes weakened
enforcement even after the three years grave period. Why is Sen. Duckworth a lead sponsor of this travesty? Her office has not
replied to my request for comment. Water in Illinois is overwhelmingly public. Her press release on the bill reads like rewrite of the industry press release.
Meanwhile on the House side, heroic efforts by clean water activists and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have just removed the
single worst feature of the House bill. In the latest draft, the major benefits are limited to water systems that are already privatized; no incentives are created for
new privatizations. It would be better if the provision were stripped from the Democrats’ infrastructure bill entirely. AFSCME’s role is a reminder that public worker
unions are advocates not just of employees, but of the importance of safeguarding the public realm from relentless efforts to privatize it. Donald Trump’s

version of an infrastructure program is more and more privatization . Turn public systems over to
private corporations , which will presumably invest in them, and stick consumers and citizens with the
higher costs. The progressive alternative is adequate funding for all necessary things public .
Privatization is a logical enough ploy for Republicans —both ideologically and to reward industry allies.
What in hell are Democrats doing supporting this stuff?
b) It totally screws over indigenous people.
Alexander 17 – contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of Glass House: The 1% Economy
and the Shattering of the All-American Town. (Brian, The Atlantic, “Privatization Is Changing America's
Relationship With Its Physical Stuff”, 7-12-2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/infrastructure-private-public-
partnerships/533256/)//mj

Whether it’s P3s, or the outright privatization of public assets , as Trump suggests doing with the air-traffic control system,
cautionary tales abound. Many experts cite the case of Chicago, which sold off its parking meters to a consortium
headed by Morgan Stanley and including the government of Abu Dhabi.* The consortium paid the city $1.1 billion. The Chicago

Sun-Times estimated that the consortium will earn back its investment from meter revenue three years
from now, but the deal runs for another 60 years. So Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi, and the other partners will pocket
millions every year ($156 million in 2015) from Chicago parkers. Meanwhile, the city has to pay the consortium every
time it takes a meter out of service—during a street fair, for example. As The New York Times explored last December, cities can be
blindsided by such deals, especially if a private owner raises the price, for example, of using its water
system in order to provide a profit to investors.
“In general,” Tracy Gordon, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains, “with these [deals] the concern is that it’s difficult to think of costs
and benefits, including operations and maintenance, over the life cycle” of the project. California found that out when it wanted to add lanes to State Route 91 in
Orange County to ameliorate traffic congestion. The state’s transportation agency, Caltrans, couldn’t add the lanes because it had given a concession to a private
company to operate a nearby toll road, and the contract included a noncompete clause.

Advocates of P3s and privatization argue that private enterprise can build and maintain infrastructure
faster, more efficiently, and at least roughly on par with the cost of traditional government contracting. Pennsylvania’s Rapid Bridge Replacement Project
appears so far to be living up to that advertising. Construction began in mid-2017, and, according to a project newsletter, 180 bridges (of 558 slated for rebuilding)
had been replaced by spring of this year.

But though Gordon said that P3s can, and sometimes do, work, she pointed out that the American people , acting through their
government , have goals that are different from business. “Government is in the business of providing ,”
she says. “ Business does not want to provide.” Like any business, private equity wants to make a profit ; the
industry attracts investors by touting its ability to beat the stock market and maximize returns. It can
do that by keeping costs as low as possible . So it has an incentive to suppress the costs of labor and
materials, and to maximize tolls, rates, and fees.

Government, freed of the profit mandate, is optimizing for social good. It can also borrow money more
cheaply. As of this writing, the current average yield on municipal bonds , which is what cities use to build and
maintain things like schools, roads, and fire stations, is about 3 percent. The bonds or other debt issued by private-equity-backed

enterprises, however, often pay much higher interest rates because they are considered riskier
investments. So, the cost of gathering funds is often higher for a private outfit than for a local government, which
means that a private owner is more likely down the line to have to, for example, keep the rates high on a toll road.

Condo’s bad
Interview with William V. Spanos ‘11, SUNY Binghamton, *modified for ableist language
All that I've just said should suggest what I meant when, long ago, in response to someone in the debate world who seemed puzzled by the
strong reservations I expressed on being informed that the debate community in the U.S. was appropriating my work on Heidegger, higher
education, and American imperialism. I said then -- and I repeat here to you -- that the traditional form of the debate, that is, the hegemonic
frame that rigidly determines its protocols-- is unworldly in an ideological way. It willfully separates the debaters from the world as it actually
is-- by which I mean as it has been produced by the dominant democratic I capitalist culture --and it displaces them to a free-floating zone, a no
place, as it were, where all things, nor matter how different the authority they command in the real world, are equal. But
in *this* real
world produced by the combination of Protestant Christianity and democratic capitalism things -- and
therefore their value --are never equal. They are framed into a system of binaries-Identity/ difference ,
Civilization/barbarism I Men/woman, Whites/blacks, Sedentary/ nomadic, Occidental/ oriental, Chosen I
preterit (passed over), Self-reliance I dependent (communal), Democracy I communism, Protestant
Christian I Muslim, and so on -- in which the first term is not only privileged over the second term, but, in
thus being privileged, is also empowered to demonize the second. Insofar as the debate world frames
argument as if every position has equal authority (the debater can take either side ) it obscures and
eventually effaces awareness of the degrading imbalance of power in the real world and the terrible
injustices it perpetrates. Thus framed, debate gives the false impression that it is a truly democratic institution, whereas in reality it is
complicitous with the dehumanized and dehumanizing system of power that produced it. It is no accident, in my mind, that this
fraudulent form of debate goes back to the founding of the U.S. as a capitalist republic and that it has
produced what I call the "political class" to indicate not only the basic sameness between the
Democratic and Republican parties but also its fundamental indifference to the plight of those who don't
count in a system where what counts is determined by those who are the heirs of this quantitative
system of binaries.
 2AC---Guidance CP
Only the aff causes compliance. Can’t solve any of the aff REMOVAL is key.
Parillo 19 (Nicholas R. Parillo, Professor of Law @ Yale Law School, 1/16/19, Yale Journal on Regulation,
Vol. 36, No. 1, "Federal Agency Guidance and the Power to Bind: An Empirical Study of Agencies and
Industries", pages 229-231, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3311743)//veronica
Thus, there are two contexts in which owners may interact with regulators: (a) the jurisdictional determination process, in which the owner
seeks out the regulator in order to obtain what is essentially a pre-approval, and (b) the ex post enforcement process, in which the EPA roves
the countryside in search of owners who are taking the risk of developing property without seeking assurances. The EPA
and the Corps
have repeatedly issued guidance on the general question of what property constitutes “w aters of the United
States,” which simultaneously governs both the Corps’ pre-approval decisions (jurisdictional determinations) and the EPA’s decisions
about what discharges to enforce against ex post. One such guidance document was issued in 2003.281 Then, in 2006, the
Supreme Court handed down a splintered decision in Rapanos v. United States that threw the meaning of “waters of the United States” into
even greater uncertainty.282 The EPA and the Corps reacted by issuing guidance in June 2007 (modified in December 2008) that identified large
categories of property as falling into a grey area for which officials would have to apply a fact-intensive test on whether the property’s waters
had a “significant nexus” with “traditional navigable water.”283 During the Obama administration, the EPA
proposed a modification
to the guidance but withdrew it, then went through a full legislative rulemaking to clarify the matter,
only to have the rule blocked in court as the administration was near its end.

As explained by an attorney at an environmental NGO, the impact of guidance on CWA administration, relative to what a legislative rule could
do, depends on whether the context is pre-approval or ex post enforcement. The “day to day administration” of the Act “in the back-and-forth
between owners and the Corps”—that being jurisdiction determinations and permitting—“might not be all too different” if the policies to be
implemented by the Corps appeared in guidance or in a legislative rule. But in ex post enforcement—when an owner has decided to
make discharges without seeking the prior assurance of a jurisdictional determination—“ then the absence of a [ legislative] rule

has a real effect .” According to the attorney, there had been “a lot of indication” during both the Bush and Obama
administrations that the EPA and the Corps were focusing enforcement suits on property not in the grey
area . But a legislative rule could have eliminated the grey area : it could be “categorical and guaranteed,” and it
would often be the exclusive focus of the judge deciding the enforcement suit (whereas guidance
would have at most persuasive power, and then only “maybe ”)
In other words, guidance can be about as impactful as a legislative rule when the context is pre-approval, since there the regulated party has
sought out the agency and is seeking to get the agency’s assent. But in ex post enforcement, the agency
bears the burden of
building its case from the ground up . That case is already built automatically if the agency has a
legislative rule to rely upon, thereby allowing a large number of easy suits to be brought rapidly , increasing
the probability of detection and deterrence . But this is not possible if the agency has only guidance in
hand, since then it must work up each case individually, reducing the number of cases it can bring overall.
This can mean a low probability of detection for regulated parties if they are numerous, as they are in the
CWA context, thus reducing incentives to comply . (It also seems reasonable to assume that the target class for
enforcement—owners who opt against seeking jurisdictional determinations from the Corps—constitutes a self-selected group whose
members tend not to have repeated interactions with or strong relationships to the Corps or the EPA .)
Not binding OR links to the net-benefit by involving Congress.
Connor Raso 10, J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, Ph.D. in Political Science candidate at Stanford
University, achieved both degrees at the year of publication, Yale Law Journal, “Strategic or Sincere?
Analyzing Agency Use of Guidance Documents,” vol. 119

A primary policy justification for exempting guidance documents from most procedural requirements is that they are not binding on
external parties .4 " A significant line of cases invalidates guidance documents that bind external parties. 46 Congress has affirmed this
policy, declaring FDA guidance documents nonbinding . 47 At the same time, however, Congress has instructed the courts to use guidance
documents as evidence when hearing cases involving small businesses.48 Guidance documents are also generally treated as nonbinding on
agencies themselves . 49 This policy has several important caveats. First, agencies must provide a reasonable explanation in cases where they deviate
from guidance."0 Second, Congress has occasionally indicated that it expects agencies to follow their guidance documents. For instance, the FDA Modernization Act

declared that FDA staff must generally observe the agency's guidance." Agencies such as the FDA may also be induced to follow
guidance if regulated parties complain to Congress or the White House in response to agency deviation.

This isn’t how guidance documents work---they require a legal basis which only the aff
can establish
Executive Branch 19, “Executive Order 13891: Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency
Guidance Documents,” October 9, 2019,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/15/2019-22623/promoting-the-rule-of-law-
through-improved-agency-guidance-documents

Agencies may clarify existing obligations through non-binding guidance documents , which the APA exempts from
notice-and-comment requirements. Yet agencies have sometimes used this authority inappropriately in attempts to
regulate the public without following the rulemaking procedures of the APA. Even when accompanied by a disclaimer that it is non-binding, a guidance
document issued by an agency may carry the implicit threat of enforcement action if the regulated public does not comply. Moreover, the public frequently has
insufficient notice of guidance documents, which are not always published in the Federal Register or distributed to all regulated parties.

Americans deserve an open and fair regulatory process that imposes new obligations on the public only when consistent with applicable law and after an agency

follows appropriate procedures. Therefore , it is the policy of the executive branch, to the extent consistent with applicable law, to require
that agencies treat guidance documents as non-binding both in law and in practice , except as incorporated into a
contract, take public input into account when appropriate in formulating guidance documents, and make guidance documents readily available to the public.

Agencies may impose legally binding requirements on the public only through regulations and on
parties on a case-by-case basis through adjudications , and only after appropriate process , except as
authorized by law or as incorporated into a contract.
 2AC---Con Con CP

3. Do the plan upon ratification---delay solves the net benefit.

David Huckabee 97, Specialist in American National Government,
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/97-922.pdf [Bracketed for readability]

In the period beginning with the First Congress, through September 30, 1997 (105th Congress, 1 Session), a total of [ around 11 thousand ]
10,980 proposals had been introduced to amend the Constitution. Thirty-three of these were proposed by Congress to the states,
and 27 have been ratified. Excluding the 27th Amendment (Congressional Pay), which took more than 202 years, the longest pending proposed amendment that
was successfully ratified was the 22nd Amendment (Presidential Tenure), which took three years, nine months, and four days. The 26th Amendment (18-year-old

vote) was ratified in the shortest time: three months and 10 days. The average ratification time was one year, eight months , and
seven days.

4. Links to politics.
Jay Riestenberg 18, M.A. in Political Management from George Washington University, citing three
Supreme Court Justices, two U.S. Solicitor Generals, one U.S. Attorney General, and thirty-one
Professors of Law, 3/21/2018, “U.S. Constitution Threatened as Article V Convention Movement Nears
Success,” https://www.commoncause.org/resource/u-s-constitution-threatened-as-article-v-
convention-movement-nears-success/

“But no rule or law limits the scope of a state-called constitutional convention. Without established legal procedures , the entire document
would be laid bare for wholesale revision. Article V itself sheds no light on the most basic procedures for such a convention. How many
delegates does each state get at the convention? Is it one state, one vote, or do states with larger populations, like California, get a larger share of the votes? The
Supreme Court has made at least one thing clear — it will not intervene in the process or the result of a constitutional convention. The game has neither rules nor

referees.” – McKay Cunningham, professor of law at Concordia University “The result will be a disaster . I hate to think of the worst-case scenario.
At best , the fight over every step along the way would consume our country’s political oxygen for
years .” – David Marcus, professor of law at the University of Arizona

5. Con con fails---It obliterates certainty, spurs legal challenges from the Courts,
Congress, AND Executive, and triggers a runaway of special interest assaults that shut
down the government---links harder.
Jay Riestenberg 18, M.A. in Political Management from George Washington University, citing three
Supreme Court Justices, two U.S. Solicitor Generals, one U.S. Attorney General, and thirty-one
Professors of Law, 3/21/2018, “U.S. Constitution Threatened as Article V Convention Movement Nears
Success,” https://www.commoncause.org/resource/u-s-constitution-threatened-as-article-v-
convention-movement-nears-success/

Why the Article V Convention Process is a Threat

As outlined in Common Cause’s 2015 report, The Dangerous Path: Big Money’s Plan to Shred the Constitution , a constitutional convention is
open to many problems , including:
  Threat of a Runaway Convention: There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent a constitutional
convention from being expanded in scope to issues not raised in convention calls passed by
the state legislatures, and therefore could lead to a runaway convention .
 Influence of Special Interests : An Article V convention would open the Constitution to revisions at a
time of extreme gerrymandering and polarization amid unlimited political spending. It could allow
special interests and the wealthiest to re-write the rules governing our system of government.
 Lack of Convention Rules : There are no rules governing constitutional conventions. A convention
would be an unpredictable Pandora’s Box ; the last one, in 1787, resulted in a brand-new
Constitution. One group advocating for a “Convention of States” openly discusses the possibility of using the
process to undo hard-won civil rights and civil liberties advances and undermine basic rights extended throughout
history as our nation strove to deliver on the promise of a democracy that works for everyone.
 Threat of Legal Disputes : No judicial , legislative , or executive body would have clear
authority to settle disputes


 about a convention, opening the process to chaos and protracted legal battles that would
threaten the functioning of our democracy and economy.
 Application Process Uncertainty : There is no clear process on how Congress or any other governmental
body would count and add up Article V applications, or if Congress and the states could restrain the
convention’s mandate based on those applications.
 Possibility of Unequal Representation:  It is unclear how states would choose delegates to a convention, how

states and citizens would be represented in a convention, and who would ultimately get to vote on items raised in a

convention.

6. CP is a VI:
b) Not real world NOR educational.
Nick Hodgson 15, history teacher, “Does the President of the United States have an opportunity to
change the political system to make it more like political systems of Ireland and Germany, or are such
problems completely up to Congress?”, https://bit.ly/2TDCyMT

Changing the political system of the US would involve a complete change of the Constitution which
neither the President nor Congress are capable of achieving on their own . There would have to be a
massive groundswell of support for such a change from the general public leading to a series of political campaigns and
candidates being elected on a platform of changing the constitution. This is so unlikely to happen it's not even worth speculating
about.
 2AC---BizCon DA
Capital is in a crisis of overaccumulation---mitigation measures create free-flowing
cash for corporations which expands a bubble of speculation AND militarism---that
culminates in violent collapse---from a burgeoning debt to GDP ratio, a euphoric stock
market, and the money printer.
John Bellamy Foster 21, Oregon sociology professor, “The Contagion Of Capital,” Monthly Review, 1-1-
2021, https://monthlyreview.org/2021/01/01/the-contagion-of-capital/

Today, vast amounts of free cash are spilling over into waves of mergers and acquisitions, typically
aimed at acquiring megamonopoly positions in the economy . A major focus is the tech sector, much of which is directed at commodifying all
information in society, in the form of a ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.29 All financial bubbles derive their animus from some common

rationale, which claims that this time is different, discounting the reality of a bubble . In the present case, the rationale is
that the advance of the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), which now comprise almost a quarter of the value of Standard and Poor 500’s total capitalization, is
unstoppable, reflecting the dominance of technology. Apple alone has reached a stock market valuation of $2 trillion. All of this is feeding a massive increase in income and wealth inequality in
the United States, as the gains from financial assets rise relative to income. Yet, like all previous bubbles, this one too will burst.30 Kalecki determined that the export surplus on the U.S.

However, the current account deficit cannot be seen, in today’s

current account increased free cash, as did the federal deficit.31

overall structural context, as simply reducing free cash, because of the changed role of multinational
corporations in late imperialism, which alters other parts of the equation . Due to globalization and the rise of the global labor
arbitrage, U.S. multinational corporations in their intrafirm relations have in effect substituted production overseas by their affiliates for parent company exports, thereby decreasing their
investment in fixed capital in the United States.32 The sales abroad of goods by majority-owned affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations in 2018 were 14.5 times the exports of goods to
majority-owned affiliates.33 Foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a proportion of U.S. domestic corporate profits rose from 4 percent in 1950 to 9 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 2019. This
mainly reflects the shift in production to low unit labor cost countries in the Global South. Samir Amin described the vast expropriation of surplus from the Global South, based on the global
labor arbitrage, as a form of “imperialist rent.”34 This expansion of global labor-value chains is also associated with an epochal increase in what is called the non-equity mode of production, or
arm’s length production. Companies like Apple and Nike rely not on foreign direct investment abroad, but instead draw on subcontractors overseas to produce their goods at extremely low

The loss of investment in the United States,

unit labor costs, often generating gross profit margins on shipping prices on the order of 50 to 60 percent.35

as U.S. multinational corporations have substituted production overseas, coupled with the growth of
foreign profits of U.S. megafirms, has further increased the free cash at the disposal of corporations (even
with a growing deficit in the current account), thereby intensifying the all-around contradictions of overaccumulation,

stagnation, and financialization in the U.S. econom y. Much of this free cash is parked in tax havens overseas to escape U.S. taxes.36
Washington uses its printing press, through the federal deficit, to compensate for the U.S. current
account deficit. Foreign governments cooperate, providing the “giant gift” of accepting dollars in lieu of
goods, thereby acquiring massive dollar reserves .37 At some point, however, these contradictions are
bound to undermine the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with dire
ramifications for the U.S.-based world empire . The COVID-19 Crisis and the Great Divide Received economic ideology, with its compartmentalized
view, treats the COVID-19 pandemic as simply an external shock to the economy emanating from the natural environment and thus unrelated to capitalism. However, as Rob Wallace and his

colleagues have shown, contagions like COVID-19 arise from the worldwide circuits of capital associated with the
global labor arbitrage and the accelerated extraction of the planet’s resources .38 This is tied especially to
global agribusiness, which displaces, often forcibly, subsistence farmers while advancing into wilderness
areas, destroying ecosystems, and disrupting wildlife. The result is a growing spillover of zoonoses (or diseases
from other animals that are capable of being transmitted to human populations). From the standpoint of the Structural One Health tradition in epidemiology, the COVID-19

pandemic can therefore be seen as part of the larger planetary ecological crisis or metabolic rift
engendered by twenty-first-century capitalism .39 In March 2020, the U.S. stock market saw a sharp dip as COVID-19 spread in the United States. The
Federal Reserve immediately brought out its firehose to flood the market with liquidity, purchasing, from March to June 2020, $1.6 trillion in U.S. Treasuries and $700 billion in mortgage-
backed securities, and letting markets know that there was virtually no limit to the trillions that they were ready to pour into markets.40 The result was that—just as social distancing and
lockdowns were being instituted and unemployment was soaring to the highest levels since the Great Depression, reaching almost seventeen million—the U.S. stock market experienced its
biggest increase since 1974 in the week of April 6 to 10.41 Wall Street profits rose in the first half of 2020 by 82 percent over the year before.42 The total wealth of U.S. billionaires skyrocketed
by $700 billion between March and July 2020, even as the number of those dying from COVID-19 in the United States continued to mount and as millions of U.S. workers found themselves hit
hard by the crisis.43 Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos experienced an increase in his total wealth by more than $74 billion in 2020, while Tesla megacapitalist Elon Musk saw his wealth
increase in 2020 by $76 billion, making him too a centi-billionaire. (For comparison, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits provided by the federal government in Fiscal Year
2019, aiding tens of millions of low-income families, seniors on fixed incomes, and disabled people, amounted to $62.3 billion.)44 All of this points to the continuing operation of what Marx
 The
termed “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,” polarizing wealth and poverty, or what Solow, commenting on the work of Piketty, calls “the rich-get-richer dynamic.”45

wreckage inflicted on the U.S. population as a whole has been enormous. In mid–October 2020, more
than 25 million workers in the United States were hurt in the pandemic crisis. According to official
unemployment figures, 11.1 million workers in the United States were officially unemployed; another
3.1 million had lost their jobs but were misclassified as a result of the lockdowns; 4.5 million had
dropped out of the labor force since the pandemic; and 7 million were still employed but experiencing
cuts in pay and hours due to the coronavirus crisis. The number claiming unemployment compensation
in all programs in October equaled 21.5 million people.46 Millions are behind in payments for rent,
home mortgages, and student loans while food insecurity has grown from 35 million to over 50 million
as a result of insufficient government help during the pandemic.47 According to the 2020 U.S. Financial Health Pulse Report, published
by the U.S. Financial Network, more than two-thirds of the U.S. population at present are in a financially unhealthy condition. Of these, more than 20 percent are concerned about not having
enough food, while more than a quarter are worried about their ability to pay their next month’s rent or mortgage. Ironically, the financial health of the bottom two-thirds of the population at
the time the survey was completed (August 2020) was slightly improved compared to 2019 (prior to the present economic and epidemiological crisis), due to the temporary relief mainly in the
form of unemployment compensation provided by the federal government in response to the pandemic.48 In the third quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy was still 3.5 percent smaller than in

Exploiting these conditions, the richest 1 percent saw

the fourth quarter of 2019, with tens of millions of people suffering as a result of the crisis.49

their financial assets skyrocketing as a share of national income. FAANG stocks led the way as
corporations and the wealthy turned increasingly from investment to speculative outlets, focusing on
the big tech monopolies. By October 2020, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google had seen the
value of their shares rise year-to-date by 29, 61, 77, 64, and 61 percent respectively.50 Such frenetic
speculation naturally carries with it the growing danger of a financial meltdown. At present, the U.S.
economy is faced with a stock market bubble that is threatening to burst. Two of the more influential ways of ascertaining
whether a financial crisis centered on the stock market is imminent are: (1) the stock price to company earnings ratios (P/E) of stocks, and (2) Warren Buffett’s Expensive Market Rule. The
historical average P/E ratio, according to the Shiller Index, is 16. In August 2020, the U.S. stock market was priced at more than twice that, at 35. On Black Tuesday during the 1929 stock
market crash, which led to the Great Depression, the P/E ratio had reached 30. The 2000 stock market crash that ended the tech boom of the 1990s occurred when the P/E ratio reached 43.51
According to Buffett’s Expensive Market Rule, the mean average of stock values (measured by Wilshire 5000 market-value capitalization index) as a ratio of GDP is 80 percent. The 2000 tech
crash occurred when the stock to income ratio, measured in this way, reached 130 percent, while the 2007 Great Financial Crisis occurred when it reached 110 percent. In August 2020, the

Another key indicator of growing financial instability is the ratio of nonfinancial corporate
ratio was at 180 percent.52

debt to GDP, depicted in Chart 4. Corporations flush with free cash have taken on debt, available at very
low interest rates, in order to further pursue nonproductive ventures such as mergers, acquisitions, and
various forms of speculation, using the free cash as flow collateral. In each of the three previous
economic crises of 1991, 2000, and 2008, nonfinancial corporate debt reached cyclical peaks in the
range of 43 to 45 percent of national income. In 2020, nonfinancial corporate debt in relation to national
income reached a record 56 percent. This is a sure sign of a financial bubble stretched beyond its limits.
The entire world economy, apart from China, is now in crisis, with over a million and a half lives lost worldwide to COVID-19 as of the beginning of December, disrupting normal production
relations. The International Monetary Fund has projected a -5.8 percent rate of growth in the advanced economies in 2020 and a -4.4 percent rate of growth in the world.53 In these

The U.S. ability to print dollars to stave off

circumstances, there will be no fast recovery from the current capitalist crisis. Heavy storm winds will continue.

financial crises as well as its capacity to devalue its currency so as to increase its exports (thereby
reducing the value of dollar reserves held by countries around the world) may both come up against
mounting resistance to the dollar system, further hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony . As in other
areas, the contagion of capital, which spreads like a virus, ultimately undermining its own basis, is
operative here.54 Washington’s attempt to create trade pacts that will ensure the continued dominance of U.S.-centered global commodity chains is running into increasing
competition from Beijing. The 2020 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the largest trade bloc in the world, accounting for around 30 percent of the global economy, has China as

Faced with economic stagnation, periodic financial crises, and declining economic hegemony,
its center of gravity.

and confronted with rapid Chinese growth , the United States is heading toward a New Cold War with
China . This was made clear in the November 2020 U.S. State Department report, The Elements of the China Challenge, accusing the “People’s Republic of China of authoritarian goals and
hegemonic ambitions.” The State Department report proceeded to outline a strategy for the defeat of China by targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exploiting the CCP’s economic
and other “vulnerabilities.”55 Here, the chief economic weapon of the United States is its dominance over world finance. Former Chinese Finance Minister, Lou Jiwei, recently indicated that
the United States is preparing to launch a “financial war” against China. U.S. attempts at “the suppression of China” by financial means under a Joe Biden administration, he says, “will be
inevitable.” Under these circumstances, Lou insists, China’s earlier goals of internationalizing its currency and initiating full capital account convertibility, which would lead to the loss of its

Washington were to use its power over the world financial system to
control of state finance, are “no longer safe options.” If

smother Chinese growth, Beijing, according to Chen Yuan, a former Chinese central bank deputy
governor, could be forced to weaponize its holdings of U.S. sovereign debt (totaling $1.2 trillion) in
response. This is viewed as the financial equivalent of nuclear war. A financial (not to mention military)
war between the United States and China, driven by U.S. attempts to shore up its declining economic
hegemony by attempting to derail its emerging rival, could well spell utter disaster for the global
capitalist economy and humanity as a whole.56 The Boundary Line and the Contagion of Capital The crisis of the U.S. system
and of late capitalism as a whole is one of overaccumulation . Economic surplus is generated beyond
what can profitably be absorbed in a mature, monopolistic system. This dynamic is associated with high
levels of idle capacity, the atrophy of net investment, continuing slow growth (secular stagnation),
enhanced military spending, and financial hyperexpansion. The inability of private investment (and
capitalist consumption) to absorb all of the surplus actually and potentially available, coupled with
government deficit spending, leads to growing amounts of free cash in the hands of corporations. The
result is the rise of a system of asset speculation that partially stimulates the economy due to the wealth
effect (increases in capitalist consumption fed by a part of the increased returns on wealth), but which is unable to overcome the underlying
tendency toward stagnation.57 Hence, monopoly-finance capital of today is a deeply irrational system,
in which money is seen as begetting more money without the mediation of production , or what Marx characterized as
M-M’ (Money-Money + Δm or surplus value).58 “The viability of today’s money manager capitalism,” as the heterodox

economist Hyman Minsky called it, depends upon not having a serious depression: the continued
absence of a serious depression fosters experimentation with portfolio managing techniques that
increases the likelihood of system threatening crises, that is, increases the likelihood of depressions.
There is a basic contradiction in money manager capitalism which makes continued success ever more dependent upon an apt structure of supportive government interventions. Money

manager capitalism rests upon the power of government to prevent a sharp decline in aggregate
business profits.… We can expect future crises to be met with some form of ad hoc intervention which
will in part reflect an unwillingness by policy makers to appreciate that once again capitalism has
changed.59 A rational strategy with which to escape this trap—if only partially—would be to increase
the direct U.S. governmental role in investment and consumption in order to address the multiple crises
of society, including public spending in response to: (1) the climate emergency; (2) the public health crisis; (3) the shortage of adequate housing for much of the population; (4) the
deterioration of the public education system under neoliberalism; (5) the absence of a national mass transit system, and so on. Yet , for the government to enter

directly into such areas would involve crossing the private sector-government boundary line, which
ensures the present near-complete dominance of the economy by the private sector , a phenomenon first critically
diagnosed by Marxist economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy in Monopoly Capital in 1966.60 As Medlen writes, “the institutional arrangements for profit-seeking investment are simply
taken for granted as a boundary line that is not to be violated.”61 So strict is the boundary line in the U.S. economy that outside of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as well as various municipal
utilities and land leases, government-owned productive facilities cannot be said to produce internal revenues sufficient to compensate for costs of production. “This is primarily because the
government, outside a considerable land mass, the public school system, the U.S. Postal Service and toll-free roads, owns essentially nothing.”62 The bulk of federal government discretionary
spending goes to the military, which constitutes a huge subsidy to private capital while avoiding any intrusions on the private sector. Meanwhile, the privatization of public health
infrastructure and public education is further pushing the boundary line in the direction of the complete dominance of a private sector already prone to overaccumulation and the contagion of

A little more than forty years ago in “Whither U.S. Capitalism?,” Sweezy, writing in Monthly Review,
capital.

questioned the then common view that the United States, caught in economic stagnation, was headed
inevitably to “ an American version of the corporate state, authoritarian and repressive internally,
increasingly militaristic and aggressive externally .”63 His reasoning is worth recalling today: There are at least
two problems with this “solution” to the crisis of U.S. capitalism. First, it assumes that because the working class has never yet organized itself for effective independent political action it never
will in the future either. In my view this reflects a simplistic view of the history of class struggles in the United States and quite unjustifiably rules out the emergence of new patterns of
behavior and forms of struggle. Second, it assumes that the capitalists will be united behind a fascist-type policy of repression, and this seems to me doubtful too. Not only is a strategy of this
kind costly to large elements of the middle and upper classes, as the whole history of fascism shows, but even more important, it is no solution at all to the real problems of U.S. capitalism.

The basic disease of monopoly capitalism is an increasingly powerful tendency to overaccumulate. At

anything approaching full employment, the surplus accruing to the propertied classes is far more than
they can profitably invest. An attempt to remedy this by further curtailing the standard of living of the
lower-income groups can only make things wors e. What is needed, in fact, is the exact opposite, a
substantial and increasing standard of living of the lower-income groups, not necessarily in the form of
more individual consumption: more important at this stage of capitalist development is a greater
improvement in collective consumption and the quality of life.64 Sweezy followed this up with the notion of building a “cross-class
alliance” between those suffering most from monopoly capitalism and the more far-seeing elements of the ruling class, a kind of new New Deal, but with the working class as the organizing
and hegemonic force. This was consistent with a political praxis emphasizing protecting the population in the immediate present while working toward the long-run revolutionary

More than four decades later, in 2021, the basic conditions are similar, if more serious
reconstitution of society at large.

and threatening. The current struggle for a People’s Green New Deal, based on a just transition, is a call
for a cross-class movement to protect humanity as a whole, one which, however, can only be successful
by going against the logic of capital and establishing the basis for a new society geared to substantive
equality and environmental sustainability: the historical struggle for socialism. If the danger of “a fascist-
type policy of repression” of the kind that Sweezy pointed to has reemerged in the twenty-first century
in the context of the contagion of capital, so has a new socialist movement from below aimed at
ensuring a world of sustainable human development. Predictions as to the future are meaningless in this
context. The point is to struggle.

Hahah

Economic growth is an unsustainable fungibility machine

Helland and Lindgren 16. Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Westminster College, M.A. Arizona State University, Ph.D. Arizona State University Westminster
College, Tim Lindgren, Research Assistant at Westminster College, What Goes Around Comes Around:
From The Coloniality of Power to the Crisis of Civilization, Journal of World-Systems Research, 2016,
Vol 22 Issue 2, p. 431-438

Today we face a planetary crisis. Environmental, energy, food, financial, and social reproduction
crises are disrupting the world-system (Ahmed 2010; McMichael 2011; Chase-Dunn 2013; Houtart 2010; Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009; Foster,
Clark, York 2010; Goodman and Salleh 2015; Peterson 2010; Rockstrom et.al. 2009, 2009b; Salleh 2012; Smith 2014; Steffen et.al. 2007). This planetary crisis, we argue, has

been triggered by a globalizing mode of civilization that has become hegemonic.2 This mode of civilization is
constituted and underpinned by anthropocentric, androcentric, hetero-patriarchal, Euro/Western-centric,
modern/colonial and capitalist systems of power. Building on world-systems, decolonial, eco-feminist and posthuman theories, we contend that the
“coloniality of power” (Quijano 1991; Grosfoguel 2009; Mignolo 2008; Lugones 2007; Maese-Cohen 2010; Dastile and Ndlovu-Gastheni 2013) has worked to
globalize a civilization that exhausts the planet and exploits most of its people , thus unleashing a
socioecological blowback that is turning this civilization into its own worst enemy . By “coloniality” we refer to the
complex and multidimensional legacy of divisive, exploitative, stratifying and hierarchical forms of power
(e.g., Eurocentric/Western-centric hegemony), forms of knowledge (e.g., technoscientific instrumental rationality), forms of (inter)subjectivity (e.g.,

possessive individualism), forms of human interrelations (e.g., racism, classism, heteropatriarchalism, etc.), and forms of human
dominion over land and mastery of “nature” (e.g., anthropocentric property/dominion/sovereignty) that have become entrenched and
continue to be reproduced throughout the world as an ongoing consequence of colonization. Coloniality thus
entails that the hegemony of colonial forms persists to this day as a legacy that structurally constitutes modernity, even into supposedly “postcolonial” times. Coloniality is the

underside of modernity: the historical and structural foundation that has enabled—e.g., through conquest ,
imperialism , slavery , resource extraction and Western dominance —the rise, hegemony, and
globalization of a world-system dominated by modern civilization . This civilization has sought to globalize
a political-economic model bent on endless accumulation, consumption and growth on a finite
planet (Ahmed 2010; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Goodman and Salleh 2013; McMichael 2011; Steffen et.al. 2007; WPCCC 2010). Now in its “neoliberal” stage, this model reinforces a
historically-ongoing coloniality of power premised on linear discourses of “progress,” “modernization,” “development,” and “evolution,” altogether constituting a hegemonic “standard of
civilization.” Globalized through (neo)colonialism and (neo)imperialism, this “standard of civilization” has subjugated the global South under the North, and the rural under the urban, thereby
stratifying the world into multiple overlapping hierarchies structured along core-periphery asymmetries. The globalization of this mode of civilization wouldn’t be possible without the coloniality
of power which has assimilated semi-peripheral and peripheral elites into a Western-centric civilizational obsession with endless accumulation based on the “mastery of nature” (Plumwood 2002;
Adelman 2015) and geared towards the aggressive pursuit of “high modernism”3 (Scott 1998)—and its “late modern(ist)” continuation. While settler-colonial elites have been instrumental to the
expansion of hegemonic civilization, the colonial de-indigenization and cultural assimilation of Southern elites through centuries of Western domination has increasingly entrenched dominant
worldviews and practices throughout the globe. Gonzalez notes; “[i]n the post-colonial period, Southern elites, deeply influenced by Eurocentric ideologies, subjugated their own indigenous and
minority populations in order to “modernize” and “develop” them” (2015: 13). Most “postcolonial” elites haven’t broken with this coloniality of power (Dastile and Ndlovu-Gastheni 2013);
instead, they often reproduce govern-mentalities aimed at “catching-up” with, emulating, imitating, “cloning” or conforming to hegemonic models enacted in the North’s metropolitan cores
(Sheppard et.al. 2009; McMichael 2011; Grosfoguel 2009; Mignolo 2008). In seeking to emulate the North’s unsustainable “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen 2012), many Southern
elites have replicated the North’s “eco-destructive, consumerist-centric, over-financialized, [and] climate-frying maldevelopment model” (Bond 2012). This coloniality of power has often
consumed the creativity, energy, and “resources” of (semi)peripheries in aspirational attempts to emulate and/or conform to hegemonic models by, for example, aggressively pursuing accelerated
modernization, developmentalism, urbanization, industrialization, and massified commodity/consumerist cultures at almost any cost, human or ecological. Playing catch-up with the North
inevitably requires the present-day rehearsal, in accelerated, compressed manner, of structurally violent practices that have underpinned the North’s “rise” to planetary dominance—like the

reliance on coercive statecraft ,

transformation of nature (including humans) into exploitable “resources” (Apffel-Marglin 2011) and the systematic

ecological imperialism, and (neo)colonialism. Comparable practices, now rehearsed in “updated” forms by elites/regimes of semi-peripheral “emerging
economies,” seek to replicate expansive core-like metropolitan centers of accumulation, consumption, and growth, like the grossly unequal BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South

Africa) megalopolises. To achieve this, emerging economies must resort to internal colonialism and “subimperialism” or
“second degree imperialism” (Bond 2014) so as to compel into subservience their “own” peripheries as sources of
exploitable natural and human “resources.” Yet in striving to emulate a patently unsustainable Northern
“way of life” built on centuries of dispossession, emerging economies face two obstacles: First, the hegemonic barriers
imposed by the dominant regime of accumulation controlled by the North which resists any challenges to its hegemony. Second, the planetary boundaries (Rockström

et.al. 2009) imposed by the Earth’s finite carrying capacity which is already responding to breaches with destabilizing consequences (Foster, Clark, York 2010). Seduced by the

coloniality of power , large “emerging economies”—like BRICS—are on a crash course against entrenched “old”
Northern cores—as the latter try to preserve their unsustainable privileges at any cost. Brand and Wissen (2012) note: [G]eopolitical and geo-economic shifts will…increasingly be…
ecological conflicts…[Facing] increasing competition for the earth’s resources and sinks , national and supranational state

apparatuses seem…willing to support ‘their’ respective capitals…to strengthen their competitive position and…secure the
resource base of their…economies…Thus, the hegemony of the imperial mode of living…, [spreading from]…the global
North…to the South…explains…an imperialist rearticulation …in the context of multiple crises (555). Increasingly volatile tensions

are resulting from the clash between the hegemonic system of accumulation and the planetary boundaries .
Geopolitical/geoeconomic conflicts, and grabs and scrambles over “resources” strategic for “development(alism),” are
proliferating globally. Such complications can often be traced to the hegemonization of an ecologically
unsustainable, socially stratifying and politically volatile model of civilization bent on endless accumulation, consumption and
growth on a finite planet. Ironically, the very success in globalizing this civilizational model through the coloniality of power may lead to its autophagous self-destruction through a planetary

crisis.Overcoming this crisis requires not only a critique of modernity in its neoliberal capitalist guise, but a transformation beyond the
systems of power underpinning the hegemonic civilization. In solidarity with movements for systemic
change and drawing on decolonial dialogues we conclude with a blueprint for a just and sustainable transition inspired on indigenous,
eco-feminist, and posthuman alternatives. Planetary Crisis: Five converging crises are triggering a planetary crisis of civilization: Ecological Rift.
Modern civilization is causing an ecological rift with global biospheric lifecycles , breaching planetary boundaries and
overshooting the Earth’s carrying capacity by exhausting and disrupting nature’s metabolic labor (Foster, Clark, York 2010; Ahmed 2010; Rockström, Steffen,

Noone et.al. 2009; Salleh 2010). We are breaching four of nine planetary boundaries ;4 further breaching seems inevitable as we continue to rely on this

civilizational model. This anthropogenic eco-crisis is undermining the natural bases for human existence . The ecological rift derives from the

anthropocentrism of the hegemonic civilization, aggravated by modernist drives for mastery of nature and capital accumulation ,
resulting in gross overconsumption of planetary biocapacity: “humanity…uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste… [I]t now takes the Earth one

Most ecological degradation comes from

year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year” (World Footprint 2014).

overconsumption and waste driven by the lifestyle of metropolitan centers globally, and of
“(over)developed” rich countrie s. McMichael (2011) notes: the richest countries have generated 42% of global
environmental degradation while paying only 3% of resulting costs. Urban areas occupy around 2% of global land yet produce more than two
thirds of CO2 emissions. If everybody in the world lived like the average US or Canadian resident , we would need

between three and five Earths—if not more—to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on nature; if everybody lived like the average EU resident, we would need 2.5 to
3.5 Earths. Emergent economies seeking to rapidly catch up and emulate Northern lifestyles —like the BRICS—

dramatically aggravate this. This “imperial mode of living” propagated from cores and now also
semi-cores is socio-ecologically unsustainable and dangerous (Brand and Wissen 2012). Energy/Resource Depletion.
Overconsumption is causing a crisis of energy scarcity and natural resource depletion of oil, natural gas, coal,
uranium, essential minerals, and water (Ahmed 2010; Zittel et.al. 2013; Sheppard 2009; Evans 2010; “Water Facts and Figures” 2014). Peak-oil may
have already occurred in 2005-2008 (Ahmed 2010); the Energy Working Group estimated overall conventional energy peak for 2015 (Zittel et.al. 2013). Mineral
depletion is predicted to exhaust 26 of the 37 most important minerals by 2100 (Sheppard 2009). By 2025 the number
of people living in absolute water scarcity is projected to rise 50%, with “two thirds of the world’s
population…in water-stressed conditions” (Evans 2010). Food System Crisis: Between 2001-2008 global demand exceeded supply
and the global stockpile of grain shrank by half (Cribb 2010). “[A]verage productivity growth rates [2.0% 1970-1990]…fell to 1.1% between 1990 and
2007 and are projected to continue to decline” (Evans 2010:3). Modern industrial agriculture and the consumption/waste patterns of

global North and metropolitan lifestyles are exhausting soils and sinks globally. Industrial agriculture through
land-use change, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is eroding soils, creating topsoil loss, and exhausting
nature’s “metabolic labor” (Salleh 2010; McMichael 2011). Agro-industrial methods like monocropping and industrial
economies of scale destroy biodiversity and carbon sinks , and degrade nutritional quality (Altieri 2009).
Industrial aquaculture has fully exploited or overexploited most of the world’s fish stocks . The food
system’s increasingly corporate consolidation multiplies social-environmental externalities through
overexploitation of natural and human resources and gross maldistribution. The “globalized” methane-releasing
“meatified” modern food system requires unnecessarily long transportation and is heavily dependent on

dwindling fossil fuels, making it a major greenhouse gas emitter. All this is triggering a global food system crisis , profoundly
impacting semi/peripheral regions (Ahmed 2010; McMichael 2011; Cribb 2010; Evans 2010.). However, further growth isn’t the answer.
We already produce excess food—albeit of disappointing nutritional quality, yet much is wasted and distribution is so skewed that “providing the additional calories needed by the 13% of the

world’s population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply” (Raworth 2012: 5). By shifting to agroecology, indigenous/small peasant
methods, and permaculture, coupled with equitable, redistributive, communal and local economies we can
produce more nutritious food, ensure fairer distribution, reduce waste, regenerate biodiversity, and fight climate change (Altieri
2009). Economic/Financial Crisis. The 2008 global economic/financial downturn resulted from contingent , recent-historical, and structural

factors. While contingent factors like the housing market collapse and recent-historical factors like neoliberal deregulation of financial markets are crucial, we underline the long-term
structural problems. Most importantly the growing disconnection between (a.) an increasingly financialized global

economy, (b.) the “real” economy of human production, and (c.) the “real-real” economy of socio-ecological reproduction
based on the Earth’s biocapacity to provide “ecological services ” (Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009). The increasingly
financialized capitalist economy is grossly abstracted from the real economy of production based on human labor, and from the
real-real economy of reproduction based on the socio-ecologically metabolic labor of communities and the planet. The second structural problem is the exploding global

inequality coupled with persistent poverty; this notwithstanding the continuous (albeit slowing) growth of the
global economy. Again , the issue isn’t that we need more growth, but that we have an increasing
concentration of wealth tied to gross maldistribution and rampant waste (according to Credit Suisse, the top 8% of the
world’s population concentrates almost 80% of global wealth). The global economic system is based on a faulty notion of endless

accumulation propelled by increasingly financialized debt disconnected from its growing social and
ecological debt (Ahmed 2010; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Peterson 2010; Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009; Salleh 2010). Social Reproduction Crisis. This crisis results
from the accelerated exploitation of productive and reproductive labor , leading to massive demographic

displacements—so-called “migrations”—from rural to urban, and from peripheries to cores. Overconsumption in cores and now also semi-cores requires constantly
increasing absorption of people—especially from semi-peripheries and peripheries—into a global system of
production geared towards endless growth. For example, people displaced from their local land bases by the globalization and
intensification of corporate and/or state mega-projects , industrial monocrops and resource extraction
are often absorbed as cheap migrant labor moving towards the exploding slum-settlements of chaotically growing urbanized centers in emerging Southern
economies or towards already established Northern centers of accumulation. There, they are incorporated as easily exploitable, often undocumented labor, crossing dangerous, sometimes lethal,
and increasingly militarized Northern borders (e.g., the US-Mexico border, the EU’s Mediterranean) (Robinson and Santos 2014). Demographic displacements are aggravated by

environmental/climate degradation, oppression and conflicts—many rooted in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories and

hegemonic/imperialist wars. Rural to urban and South to North displacements drain the human, cultural, and social-reproductive capabilities of
traditional/rural/peasant/agricultural/fishing communities and Southern regions generally (Gasper and Truong 2014). The social reproduction crisis is gendered

and racialized, primarily affecting women, peasants, indigenous communities, and people of color (Salleh 2010; Peterson 2010; McMichael 2011). The critical consequences are
threefold: the brain drain, the proliferation of migrant/refugee labor, and the care drain. Racialized rural, peasant, indigenous and traditional

communities are eroded by the massive transference or displacement of productive, reproductive, and intellectual labor to cities and to the North. Working-age
people are being absorbed, often in violent, exploitative and oppressive conditions, into hyper-productive globalized economies of
 The care drain feeds the
capital accumulation. Concomitantly, many children, elderly, and disabled are marginalized, left uncared for as socially-reproductive labor erodes.

new genderization and feminization of labor in manufacturing , especially light assembly (e.g., maquiladoras, export-processing zones,
sweatshops). Labor feminization draws from migrant female workers coming from rural communities. Communities of origin, deprived of working age females (and males), lose the reproductive
labor needed to care for social needs like education, safety, health, child and elderly care, often becoming reliant on migrant remittances. The care drain also feeds the South to North export of
female labor to cover for the scarcity of reproductive labor resulting from the absorption of Northern female labor into the “productive” labor force. Moreover, the growing global sex trade
absorbs and exploits economically-marginalized women, especially from semi/peripheries. Add gendered—and racialized—labor exploitation in less visible realms like domestic work, care

work, and agroindustry. The social reproduction crisis also embeds a health crisis stemming from acute inequality,
environmental degradation, neoliberal erosion of public health infrastructures , and deteriorated access to
food, water and resources. This health crisis, on the one hand creates the growth of noncommunicable “ diseases of
globalization ” resulting from consumerist, commodity-based, sedentary and industrial lifestyles (e.g., diabetes,
coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, depression, etc.), while on the other hand it perpetuates in the “Third World” communicable

diseases such as malaria and cholera, among many others . This health crisis interacts with other abovementioned crises to further complicate
social reproduction and to trigger displacement (Harris and Seid 2004; Schreker 2012; McMichael, Barnett and McMichael 2012; Ottersen, Dasgupta, Blouin et.al. 2014; The Global Health
Watch 2014). These crises are partly triggered and aggravated by neoliberalism, including its dismantling of social support networks and ecological protections globally since the 1980s, which

The planetary crisis, we

set the stage for the globalization of corporate and financial capital at the expense of people and planet. Yet the roots of the planetary crisis are deeper.

contend, has resulted from the generalization of a hegemonic mode of civilization underpinned by the

layered intersection of anthropocentric, androcentric, heterosexist, rationalist, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial, racialized, industrialist/developmentalist, capitalist, and
ableist systems of power. These ten systems of power constitute the infrastructures of hegemonic

civilization . Upon them, complex discursive and institutional apparatuses have been built and reproduced ,
asymmetrically shaping relations, practices, and cultures, often in structurally hierarchical, violent, oppressive, and
exploitative ways. Such infrastructures buttress vitiated relations among humans and with non-humans, thereby producing, reproducing and accelerating the crises. These
infrastructures must be critically and materially deconstructed to enable alternative worldviews ,
lifeways, organizational forms and practices to flourish . Drawing on decolonial, ecofeminist, posthumanist-ecological, and world-systems analysis
we describe these infrastructures and how they feedback on each other:5

Rejecting capitalism’s a d-rule

Inderpal Grewal 17, Yale gender and sexuality studies professor, Saving the Security State, libgen
Over the last few years, journalists have revealed the extent to which the US state surveilled its citizens, especially those, such as Muslims, who are now figured as
racialized national security threats.40 This surveillance exists alongside continuing racial profiling of South Asian Muslims and those of Middle Eastern descent, as
well as Latinos and African Americans; such profiling has become a method of crime and “terror” prevention.41 Corporations
also participate in
surveillance by gathering consumer data, producing profiles, and predicting consumer behavior and
habits.42 Consumer data as well as political behavior and actions online that become political data are
commodities that are for sale, increasing the likelihood of more surveillance by digital technology
companies.43 There is often a close relation between corporations and state security projects, as states
and corporations work on surveillance either in partnership, separately, or even antagonistically . In addition,
because neoliberalism often blurs divisions between public and private entities, corporations are increasingly endowed with the rights of persons. Entities and
groups that claim to be outside of the state, such as ngos, can both depend on the state and claim to be outside of it.44 One
widely noted example
of the collaboration between public and private entities is the US government’s privatization of state
security through its use of private corpo-rations in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. 45 It is this fuzziness
between public and private power through which sovereignty is shared, making some persons more secure because of power given to them and some insecure (or
even targets of racial violence) because of the power exercised by these nonstate sovereignties. Both
race and gender are key
determinants of sovereignty or lack thereof, as race emerges to enable white citizens to
governmentalize security, leading to criminalizing nonwhite groups in old and new ways.46 New
technologies of profiling emerge within legal, material, and political domains that engage with the
political economy of security and insecurity . Neoliberalism relies on racial, religious, and gender
exclusions as much as did liberalism . Dispersing sovereignty to particular authoritarian white
masculinities and, to a lesser extent, femininities,47 these racialized and gendered subjects feel
empowered and responsible in emergent ways in this century . Some are empowered by a sovereignty given to them to claim
historically racialized white power for groups not always seen as white, while others bring together race and gender to create new imperial feminisms. While some
forms of racialized exclusions (such as immigration laws) seem to continue, Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians are more visibly racialized as dangerous Others who
are left out even from becoming neoliberal citizens.48 African Americans, Latinos, and Native peoples continue to be targets of a carceral state that is also part of
the security state.49 White,
imperial sovereignties constitute the “soft” and “hard power” of military force,
sometimes as humanitarianism and other times as police .50 In particular, what is visible in the new
century is that this “soft power” is inextricable from the “hard power” of the military . Military and
consumer technologies have long been codependent, and military technologies continue to reformulate
everyday life in new ways.51 In particular, what is called the “carceral state” is constructed through
military technologies to enact forms of racialized power .52 Racial profiling and consumer profiling are
both enabled by new technologies that allow public and private organizations to collect personal
data.53 State welfare agencies, banks, and retail companies all use digital technologies to collect
biometric, location, dna, consumption, Internet, and face-recognition data. Data-mining tools grow ever
more sophisticated and fine tuned, though it is unclear whether they can achieve the sophisticated
profiling their marketers claim.54 In the context of twenty-first-century US empire, what Armand
Mattelart calls “the techno-security paradigm” is focused on “terrorism ,” a deliberately vague concept
that allows violence and is not accountable to liberal constitutional ideals . Mattelart argues that the war on terror was
mobilized by collaborations among “the entire information and technology complex.”55 Shadowy government agencies and private

corporations wage “networkcentric” cyberwar,56 using information technology to create geopolitical

advantage, with the support of nontechnological mechanisms such as state antiterror laws that enforce
and popularize surveillance and secrecy technologies . The state and its exceptional subjects use these new
technologies to mobilize racialized and Orientalist ideologies.57 In the name of enhancing personal and
state security, the US government, the technology industry, and other corporations manage and
proliferate risks and fears to create ever more surveillance. Internet and communication technology growth is fueled by the
promise of accurate and effective profiling—and this is part of the long history of all technology. Caren Kaplan has shown how air-power technology industries have
long relied on such claims of “precision bombing” while naming their targets as “collateral damage.”58 When the “profile” of a consumer,
criminal, citizen, or terrorist is dynamic—created out of shifting information flows and racialized notions
of security and fear—it is nothing but aporetic. Profiling does not work through accuracy but rather
through its broad racial effects that are terroristic; that is, profiling itself produces terror for those it
catches in its security net, and those it catches are a broad group identified by religious, gendered, and
racial characteristics produced by histories of racialized imperialism . In the continued use of race and colonial regimes of
Orientalism, new surveillance technologies rely on older racial and colonial ideologies embedded in Western visual histories. One result of these

twenty-first-century US surveillance practices is that the term “security” has come to index
heterogeneous and unstable state, social, and economic powers, through blurred distinctions between
individuals, corporations, the state, public entities, and private entities. It is precisely the transfer of
technology from military to ordinary, everyday life that enables the duplicity of the term “security” for
the state and for individuals; this creates the state effect of fluidity between individual, personal ideas of home, safety, and protection, as well as
between those interests and national threats and state security. Security traffics in the dynamism of affect across family, home, safety and national security, in

which differences can be highlighted or dissolved at different times and places. Security can refer to welfare and militarization , and
to safety and violence . It can refer to individual and biological processes of welfare and biopolitics that
in the US context are based on biometrics, pathologization of new racial formations, old and new
Orientalisms, and widespread surveillance. These neoliberal securitizations have, since the 1970s,
supported what some scholars argue is an authoritarian populism that criminalizes on the basis of
race, class, gender and religion.5 9 But it can also refer to the demands made on the state for safety and
protection that it cannot ensure, and which it often refuses to ensure . Security works affectively
through the promise of the safety of home and of nation, but also enables the powers of protection
claimed by patriarchies, fraternities, and nationalisms that work through violence. Security enables a
promise of welfare that the state cannot fulfill, not because it is unable to but because its neoliberal
alliances prevent it from doing so . This means that neoliberalisms alter the relations between citizens,
nations, and states by shifting power and sovereignty to corporations and individuals at national and
transnational scales. Such shifts create problems of state legitimacy, and have come to produce protests
and frictions that mark the era of advanced liberalism.

Thumpers – previous regs + WOTUS rule

Alt causes – economy works on other levers – no reason companies suppiku bc plan –
OTHER sectors
Confidence is low now.
Isabella Mourgelas and Melanie C. Nolen, 6-14-2021, [Melanie is research director for Chief Executive
Group and research editor for Corporate Board Member and Chief Executive magazines. She has two
decades of experience writing for the corporate and financial industry across Canada and the United
States. "CEO Optimism Falls Back To Pre-Vaccine Levels", ChiefExecutive.net
https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-optimism-falls-back-to-pre-vaccine-levels/ //DMcD]

CEO optimism in an improving business landscape continues to fade in June on concerns over soaring materials and
labor costs, supply-chain snarls, inflationary pressures and increasing taxes and regulations , which they
say they expect will stall the economic recovery — and growth in their businesses . Those are the key findings
from Chief Executive’s latest poll of 233 U.S. CEOs, fielded from June 8-10. After 5 months of expansion, our leading indicator of CEO
confidence declined for the second month in a row in June, to 6.9 out of 10, on our 10-point scale. It is now down
more than 5 percent from its April peak of 7.3 and back to December levels , before vaccination efforts
began. This rating is in-line with CEOs’ rating of current conditions (6.9/10), indicating that America’s business chiefs no longer
expect conditions to improve over the coming months . “It is clear that we will be dealing with Covid-19 for a while yet,”
says Karim Chichakly, co-president of NH-based software company isee systems. While he expects the reopening of business and lifting of Covid
restrictions to support growth, “If we cannot manage it, inflation may exert some strong downward pressures,” he says. “Demand in residential
new construction and repair and remodeling remains strong. However, it is being held back by the rapid
increases in prices for
materials coupled with shortages of product,” says Bob Merrill, CEO of Interbuild Distribution, a global manufacturer of countertops
and panels. “Imports have also slowed significantly due to container shortages and slowdowns at the ports ,” he
says. For Jeff Chandler, CEO and president of Hopdoddy Burger Bar, an Austin-TX-based burger joint chain with more than 20 locations across
the country, “inflation, labor shortage, commodity and supply chain disruption, [and] lack of confidence in our
government ” justify his forecast for worsening conditions (from 7/10 to 5/10) over the coming months and why he projects his company’s
revenues to be down by this time next year. Pete Barile, president and CEO of Tennessee-based furniture manufacturer Daniel Paul Chairs, says
the “uncertainty of material costs, availability and lack of labor over the next 12 months” are what’s driving his forecast for the
months ahead. Siemens chairman and former CEO Joe Kaeser agrees that inflation is a concern, to which he adds “lacking execution of the
stimulus packages” as another reason why he expects muted growth this year, rating his outlook for the economy 12 months out a 6 out of 10.
Overall, only 36 percent of CEOs participating in our June poll expect conditions to improve in the next year —down from
42 percent the month prior and from 63 percent at the beginning of the year, when Covid-recovery hopes were highest.

Economic decline doesn’t cause war.

Walt 20 -- Stephen Walt, International Relations Professor at Harvard University. [Will a Global
Depression Trigger Another World War? 5-13-20, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-
pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/]
On balance, however, I
do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to
have much impact on the likelihood of war . Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there

would be a lot more of the latter . To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since
the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars , most of them unrelated to the state of the
economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war,
they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).”

Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory . As
John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it

will be long , bloody , costly , and uncertain . To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a
quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would
win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as
possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W.
Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

The fact that each of these leaders miscalculated badly does not alter the main point: No matter what a country’s
economic condition might be, its leaders will not go to war unless they think they can do so quickly , cheaply ,
and with a reasonable probability of success .

Third, and most important, the primary motivation for most wars is the desire for security, not economic gain . For this
reason, the odds of war increase when states believe the long-term balance of power may be shifting against them, when they are convinced
that adversaries are unalterably hostile and cannot be accommodated, and when they are confident they can reverse the unfavorable trends
and establish a secure position if they act now. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed that “every
war between Great Powers
[between 1848 and 1918] … started as a preventive war , not as a war of conquest ,” and that remains true of
most wars fought since then.

The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or
peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant . Even if the COVID-19

pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy—as seems quite likely—it is not likely to affect the
probability of war very much , especially in the short term.
 2AC---Federalism DA---Top

1) Biden’s killing federalism.

Smith, 1/21 (Isaac Smith, District Manager, Mobile, AL Office, January 21 2021, “How the Biden
Administration Plans to Shape Environmental Policy”, PPM Consultants, https://ppmco.com/how-the-
biden-administration-plans-to-shape-environmental-policy/, accessed 6/27/2021) TK

TheTrump Administration focused on EPA embracing the principles of “ cooperative federalism ” and EPA’s FY
2018-2022 Strategic Plan specifically implemented cooperative federalism in the compliance and
enforcement process with states primarily taking the lead. This resulted in a decline in the number of
federal enforcement cases initiated by EPA under the Trump Administration . It’s expected that a Biden
Administration EPA will take a more active, aggressive position in pursuing federal enforcement cases. It
EPA will reinstate the use of supplemental environmental projects ( SEPs ) in resolving
is also anticipated the
civil enforcement cases. In March 2020, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that EPA lawyers may no
longer use SEPs in consent decrees or settlements because “SEPs violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the
Miscellaneous Receipts Act, which is intended to protect Congress’ constitutional power of the purse .” In
Biden’s Administration, SEPs will likely be resurrected and allowed for use by EPA in settlements as a means to
carry out specific projects and implement environmental justice goals. The remainder of this article will focus on the environmental
regulations that are likely to be impacted by the change in administration and the possible tools the Biden Administration may use to enact
their agenda.

2) No spillover to other issues.

Craig 13 (Robin Kundis, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs and Attorneys’ Title Professor of
Law, Florida State University College of Law, “Adapting Water Federalism to Climate Change Impacts:
Energy Policy, Food Security, and The Allocation Of Water Resources,” FSU College of Law,
Environmental & Energy Law & Policy Journal, Volume 5, Public Law Research Paper No. 431, last revised
June 2013, pp. 183-236, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1555944, ccm)

Recognizing that the federal government may take an increasing interest in how water is managed and
allocated does not dictate any particular federal role , or even a re-balancing of water federalism . For
example, a bill introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2009 acknowledges that
“ supplying water is highly energy-intensive and will become more so as climate change forces more
utilities to turn to alternative supplies ” and that “ energy production consumes a significant
percentage of fresh water resources of the U nited S tates.”229 However, its responses are to fund the EPA
to conduct research on the effects of climate change on the nation’s drinking water utilities .230
Funding and carrying out research is a traditional federal role in water management (among other areas),
and hence this approach can hardly be deemed to shift water federalism in any significant way. A bit
more ambitiously, but again without creating any real shift in the federalism balance surrounding water, a
bill introduced the next day would: (1) establish a WaterSense labeling program within the EPA “to
identify and promote water efficient products, buildings, landscapes, facilities, processes, and
services”231; (2) create a federally funded, state-based residential water efficiency and conservation
incentives program232; and (3) create a direct federal funding program (the “ Blue Bank ”) to implement
mitigation and adaptation measures in water systems .233

The most credible officials confirm no impact—their impacts are pure threat
inflation designed to justify an endless military surveillance state
Blunden, citing Clapper, 15—lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs, James Clapper is the Director of
National Intelligence (Bill, “Cyber Armageddon is a Myth”,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/23/cyber-armageddon-is-a-myth/, dml)
Over the past several years mainstream news outlets have conveyed a litany of cyber doomsday scenarios on
behalf of ostensibly credible public officials. Breathless intimations of the End Times . The stuff of Hollywood
screenplays. However a recent statement by the U.S. intelligence community pours a bucket of cold water over
all of this. Yes, Virginia, It turns out that all the talk of cyber Armageddon was a load of bunkum. An elaborate
propaganda campaign which only serves as a pretext to sacrifice our civil liberties and channel an
ocean of cash to the defense industry. Looking back the parade of scare stories is hard to miss. For example, in late 2012 Secretary
of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor .” Former White House cybersecurity official Paul B. Kurtz likewise
spoke of a threat which he referred to as a “cyber Katrina.” Former NSA director Mike McConnell claimed that a veritable Cyberwar was
on and chided the public “are we going to wait for the cyber equivalent of the collapse of the World Trade Centers?” Yet another NSA director,
Keith Alexander, described cyberattacks as constituting “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” And finally, Vanity Fair magazine published a
hyperbolic article entitled “A Declaration of Cyberwar” wherein the NSA’s Stuxnet attack against Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities was
likened to a cyber “Hiroshima.” Yet the 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. intelligence community
submitted recently to the Senate Armed Services Committee has explicitly conceded that the risk of “cyber
Armageddon” is at best “remote.” In other words, it’s entirely safe to ignore the hyperbolic bluster of the
Cult of Cyberwar . Despite what we’ve been told the Emperor is naked. What society has witnessed is
what’s known in the public relations business as threat inflation . It’s a messaging tool that’s grounded in human emotion. Faced with
ominous prophecies by trusted public servants the average person seldom pauses to consider the likelihood of ulterior motives or
perform a formal quantitative risk assessment. Most people tacitly cede to the speakers’ authority —given that most speakers are, or
were, high-ranking officials— and accept their graphic worst-case scenarios at face value . The American public saw threat
inflation back in the 1950s when American leadership hyperventilated over the imaginary Missile Gap. We saw it once again before the invasion
of Iraq when President Bush spoke of a nuclear “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” And after reading through the
various cyber metaphors described earlier it’s hard not to recognize the fingerprints of threat inflation at work. The
goal of threat
inflation is to stir up anxiety, to foment a profound sense of apprehension so that the public is receptive to marketing
pitches emerging from the defense industry. Studies conducted by accredited research psychologists demonstrate that
anxious people will choose to be safe rather than sorry . In the throes of an alleged crisis, anxious people aren’t
necessarily particular about the solution as long as it’s presented as a remedial measure; they don’t care
much about the ultimate cost or the civil liberties they relinquish . They’re willing to pay a steep price to
feel safe again. So it is that American intelligence services have raised a global panopticon and in doing
so engaged in clandestine subversion programs that span entire sectors of the economy . Speaking to the public
our leaders justify mass surveillance in terms of protecting the American public against terrorists. Speaking to each
other intelligence officers disparage iPhone users as ‘zombies’ who pay for their own monitoring. This sharp contrast underscores an insight
provided by whistleblower Ed Snowden in an open letter to Brazil. In particular Snowden stated that “These programs were never about
terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.” This
process, of
capitalizing on deftly manufactured emotional responses, has been called securitization and it puts the
economic and political imperatives of corporate interests before our own. An allegedly existential threat
like cyber Armageddon can presumably justify any cost in the throes of a crisis mentality. This is
exactly what powerful groups are betting on.
No cyber impact – attribution, restraint, and capabilities.
Lewis ’20 [James Andrew; 8/17/20; senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies
Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; "Dismissing Cyber Catastrophe,"
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dismissing-cyber-catastrophe]

More importantly, there are powerful strategic constraints on those who have the ability to launch
catastrophe attacks . We have more than two decades of experience with the use of cyber techniques and
operations for coercive and criminal purposes and have a clear understanding of motives , capabilities , and
intentions . We can be guided by the methods of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which used interviews and observation (rather than
hypotheses) to determine effect. These methods apply equally to cyberattacks. The conclusions we can draw from this are:

Nonstate actors and most states lack the capability to launch attacks that cause physical damage at
any level, much less a catastrophe . There have been regular predictions every year for over a decade that
nonstate actors will acquire these high-end cyber capabilities in two or three years in what has become a cycle of
repetition. The monetary return is negligible , which dissuades the skilled cybercriminals (mostly Russian
speaking) who might have the necessary skills . One mystery is why these groups have not been used as mercenaries, and this may
reflect either a degree of control by the Russian state (if it has forbidden mercenary acts) or a degree of caution by criminals.

There is enough uncertainty among potential attackers about the U nited S tates’ ability to attribute
that they are unwilling to risk massive retaliation in response to a catastrophic attack. (They are perfectly willing to
take the risk of attribution for espionage and coercive cyber actions.)

No one has ever died from a cyberattack, and only a handful of these attacks have produced physical damage.
A cyberattack is not a nuclear weapon, and it is intellectually lazy to equate them to nuclear weapons.
Using a tactical nuclear weapon against an urban center would produce several hundred thousand casualties, while a strategic nuclear
exchange would cause tens of millions of casualties and immense physical destruction. These are catastrophes that some hack cannot
duplicate. The shadow of nuclear war distorts discussion of cyber warfare.

State use of cyber operations is consistent with their broad national strategies and interests. Their
primary emphasis is on espionage and political coercion . The U nited S tates has opponents and is in
conflict with them, but they have no interest in launching a catastrophic cyberattack since it would
certainly produce an equally catastrophic retaliation . Their goal is to stay below the “use-of-force”
threshold and undertake damaging cyber actions against the United States, not start a war.

This has implications for the discussion of inadvertent escalation , something that has also never occurred . The
concern over escalation deserves a longer discussion, as there are both technological and strategic constraints that
shape and limit risk in cyber operations , and the absence of inadvertent escalation suggests a high
degree of control for cyber capabilities by advanced states . Attackers, particularly among the U nited
S tates’ major opponents for whom cyber is just one of the tools for confrontation, seek to avoid
actions that could trigger escalation .

The U nited S tates has two opponents ( China and Russia ) who are capable of damaging cyberattacks.
Russia has demonstrated its attack skills on the Ukrainian power grid, but neither Russia nor China would be well served
by a similar attack on the U nited S tates. Iran is improving and may reach the point where it could use
cyberattacks to cause major damage, but it would only do so when it has decided to engage in a major
armed conflict with the U nited S tates. Iran might attack targets outside the United States and its allies with less risk and
continues to experiment with cyberattacks against Israeli critical infrastructure. North Korea has not yet developed this kind of
capability.

No blackouts.
Larson 18 Selena Larson, Cyber threat intelligence analyst at Dragos, Inc. [Threats to Electric Grid are
Real; Widespread Blackouts are Not, 8-6-2018, https://dragos.com/blog/industry-news/threats-to-
electric-grid-are-real-widespread-blackouts-are-not/]//BPS

The US electric grid is not about to go down. Though it’s understandable if someone believed that. Over the last few weeks,
numerous media reports suggest state-backed hackers have infiltrated the US electric grid and are capable of manipulating the flow of
electricity on a grand scale and cause chaos. Threats against industrial sectors including electric utilities, oil and gas, and manufacturing are
growing, and it’s reasonable for people to be concerned. But to say hackers have invaded the US electric grid and are
prepared to cause blackouts is false. The initial reporting stemmed from a public Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
presentation in July on Russian hacking activity targeting US electric utilities. This presentation contained previously-reported information on a
group known as Dragonfly by Symantec and which Dragos associates to activity labeled DYMALLOY and ALLANITE. These groups focus on
information gathering from industrial control system (ICS) networks and have not demonstrated disruptive or damaging
capabilities . While some news reports cite 2015 and 2016 blackouts in Ukraine as evidence of hackers’ disruptive capabilities, DYMALLOY
nor ALLANITE were involved in those incidents and it is inaccurate to suggest the DHS’s public presentation and those destructive behaviors are
linked. Adversaries have not placed “cyber implants” into the electric grid to cause blackouts; but they are infiltrating business
networks---and in some cases, ICS networks---in an effort to steal information and intelligence to potentially gain access to operational
systems. Overall, the activity is concerning and represents the prerequisites towards a potential future disruptive event ---but evidence to
date does not support the claim that such an attack is imminent. The US electric grid is resilient and
segmented , and although it makes an interesting plot to an action movie , one or two strains of malware targeting
operational networks would not cause widespread blackouts . A destructive incident at one site would
require highly-tailored tools and operations and would not effectively scale . Essentially, localized
impacts are possible, and asset owners and operators should work to defend their networks from intrusions such as those described by
DHS. But scaling up from isolated events to widespread impacts is highly unlikely .
 2AC---PTX
Two-track fails---multiple crises drained Biden’s PC.
Thomas Gift 21, Associate Professor of Political Science at UCL, director of the Centre on US Politics,
9/7/2021, "Biden’s mishandled Afghanistan withdrawal is unlikely to have a large effect on the 2022
midterms," https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2021/09/07/bidens-mishandled-afghanistan-withdrawal-
is-unlikely-to-have-a-large-effect-on-the-2022-midterms/, MBA AM

How will Biden’s tough recent stretch, especially in Afghanistan, affect the White House’s p olitical c apital?

The last few weeks have been an undeniable jolt to the White House. Biden’s approval ratings have dipped into
negative territory. Republicans are using the devastating images out of Kabul to paint a portrait of an unreliable commander-in-
chief. Even Democratic allies have questioned how Biden’s recent moves square with a leader who promised to be a steady
hand and to restore American trust abroad. Afghanistan was Biden’s first true foreign policy test, and his execution failed . Politically, however,
whether this proves to be a temporary blip for Biden—or the start of a protracted loss of p olitical c apital—will depend
on how effectively the administration can change the conversation. The White House communications office is
clearly trying to pivot back to domestic issues. But even here , there’s no safe harbor given continued
depressing news on COVID-19 , worse-than-expected August job numbers , mounting concerns about
inflation , and so on. To the extent that presidents are granted even a modicum of a honeymoon period anymore, we’re well past that
with Biden.

Will perceptions of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal thwart his domestic agenda?
It’s possible to overstate how much recent events in Afghanistan will shape what Biden can achieve legislatively at home; any effects will be case-specific. It’s still
much more likely than not that the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that’s already passed the Senate will become law, which only requires that Democrats vote along

party lines in the House. But Biden’s additional $3.5 trillion spending proposal—which was already going to be a
tough sell for the White House to pass through reconciliation in ideal circumstances—might become even less
likely . That’s a bill that that’s jam-packed with progressive wish-list items , including on clean energy, family leave,
housing, and pre-K schooling. Some Democrats, particularly from swing districts and moderate states, would’ve been
reluctant to vote for that bill anyway. But Biden’s diminished political stature might give those
lawmakers even more pause about toeing the party line. In fact, there’s already evidence of this
hesitation, with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin demanding a “strategic pause” on the bill, which should concern
the White House.
Is there any chance progressive Democrats use Biden’s difficulties to try increase their own political leverage within the party?

Some progressive Democrats may be emboldened by Biden’s troubles and see them as an opportunity to
gain an upper hand in negotiations between different wings of the party. But the reality is that, if they go down that route, it
will ultimately be at their own expense . For one thing, no one thinks that Biden’s falling poll numbers should be interpreted as anything but
disapproval over Afghanistan. The recent downward trend is divorced from what Americans think about progressive agenda items like the Green New Deal, or

ambitious social programming. A sure-fire way for progressives in Congress to ensure that their priorities fall flat is
to heat up an already simmering war within the party. That will hamper Democrats from enacting
legislation in an already fragile political environment , which, in turn, will hurt their chances of maintaining a majority on Capitol Hill
beyond 2022. Strategically, progressives would be better off recognizing that the negative press afflicting the White House makes it more important—not less—that
they stick with moderates. Like it or not, their political fates are fused together.
Moderates and progressives back both bills inevitably---publicly-expressed concerns
are posturing.
Anna Palmer 21, Jake Sherman, co-founders of Punchbowl News, former authors of Politico Playbook; 8-
9-2021, "The Daily Punch: Aug. 9, 2021," Punchbowl News, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-
daily-punch/id1549272440?i=1000531457937, transcribed via temi.com from 8:08-13:04, MBA AM
*The Problem Solvers’ Caucus is a bipartisan caucus of House moderates.
AP: Alright, let’s move on to the number three story of the day: the House’s dilemma. So, we've been spending so much time on the Senate the last several weeks
and months, trying to kind of cover the ins and outs of the Schumer majority: how Democrats are going to handle the bipartisan infrastructure package, the budget
resolution, but it gets even more complicated, I think, in the House. And those dynamics are starting to play out kind of in public at this
point.

JS: Yeah. So, yes, that's true. So you have all these moderates basically saying that they don't want to spend $3.5
trillion and they're saying they're skeptical of it. And they're also saying that they need some additional information, let's say, about how
the money's going to be spent. You know, I just think we've been focused on the Senate for so long and maybe this is, this is my house bias here coming up, but
we've been focused on the Senate for so long that we're ignoring the realities in the House where again, a four seat majority a caucus that ranges from practically
people who identify as being in the Bernie Sanders wing of the party to people who are a lot more conservative. I mean, you have Kurt Schrader of Oregon who's
basically said, no matter what the budget says, I'm not going to vote for it. So this is a pretty, a pretty broad coalition that Nancy Pelosi has to keep together. They
also want these moderates, Anna, want Pelosi to bring up the infrastructure bill immediately. So they
want the infrastructure bill brought
up, you know, as soon as it passes the Senate. That's not going to happen because Pelosi needs to keep her
crew together. She needs to keep liberals together who won't pass the infrastructure Backpage unless they see the larger reconciliation package. So just
a ton of really complicated dynamics here that we'll be dealing with straight through.

AP: Yeah. I think the one question I have on all of this, right? So you have this caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, that is led by Mr. Gottheimer
from New Jersey, and they're sending a letter out today updating kind of their thoughts and feelings about how they want the bipartisan infrastructure package to

go first and to go immediately. And they have a lot of questions and concerns about the budget resolution, but at the
end of the day, I am always, and I think we have gone over this many times, skeptical of their fortitude to actually draw
that line in the sand and say, “no, we're not going to vote for this.” Are they really going to, is, is Josh Gottheimer really going to lead
Democrats over the edge and not pass bipartisan infrastructure. I have a hard time seeing that. I do think they're

trying to negotiate and kind of make their positions known, but don't you think they almost always cave ?

JS: Yeah, they do and they need to. Yes, I think they do. And, progressives are much more likely to have a stiff spine, I think, although, but all
of them are probably going to cave, this is the entirety of Joe Biden's agenda. I don't think that there's a
chance that anyone kind of tries to blow it up.

Two-track fails in the status quo due to Biden’s insufficient PC, but the plan is a
needed win that revives his political capital.
Steve Benen 21, Emmy award-winning producer for The Rachel Maddow Show, an MSNBC contributor,
author of The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics, 8/23/2021, "Will
9 moderate House Dems derail Biden's domestic agenda?," https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-
show/will-9-moderate-house-dems-derail-biden-s-domestic-agenda-n1277453, MBA AM

It's Political Science 101: in the United States, the more political capital a president has, the more likely he/she is
to win important fights. And as a Democratic-led Congress looks ahead to the fall, and President Joe Biden's domestic agenda hangs
in the balance , the New York Times reports that the White House is running low on p olitical c apital at an
inopportune time .
 With President Biden facing a political crisis that has shaken his standing in his party,
Democrats across the country are increasingly worried about their ability to maintain power in
Washington, as his administration struggles to defend its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and
stanch a resurgent pandemic that appeared to be waning only weeks ago.

All things considered, I think "political crisis" is probably overstating matters, but it's nevertheless true that the
president was in a stronger
position a few weeks ago. Coverage of developments in Afghanistan has been brutal ; Biden's approval
rating has dipped below 50% for the first time; and even public support for his handling of the
pandemic has fallen, despite the obvious fact that the surge in COVID-19 infections is not his fault.

But presidential p olitical c apital is not some ephemeral thing that exists in an unreachable vacuum . If
congressional Democrats want Biden to be in a stronger position , even for their own benefit, they can give him
more capital by passing his agenda.

And to an extraordinary degree, a

small handful of moderate House Dems -- whose own political fortunes appear to be tied to Biden's --
appear ready to make things dramatically worse for the White House. As the New York Times explained in a separate
report:

House Democrats will end their summer break on Monday, amid finger-pointing and rising tensions, to try to pave the legislative way for the most
ambitious expansion of the nation's social safety net in a half century. But the
divisions emerging over an arcane budget
measure needed to shield a $3.5 trillion social policy bill from a filibuster are exposing deep
strains in the Democratic Party over ideology, generational divides and the fruits of power and incumbency.

As House members return to work, let's recap how we arrived at this point by circling back to our earlier coverage.

The Democratic road map to legislative success was relatively clear. The Senate recently approved a $3.5 trillion budget
resolution with unanimous support from the Democratic conference. The plan was for the House to approve the same budget blueprint, at which point the party
could flesh out an ambitious intra-party compromise.

Two weeks ago, nine House Democrats -- whom Jon Chait nicknamed the "Suicide Squad" -- announced they'd defeat the budget
resolution , effectively crushing Biden's entire domestic agenda , unless the House first passes the
Senate's bipartisan infrastructure plan.
The rebellion is being led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who's joined by Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.), Filemon Vela (D-Texas), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Henry
Cueller (D-Texas), Vicente Gonzales (D-Texas), Ed Case (D-Hawaii), Jim Costa (D-Calif.), and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.).

These nine moderates -- representing roughly 4% of the House Democratic conference -- are well aware of their party's plan.
The process envisioned by House Democratic leaders and the vast majority of progressive members has been
unchanged from the outset : The chamber will tackle the $3.5 trillion measure, and once it passes, the House can then approve the Senate's
bipartisan infrastructure legislation, sending both parts of the two-track package to the White House for Biden's signature. It's
the same plan that has
the president's enthusiastic support.

But Gottheimer & Co. are eager for progressive lawmakers to voluntarily give up their leverage, and hand it over to these nine moderates. They
envision a schedule in which the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill passes first, at which point the centrists will consider the rest of the party's plans.

Maybe. If they feel like it.

The moderates claimed in a new Washington Post op-ed that the nation's infrastructure needs are so urgent that the
House has to pass the Senate bill as quickly as humanly possible. It's a difficult argument to take seriously, in part because a few
weeks won't make any practical difference, and in part because it's
a pretextual excuse obscuring what appears to be
Gottheimer's principal priority: tax breaks that largely benefit his wealthy constituents.
The New Jersey congressman told The Atlantic that, as far as he's concerned, most House Democrats are "holding the president's priority hostage," which was
amusing given that (a) Biden doesn't support Gottheimer's scheme; and (b) it's
Gottheimer and the other moderates who are
actually holding the president's entire domestic agenda hostage .

And just in case these efforts to divide the party weren't quite problematic enough, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) issued a statement this
morning siding with the nine centrists over the Democratic leadership.
It's possible that all of this is just a lot of summer posturing; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who's already explored possible compromises, will figure
something out; and the White House agenda will remain on track, with plenty of difficult negotiations still to come.

It's also possible that nine moderate House Democrats will cause Biden's domestic plans to fail
catastrophically , and both infrastructure bills will die.
We should expect some clarity fairly soon: the House is scheduled to hold a procedural vote as early as tonight on the budget resolution, which would clear the way
for a budget vote slated for tomorrow. As of this minute, the Democratic leaders' plan doesn't have the votes to pass, and the Democratic moderates' alternative
strategy also doesn't have the votes to pass.

Turn---Biden’s PC will be useless, but a flood of policymaking via the plan enables him
to accomplish more.
Paul Waldman 20, opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. 12/2/2020, "Joe Biden has to move fast,"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/02/joe-biden-has-move-fast/, MBA AM

For every day of his presidency, Joe Biden will be restrained and bedeviled by Republican power. Republicans will
probably retain control of the Senate, and even if they don’t, they will do everything they can to sabotage Biden’s agenda. They

will obstruct and delay, whether it’s on legislation, appointments or anything else, to make sure Biden has as little as possible
to show for his time in office.

Unfortunately, Biden
is naturally inclined to respond in just the way Republicans are counting on. He’s a compromiser, a
dealmaker — a man who wants to believe that there are bipartisan solutions to be found.
That’s not to say that Biden is naive about what he faces, just that he will always be vulnerable to some of the same mistakes that President Barack Obama made
early in his tenure, mistakes that come from thinking Republicans just might be operating in good faith and with the proper persuasion they can be dealt with.

But a realization of the full implications of our current polarization may just prove liberating for the new
administration.
There are at least some encouraging signs that Biden understands the situation; here’s a report from Politico on how his transition is thinking about personnel:

Concerned about Republicans slow-walking confirmation hearings for Cabinet appointees and hollowed-out federal agencies, Biden and his aides are eager to place
mid- to lower-level officials across the federal government, particularly in national security roles, to ensure his administration can begin to enact his agenda
immediately, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Slow-walking will absolutely be the Republican strategy , on both appointments and legislation. They won’t
come out and say they’re going to stonewall every appointee and refuse to allow any legislation to pass; instead
they’ll say that they just want to make sure Biden doesn’t stock his administration with radical leftists and propose far-out socialist laws. Send us the nominees and
the bills, and we’ll consider them. It’ll just take some time.

Weeks will then stretch into months, and the Biden agenda will languish. They’ve done it before — Obama himself
describes how they endlessly dragged out negotiations on the Affordable Care Act by claiming they might support it — and they’ll do it again. That’s the

Republican plan.
The first step to getting around it is to understand that thepublic won’t blame gridlock on the ones who are causing it. They’ll
just see a bunch of bickering in Washington with nothing getting done, and Biden will be the one who takes the blame.

Once you realize that the public is neither aware of nor particularly concerned about process questions,
you can stop worrying about whether Republicans will squawk at this appointment or that executive
order — because they’ll squawk no matter what you do. If it’s a good idea and you think the results will be good, then just do it. As
quickly and comprehensively as possible.

As David Roberts of Vox observes: In 2009, Obama and his aides made the mistake of thinking that their major
initiatives had to be rolled out one at a time in sequence, because he had a finite store of “ p olitical
c apital” that had to be spent carefully. But p olitical c apital is not something that exists apart from any particular
issue; it isn’t a special sauce that has to be poured on a policy in order to make it palatable.

p olitical c apital has become all but meaningless . There may have
And with the parties as polarized and unified as they are,

been a time when a popular president possessed so much capital that a senator from the opposition
party would feel compelled to support him on part of that president’s agenda , but that time is long
gone. There is no account Biden can draw on to turn Republican “no” votes into “yes.”

Sosetting up a series of high-profile policy battles may be the opposite of what Biden should do. The
unfortunate fact is that he
may not have the opportunity to do much in the way of big legislation on health care
or climate change or anything else, and if he has only executive power to work with, it makes it all the
more urgent to move quickly.
Which means getting staff in place immediately and then unleashing them. The Revolving Door Project argues that Biden should give as much authority as possible
to the agencies to let them dismantle their particular corners of the Trump legacy on their own, because the task “simply will not happen if approached sequentially
or micromanaged” by a White House staff with limited bandwidth.

That means moving on every policy area all at once. There’s nothing to be gained by putting off any
part of Biden’s agenda. Whatever he can do given the limits of his power, he should do as soon as
possible , in a flood of policymaking.

Even if Democrats win both Georgia races and control the Senate, Biden
should acknowledge that he likely has two years until
the 2022 midterm elections to pass whatever legislation he can. Not only will Democrats probably lose one or both houses in
the inevitable backlash (as happens to most presidents in their first midterm), the only possible chance at forestalling that result is to get results, as many as
possible, that he can show the voters.

Republicans will complain that Biden is being partisan, uncompromising, taking a “my way or the highway” approach. It
will be a strategy to
convince everyone of the lie that Biden and Democrats might be able to find some way of winning them
over, when in fact they’ll be implementing a strategy of total opposition.

If Biden follows them on that fruitless quest, he’ll be running in circles while crucial time passes and
nothing gets done. The only option for him is to decide not to care about Republican whining and do
what he got elected to do with all haste. The alternative is failure.
1AR Doubles
 Politics
Two-track collapses now---spent political capital robs Biden’s ability to cajole
Democrats.
Kevin McLaughlin 21, former executive director of the NRSC, president of Common Sense Leadership
Fund; 9-12-2021, "Kevin McLaughlin: Stop Biden's $3.5 trillion boondoggle – Manchin shows moderate
Dems how to survive midterms," https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/stop-biden-trillion-manchin-
moderate-dems-kevin-mclaughlin, MBA AM

If Kyrsten Sinema was the first Democrat to breach the gates of the Biden administration’s domestic agenda, Joe Manchin
kicked the door wide open and showed others the way.

Just before a weary nation paused for the holiday weekend, the West Virginia Democrat took a hatchet to the Democrats’ $3.5
trillion spending package , which has become the crown jewel on the left’s legislative wish list.

In a guest Wall Street Journal column, Manchin accurately accused

the bill of having, "no regard to rising inflation,
crippling debt or the inevitability of future crises" and said "ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a
disastrous future for the next generation of Americans."

Of course, Manchin has perfected the kabuki dance of talking the moderate talk before falling in line with his party’s liberals. In 2021 alone, he cast the tie-breaking
vote for Biden’s first $1.9 trillion spending package and the so-called For The People Act in June.

But if Manchin’s opposition is genuine, it marks the latest blow in a sea of setbacks for Biden. With his razor-
thin congressional majorities, the president’s domestic agenda was already on thin ice . The fiasco in Afghanistan
robbed Biden of precious p olitical c apital. Arizona’s Sinema has remained steadfast in her opposition .
Now, the real question is where are the other "moderate" members of the Democratic caucus?

As the political ground crumbles beneath Biden’s feet , opposing the left’s $3.5 trillion package is
becoming easier by the day. Also known as the "Bernie Budget," (the Vermont socialist has hit the road trying to sell it), it includes the worst
provisions that party leaders knew they could not stuff into the smaller infrastructure package while keeping a straight face about any semblance of
"bipartisanship."

Republicans laid traps that scuttle the bill.

Jordain Carney 21, reporter for The Hill, 9-5-2021, "GOP hopes spending traps derail Biden agenda,"
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/570827-gop-hopes-spending-traps-derail-biden-agenda?rl=1,
MBA AM

Senate Republicans are hoping they successfully laid spending traps that will scuttle , or significantly water down, President
Biden’s $3.5 trillion package.

Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), believe that by passing a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan bill
through the Senate, they've made it harder for Democrats to rally behind the larger package without at least
making changes that lower the overall price tag.

And they are publicly rooting for, and raising pressure on, moderates in both chambers who have signaled unease about the
size of the Democratic-only package.
“I’m praying for Joe Manchin [D-W.Va.] and Kyrsten Sinema [D-Ariz.], the two Democratic senators that seem to have some resistance to all this. I pray for their
good health and wise judgement every night. I recommend you do the same,” McConnell said during a stop in Kentucky.

Democrats are pursuing Biden’s infrastructure and spending package, the core of his economic and legislative agenda, through two tracks. The first is a $1 trillion bill
that was negotiated by the White House and a bipartisan group of senators that includes money for areas such as roads, bridges, rail, broadband and water. It
passed the Senate last month with the support of 19 GOP senators and all 50 members of the Democratic caucus.

The second is a sweeping $3.5 trillion social spending package that includes some of the party’s long-held priorities such as expanding Medicare, shoring up the
Affordable Care Act, combating climate change and providing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Both House and Senate Democrats
passed a budget resolution that greenlights them passing the package without GOP support in the Senate.

with deep divisions in the House and the

That means Republicans are largely powerless to block the bill — if Democrats remain unified. But

Senate among moderates and progressives, Republicans are hopeful that Democrats will have to drop
part of the package.
“We’ll see if they can get 50 Democrats. I think that that next bill is such a stretch that it’s going to be a lot harder for them to do than they think it is,” Sen. Roy
Blunt (Mo.), a member of GOP leadership, told KFTK-FM, a Missouri radio station.

“And I think by taking the infrastructure off the table that everybody knows we need to do ... it makes it
harder for them to get all 50 of their members to vote for this next bill,” Blunt added. “I think they’ve got their work cut out
for them.”

Part of the thinking for Senate Republicans is that by helping pass the $1 trillion bill, they’ve picked off the parts of infrastructure
that attract the most bipartisan support and are making Democrats carry the water alone on their
larger spending package.

“Why am I going to eat my spinach if I already have my dessert? Pretty good logic, right? And you know someone who accepts
that logic is Mitch McConnell,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said during a recent Facebook Live Q&A.

“You may not like Mitch, you may not trust Mitch, but there is no better analyst of how to better achieve Republican goals in Congress than Mitch McConnell. And
he thinks that passing this bill makes it less likely that Democrats are able to pass their $3.5 trillion tax and spending extravaganza,” Cassidy added.

Manchin axes climate provisions. Justified cuz new cards and analysis
Rachel Frazin 21, Zach Budryk, staff writers for The Hill; 9/14/2021, "Manchin puts foot down on key
climate provision in spending bill," https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/572066-manchin-
puts-foot-down-on-key-climate-provision-in-spending-bill?rl=1, MBA AM

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is throwing a wrench into Democratic plans for major government spending to
tackle climate change.

In TV interviews over the weekend, the senator said he wouldn't back the party's $3.5 trillion spending proposal,
adding that he doesn't support a program that would pay power providers to make the shift toward
clean energy .

The so-called clean electricity payment program, a central component of the party’s climate agenda, could
be in jeopardy unless Democrats find a way to sell it to the key swing vote senator.
Manchin argued in a CNN interview that paying for a transition to clean energy isn’t necessary since cleaner sources already
make up a growing share of the country’s electricity consumption.

“The transition is happening. Now they’re wanting to pay companies to do what they’re already doing. It makes no sense to me at all for us to take billions of dollars
and pay utilities for what they’re going to do as the market transitions,” the senator said.

“It makes no sense at all,” he added.

He also indicated opposition to Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending package as a whole in interviews with CNN and NBC.

This isn’t the first time Manchin has raised concerns about congressional action that would boost clean
electricity. In January, he expressed skepticism of a clean electricity standard , which would have required the switch to
clean energy, in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

The plan is popular---builds up momentum AND PC for infrastructure---the GOP is on

board!
Souers Kober 21– Vice president of communications for American Rivers, a national conservation
organization, BA from Trinity College (Amy, 6-19-2021, "Biden Has a Chance to Oversee Biggest River
Restoration Project in US History," Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/biden-has-a-chance-to-
oversee-the-biggest-river-restoration-project-in-history/)//kh
“America’s Most Endangered River”

My organization, American Rivers, named the Snake River “America’s Most Endangered River for 2021” because of the urgent need for action to save the salmon —
and the opportunity to come up with a bold, comprehensive solution. In February, Congressman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) proposed a $33.5 billion

infrastructure investments, including removing the lower Snake dams, to recover salmon runs
package of

and boost clean energy, agriculture and transportation across the region .
Showing his personal compassion toward the cause of salmon recovery, Simpson described salmon as “the most incredible creatures, I think, that God has created,”
according to a 2019 article.

Meanwhile, a presentation titled, “The Northwest in Transition: Salmon, Dams and Energy,” on Simpson’s website states, “The question I am asking the Northwest
delegation, governors, tribes and stakeholders is ‘do we want to roll up our sleeves and come together to find a solution to save our salmon, protect our
stakeholders and reset our energy system for the next 50 plus years on our terms?’ Passing on this opportunity will mean we are letting the chips fall where they
may for some judge, future administration or future [C]ongress to decide our fate on their terms. They will be picking winners and losers, not creating solutions.”

Since Simpsonreleased his proposal, other members of the Northwest congressional delegation have
joined the conversation. In May, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) spoke in favor of a
comprehensive solution, saying, “People in the Pacific Northwest [need to] engage with one another.”
“Let’s dive in and do it rather than pretend that somehow this is going to go away.… That’s just not going to cut it,” he said.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee also released a statement in favor
of a collaborative, comprehensive solution for salmon and the region.
No matter which proposal ultimately gains traction, American Rivers and other salmon advocates believe that we need meaningful immediate action and funding to
remove the lower Snake dams and replace their benefits. Prioritizing the following five goals is essential to long-term solutions for salmon recovery and improving
the present Northwest infrastructure:

Healthy rivers, abundant salmon: Restoration of the lower Snake River, along with the funding and
implementation of habitat restoration and fish protection projects, will provide the most favorable river
conditions possible for salmon, steelhead and other native fish species.
Honoring promises to tribes: Restoring
abundant, harvestable salmon will honor the promises made to Northwest
tribes by upholding their right to access fish and will benefit tribes from the inland Northwest to the
coast.

Prosperous agriculture: Infrastructure

upgrades will ensure irrigation from a free-flowing lower Snake River
continues to support the farms that currently rely on surface diversions and wells for their orchards,
vineyards and other high-value crops. Investments in the transportation system will allow farmers, who currently ship their grain to market
using river barges, to transport their products via rail.

Affordable, reliable clean energy: The

energy currently produced by the four lower Snake River dams can be
replaced by a clean energy portfolio that includes solar, wind, energy efficiency and storage. Diversifying
energy sources will improve the electric system’s reliability. Funding for energy storage, grid resiliency and optimization would
allow the Northwest to maintain its legacy of clean and affordable energy.

Revitalizing the economy: Infrastructure

investments in energy and transportation would mean more family-wage
jobs, the impact of which ripples out in communities throughout the region. A restored lower Snake
River would strengthen local economies by creating new opportunities for outdoor recreation, which will help
support local businesses, including outfitters, lodging and restaurants.

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity

Time is of the essence. Climate change is warming Northwest rivers, creating deadly conditions for endangered salmon. Meanwhile, the salmon runs continue to
decline. Northwest tribes have called for a major salmon summit this summer to underscore the urgency of these issues.

It is time for bold action from Northwest leaders. The

region’s congressional delegation has a strong history of crafting
innovative, bipartisan solutions to challenging water and river issues. And we’ve seen powerful ,
collaborative dam removal efforts come together on other rivers across the country, from Maine’s
Penobscot to Oregon and California’s Klamath. Now, with President Biden considering a national
infrastructure package, the government has an opportunity to secure significant regional investment
— and advance the biggest river restoration effort the world has ever seen. A well-crafted solution on a swift timeline would benefit
the nation as a whole by restoring salmon runs, bolstering clean energy and strengthening the
economy of one of the most dynamic regions in the country .
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“The salmon are a life source that we all depend on. Just as we are united with each other, we are also united with the salmon,” said Samuel Penney, Nez Perce
chairman. “We are all salmon people.”

Dam removal has bipartisan support and can be included in the infrastructure bill.
Kiernan, 21 --- president and CEO of American Rivers, a national river conservation organization
(5/25/21 04:00 PM EDT, Tom Kiernan, “Rivers, hydropower and climate resilience,”
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/555296-rivers-hydropower-and-climate-resilience,
JMP)

Leaders from the 12 Columbia Basin tribes, led by the Nez Perce, have called for a collaborative legislative solution. U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.)

and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), members of Congress on opposite sides of the political spectrum , are encouraging
the region to support a federal legislative package that includes breaching the four lower Snake River dams
and investing to replace their services to agriculture and power generation. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently released a statement with Washington Gov. Jay
Inslee (D), calling for “action and a resolution that restores salmon runs and works for all the stakeholders and communities in the Columbia River Basin.”
The time for action is now. The
infrastructure package that Congress is developing with the Biden administration is the
perfect opportunity to prioritize immediate investments on an aggressive timeline that will reduce
environmental harms and cultural injustices, and provide climate resilience , all while providing much needed jobs and
economic stimulus for the region.

Dam removal increasingly popular

Honea, 20 --- Assistant Professor of Science, Emerson College (May 29, 2020 8.24am EDT, Jon Honea,
The Conversation, “When dams cause more problems than they solve, removing them can pay off for
people and nature,” https://theconversation.com/when-dams-cause-more-problems-than-they-solve-
removing-them-can-pay-off-for-people-and-nature-137346, JMP)

Across the U nited S tates, dams generate hydroelectric power, store water for drinking and irrigation,
control flooding and create recreational opportunities such as slack-water boating and waterskiing.

But dams can also threaten public safety, especially if they are old or poorly maintained . On May 21, 2020, residents of
Midland, Michigan were hastily evacuated when two aging hydropower dams on the Tittabawassee River failed, flooding the town.

I’m an ecosystem scientist and have studied the ecology of salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest, where dams and historical over-harvest have drastically
reduced wild populations of these iconic fish. Now I’m monitoring how river herring are responding to the removal of two derelict dams on the Shawsheen River in
Andover, Massachusetts.

There’s growing support across the U.S. for removing old and degraded dams , for both ecological and
safety reasons. Every case is unique and requires detailed analysis to assess whether a dam’s costs outweigh
its benefits. But when that case can be made, dam removals can produce exciting results.
Pros and cons of dams

It’s relatively easy to quantify the benefits that dams provide. They can be measured in kilowatt-hours of electricity generation, or acre-feet of water delivered to
farms, or the value of property that the dams shield from floods.

Some dam costs also are obvious, such as construction, operation and maintenance. They also include the value of flooded land behind the dam and payments to
relocate people from those areas. Sometimes dam owners are required to build and operate fish hatcheries to compensate when local species will lose habitat.

Other costs aren’t borne by dam owners or operators, and some have not historically been recognized. As a result, many were not factored into past decisions to
dam free-flowing rivers.

Research shows that dams impede transport of sediment to the oceans, which worsens coastal erosion. They also release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as
drowned vegetation beneath dam reservoirs decomposes.

One of dams’ greatest costs has been massive reductions in numbers and diversity of migratory fish that move up and down rivers, or between rivers and the ocean.
Dams have driven some populations to extinction, such as the iconic Baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, and the once economically important Atlantic salmon on most
of the U.S. east coast.

Old dams under stress

As dams age, maintenance costs rise. The average age of U.S. dams is 56 years, and seven in 10 will be over 50 by 2025. The American Society of Civil Engineers
classifies 14% of the nation’s 15,500 high hazard potential dams – those whose failure would cause loss of human life and significant property destruction – as
deficient in their maintenance status, requiring a total investment of US$45 billion to repair.

Like the failed Michigan dams, which were built in 1924, older dams may pose growing risks. Downstream communities can grow beyond thresholds that
determined the dams’ original safety standards. And climate change is increasing the size and frequency of floods in many parts of the U.S.

These factors converged in 2017, when intense rainfall stressed the Oroville Dam in Northern California, the nation’s tallest dam. Although the main dam held, two
of its emergency spillways – structures designed to release excess water – failed, triggering evacuations of nearly 200,000 people.

Benefits from free-flowing rivers

As dam owners and regulators increasingly recognize the downsides of dams and deferred maintenance costs mount, some communities have opted to dismantle
dams with greater costs than benefits.
The first such project in the U.S. was the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine. In the mid-1990s when the dam was
up for relicensing, opponents provided evidence that building a fish ladder – a step required by law to help migratory fish get past the dam – exceeded the value of
the electricity that the dam produced. Federal regulators denied the license and ordered the dam removed.

Since then, the

river’s river herring population has grown from less than 100,000 fish to more than
5,000,000, and the fish have drawn ospreys and bald eagles to the river. This project’s success
catalyzed support for removing more than 1,000 other dams.

Dam removal is bipartisan

Workman, 7 --- adviser and consultant on water and natural resources issues to governmental and
nongovernmental organizations, including the World Commission on Dams (FALL 2007, JAMES G.
WORKMAN, “How to Fix Our Dam Problems; Thousands of aging dams should be repaired or destroyed,
at a cost of billions. A cap-and-trade policy could speed the process and help pay the bills,”
https://issues.org/workman-water-crisis-drought-fix-dams/, JMP)

Dams have always been politically charged and often the epitome of pork-barrel projects. For the same
reasons, dam removal can get bipartisan support from leading Democrats and Republicans alike. The
switch from the Clinton to Bush administrations led to attempted alterations of many natural resource policies,
but one thing did not change: the accelerating rate of dam removals. In 1998, a dozen dams were terminated; in 2005, some
56 dams came down in 11 states. Yet despite bipartisan support, there has never been any specific dam policy in either administration. A dam’s demise just
happened, willy-nilly, here and there. Dams died with less legal, regulatory, or policy rationale than accompanied their
birth.