Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1NC ......................................................................................................................................... 2
Development Link ................................................................................................................... 8
Leadership/Hegemony Link .................................................................................................. 11
Wind Links ............................................................................................................................ 15
Climate Change Links ........................................................................................................... 20
Alternative - Ext .................................................................................................................... 27
2NC K Prior Aff Suspect ................................................................................................. 31
2NC Turns Case (Energy/Climate)..................................................................................... 34
2NC Impact Structural Violence ........................................................................................ 36
2NC Impact Energy Technocracy ...................................................................................... 40
AT: Climate O/W .................................................................................................................. 43
AT: Renewables Better than FF ............................................................................................ 45
AT: Perm ............................................................................................................................... 47
AT: Enviro-Pragmatism ........................................................................................................ 51
AT: Prioritize Scientific Method ........................................................................................... 54
1NC
The discourse of ocean development requires a system of ecological and
economic destruction. The affs framing of ocean policy is unsustainable.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) 6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
3-6
Respected ecological philosopher Andrew Dobson provides a helpful discussion of the
accompanying asymmetry to this expansion when he considers how globalization has changed
citizenship. Dobson uses Castells for context: In a global approach, there has been, over the past
three decades, increasing inequality and polarization in the di stribution of wealth .... The poorest
20 percent of the world's people have seen their share of global income decline from 2.3 percent
to I .4 percent .... Meanwhile, the share of the richest 20 percent has risen from 70 percent to 85
percent." (Castells in Dobson 2003, I 9) Thus, globalization is not an even process of economic
expansion and opportunity where everyone is connected and everyone becon1es an equal part of a
wondrous network of global invisible hands. Instead, while there are some opportunities for poor
countries and their civic groups, globalization moves mostly in one direction. Global activist
Vandana Shiva elaborates that "Through its global reach, the North exists in the South, but the
South exists only within itself, since it has no global reach" (Shiva in Dobson I 7). T his does not
mean that globalization is inherently "bad" and localization "good"; it means that historically,
globalization has occurred to the privilege of some and at the expense of others. Nonsustainable
trends are embedded in inequitable power relationships; thus, global material equity is necessary
for curbing maldistribution and exploitation of resources. Dobson rejects the more
cosmopolitan belief that there is a reciprocal obligation of everyone to one another in favor of a
distributional responsibility such as from North to South based on the materials produced and
reproduced through asymmetrical globalization. This is a more sophisticated iteration of the
material equity included in the Borgese Test described below. I take Dobson's (and Shiva' s) point
that globalization enables this connectivity through and within ecological spaces and budgets, and
that sustainability requires benefits to be redistributed throughout transnational communities
(Dobson 2003). It is worthwhile to reflect on the question "How much has changed for the
majority of poor countries in the last fifty years, and in particular the last twenty years, in the face
of Western 'help'?" and then to simultaneously ask, "What is the direction of ecology in this same
last 50 years?" Minus a few exceptions, the promise and dream of "development" 2 for the global
South has actually "produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment,
untold exploitation and oppression" (Escobar I994, 4) at the same time ecology has seen
"structural" decline-that is, a decline of the frame and foundation of ocean ecology. Structure is
important economically and socially as well and implies the same meaning of the larger frame
and construction of a system where constituent agents and decisions are made, but which do not
fundamentally alter the larger design. As a political scientist, I cannot count this situation as an
accident, but instead a purposeful result that can come about only through disproportionate and
asymmetrical structural arrangements of power-but from where? While localities cannot escape
some responsibility, poor localities have unquestionably been marginalized, and their ability to
change their situation has been fraught with obstructions that originate from the colonial period.
Much of this power has cone from development discourses and projects which embody the
ideals of what progress should be (through modernity), and this has then framed the reality that
poor countries find themselves in when needing stabilization loans or making trading
arrangements (Escobar I 995). This follows the various ghosts of modernity, now supported, recreated, and defended most by the ideology of " neoliberalism." Liberalism is the central Western
political theory, ideology, and political economy preferring a least restricted market, pluralistic
competing political groups such as NGOs, various strong civil freedoms for individual citizens (
e.g., of speech, religion, etc.), and a neutral State which affords procedural equity (procedures of
the state treat everyone the same, e.g., in a courtroom) to all citizens and most agendas.
Neoliberalism is a reformed liberalism that places much more focus on the market aspect of
liberalism and much less focus on civil liberties. Neoliberal policies focus on privatizing formerly
public enterprises and industry; lowering social expenditures of the state (particularly those which
tend to redistribute wealth); reducing or eliminating tariffs toward other countries; and creating a
tax and physical infrastructure that favors industrial production and trickles down to lower classes
to create economic growth and employment and reduce poverty (Fri edman I 962). Neoliberal
policies are not concerned with creating a social safety net, leaving this up to a robust economic
growth, nor do they like regulatory environmental policies, which they prefer to leave up to the
pricing of goods. This ideology is exported through trade and loan arrangements to other
countries from the Western power elite, such as World Bank, the OECD, or individually through
the United States, Britain, and some other European countries that have majority voting power in
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Neoliberalism changed its focus
from simple capital accumulation models to include the development of institutions. Evans
(2004) sees these institutions imposed, such as through international finance institutions, which
are AngloAmerican generated models. These institutional designs are all the same; he calls them
"institutional monocropping," where the "best response to bad governance is less governance" (
35). This arrangement is a fundamental problem with neo liberalism because it creates fewer
limits on exploitation of people and natural resources, and places the profit motive of firms in a
privileged position without any sense of citizenship mentioned above. In contrast, Evans
proposes, along with scholars Dani Roderick and Amartya Sen, that the building of institutions
should center around more direct and participatory deliberative democratic institutions where
minority voices have more influence to stem exploitation. Ironically, the Anglo-American set of
institutions and countries never strictly employed neoliberalism themselves. It is well known that
state involvement and guarantees (to differing degrees) of some civil rights and social welfare
have been key elements in the building of stable industrialized affluent countries (H ettne, Inotai,
and Sunkel 2001). The United States and the European Union (EU) consistently use state
subsidies and protections, such as for agriculture-the primary area in which industrializing
countries have a competitive advantage (Kutting 2004). For ocean politics, the Northern subsidies
of fishing fleets are a source of overfishing and a prime example of a non-neoliberal policy,
which is now being negotiated in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, AngloAmerican countries demand lightning-fast change toward free markets and liberal democracy,
without some level of democratic guarantees and social welfare. Evidence indicates that this can
and has led to instability, violence, and ethnic genocide because these rapid changes create
unequal market and political controls among factious rival groups (Chua 2003). This is not
occurring only at the national level. The Third World cannot compete against Northern subsidies.
This problem was symbolized by a South Korean farmer, Lee Kyoung Hae, who committed
suicide outside the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, Mex ico, as a protest to WTO rules that allow
agricultural protections from the free market (Vidal 2003). Protesters at this n1eeting numbered
over ten thousand and hailed from more than thirty countries; they presented some recurrent
demands, which " included protection from big business, abandonment of genetically modified
crops in developing states, and no privatization of water, forests and land" (Vidal 2003). Now, the
world economy is growing at about 5 percent per year-the fastest in almost thirry years
(International Monetary Fund 2004). This global economy is based on flows of energy, material,
and capital. This flow is called throughput, and is used to sustain (and impoverish) groups within
the population greater than six billion people. These energy flows start and end within natural
systems. More throughput means more withdrawals and additions from and into natural systems.
Therefore, the basis for connecting economic globalization to ecological decline is that current
globalization expands the scale and intensity of throughput; this kind of growth is viewed as
essential to progress and development within neoliberalism. The inherent disconnect between
resource decline and global economic expansion is hidden structurally by distancing, or
"distanciation" (Kutting 2004). Capitalism in general, but in particular petroleum-based
capitalism, creates expedited pathways for export and trade that become separated, or distanced,
from their local meaning so that "Time-space separation disconnects social activity from its
particular social context" (Kutting 2004, 33). This is related to what ecological economists have
described in terms of ecological burdens remaining outside the pricing system as externalities
which ecology and third parties eventually pay. Current globalization allows affluent populations
to shift environmental costs through a global economy, and these populations are structurally
permitted to live off of the carrying capacity of others (Kutting 2004; Muradian and
MartinezAlier 200Ia, 200Ib; Martinez-Alier 1995; Bunker 1985). When one fishery is depleted,
the world economy can move on to the next fishery, structurally obscuring the problem because
consumers are not dependent on local ecological budgets. Changes do not affect affluent
consumers because these customers are not forced to care about the first depleted fishery, and in
this way human-ocean relations have fundamentally changed with economic globalization.
representations within three discourses: development, geopolitics, and law. The discourse of
development is built around an absolute definition of progress, an assumption that the more
developed can lead the less developed along this path to progress, and the belief that this progress
can be achieved by applying scientific rationality to development "problems" (Sachs 1992; Watts
1993). The development discourse is rooted in Enlightenment concepts of science and reason:
The world is knowable and individuals can shape it to serve themselves if only they utilize
science to find the proper formula. It follows that both society and space are amenable to
development. Space is perceived as an abstract field in which individuals can embed and
redistribute social relations and structures in an attempt to better their lives. By establishing a grid
(graphically expressed in the system of latitude and longitude lines), the location of every space
in relation to every other space is made generalizable, a key prerequisite for scientific inquiry and
the formation of scientific laws. An abstract element susceptible to manipulation (or, to use
Sack's terminology, "emptying" and "filling"), space is represented as a canvas on which planners
and engineers may test and apply their insights and work toward human progress (Harvey 1989;
Lefebvre 1991; Smith 1990). < The modern construction of ocean-space is in some senses the
antithesis of this land-space territorial construction. The sea largely has been constructed as a
"non-territory," an untamable space that resists "filling" or "development." And yet, this
construction of oceanspace as a "non-territory" or "other" in which rational planning cannot
prevail also lies within the development discourse of scientific rationality and space-oriented
planning. This discursive construction is possible only as a counterpoint to the paradigmatic
modern construction of land-space as amenable to rational planning, and, as Said (1993) notes,
antithetical counterpoints play a crucial role in producing discourses. A second discourse
frequently informing (and being reproduced by) the construction of ocean-space is the discourse
of geopolitics, by which "intellectuals of statecraft 'spatialize' international politics in such a way
as to present it as a 'world' characterized by particular places, peoples, and dramas" (6 Tuathail
and Agnew 1992: 192; see also 6 Tuathail 1996~n the modern era's geopolitical discourse, as in
the era's development discourse, ocean-space typically is represented as a "special" space that
lacks the paradigmatic attributes of "regular" space. For the development discourse, the key
spatial unit is the manageable block of land that can be "filled" and "developed," and the ocean
therefore is unique and an "other" because it is "undevelopable.( For the geopolitical discourse,
the key unit is the territorially defined state that interacts with the world's other states. As space
outside state territory, the ocean is constructed within the geopolitical discourse as an empty
"force-field" within which and across which states exercise their relative power over their
competitors. This geopolitical counterpoint, like that of the development discourse, lies firmly
within dominant ways of thinking: It reproduces the representation of space as a landscape of
(developable and governable) terrestrial nation-states separated by an (undevelopable and
anarchic) marine void. A third discourse referred to here is that of law. Legal discourse theorists
challenge the accepted perception of law as an autonomous set of rules and reasoning systems
lying outside the structures and power relations of social life: Legal critics ... insist that law ... is
not only deeply embedded in the messy and politicized contingencies of social life but [is]
actually constitutive of social and political relations. (Blomley 1994: 7- 8) Like the other
discourses discussed here, the legal discourse does more than operationalize and legitimize social
relations. When one appeals to the legal discourse, one represents relations in a particular manner
that serves to "naturalize" material reality as well as the autonomy of a seemingly distinct sphere
of legal reasoning. Critical legal geographers demonstrate how this scripting of social relations
within a legal discourse serves to define places, their hierarchical order, and the scale and
boundaries of social organization. The legal discourse historically has served both to reflect and
construct social conceptions of space. Ideas about property and the relative mobility of privately
held goods within the realm of one sovereign and among the realms of multiple sovereigns are at
the foundation of legal thinking.qhe legal discourse plays a crucial role in reproducing the ideal of
mutually exclusive sovereign nation-state territories that, taken as a whole and mapped next to
each other serially across the surface of the earth, represent the rule of law and the space of
society. As with the other discourses, the legal discourse implies that the sea is a "lawless,"
antithetical "other" lying outside the rational organization of the world, an external space to be
feared, used, crossed, or conquered, but not a space of society.
number of philosophical, social and political theories. Principally, the insights of feminist and
ecological feminist thinkers into forms of oppression and social and environmental justice have
stirred the analysis I carry out. The conceptual analysis and theoretical insights of avariety of
thinkers across a range of disciplines assist me to develop a critique targeted toward the social
and cultural dimensions of human exploitation and degradation of oceans. I also go beyond
critique to explore ways of acknowledging non-human agency that work toward addressing the
abuse. It is important to add that in going beyond critique I advocate for a view in which policy
debates and outcomes are driven, at least in part, with forms of political epistemology that decentres the expertsscientists in particular. Political epistemology is a term I use to conceptualise
democratic reciprocal knowledge making (Fawcett 2000, 136). I also advocate for ocean
policy that centres both the non-human realm (which is often backgrounded) and our active
construction of reality (which is often overlooked). A theme in my interventions in this
dissertation is to advocate for understandings of oceans that acknowledge both our active
construction of reality and natures role in these negotiations (Cheney 1994, 175). Political
epistemology that is inclusive of a diversity of perspectives and roles human and non-human
and takes seriously the possibilities of a democratic process is, for me, the basis of ethical
politics. My concern with democratic political epistemology is discussed in detail in my final
Chapter. However, the central themes in my dissertation of democratic process and ethical
politics bear further elaboration prior to introducing the contents of each chapter. The following
preamble establishes the background against which much of my discussion of the Western
discourses of law, aesthetics and science can be read. That is to say, much of what is considered
the reality of oceans through these discourses is a social construction wherein rarely, if ever, do
these discourses take seriously the possibility that oceans have agency.
Development Link
Ocean development discourse empowers imperialist politics and resource
exploitation. Rationalizing ocean extraction increases hierarchical
concentration of power in the global North.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) 6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
29-31
Critical Theory: Deconstructing the World and Putting it Back Together Again? Critical theory is
more interested in deconstructing meamng, power, and connections than it is in building them;
nonetheless, I describe here how critical theory might be used to understand global phenontena as
well as some thoughts about global "nature" from a critical theory perspective. While "critical
theory" has been understood by the so-called Frankfurt School of German Western Marxism.
through the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and Lukacs, I refer to
critical theory more as a systematic critique of modernity. Escobar (2003) clarifies: I understand
modernity as a particular form of social organisation that emerged with the Conquest of America
and that crystallised initially in Northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century. Socially,
modernity is characterized by institutions such as the nation-state and the bureaucratisation of
daily life based on expert knowledge; culturally, by orientations such as the belief in continual
progress, the rationalisation of culture, and the principles of individuation and universalisation;
and eco nomically, by its links to various forms of capitalism, including state socialism as a form
of modernity. ( I 58) Modernity has been the foundation for "development" politics from the
beginning of the first wave of globalization. Escobar sees development and modernity as spatialcultural projects that require continuous conquest of territories, people, and ecology to sustain it.
Further, this project is now carried through the modern global capitalist economy, led by an
imperial United States, "which seems more inhumane than ever," bent on exploitation particularly
of the Third World (Escobar 2004, 208). As such, counterhegemonic movements which are
locally based but transnational in effort are important for the preservation of people and ecology
slated for violent displacement. This last point is one reason why, to preserve the World Ocean, I
look to regional civil-society efforts that may be transnational and even globalizing. Instrumental
reason and scientific justifications for the manipulation of a mechanistic nature are compatible
with the "development" of natural resources, which requires labor and its exploitation. This is not
without political impact. Allan Schnaiberg ( I980) describes the concentration of power that
comes from ever-growing intensified withdrawals from and additions to the natural world as a
result of intensifying and expanding capital-described as the "treadmills of production." This
cycle then expands outward, with global extensity. However, science, as the systematic pursuit of
knowledge, cannot be blamed en masse. Specifically, Enlightenment science which is science
based in modernity that pursues and promo tes single notions of Truth and a pure objectivity
through a separation of object/ subject justifies the global exploitation of nature (Marcuse I 964 );
it is likely that current interdisciplinary science does not allow for exploitation in the same way
because power in knowledge is more dispersed. Also, work in conservation biology, marine
sciences, atmospheric sciences, and other important areas provides several reference points that
legitimize resistance against expanding imperialism through the impacts of this economic
expansion upon hum.an ecology and vice versa. This assumes that interdisciplinary knowledge
claims work against the concentration of power because authority is negotiated across
epistemological conunitments, instead of being self-reproducing within them (Daly and Cobb
1989). I take several points from critical theory about globalizing changes. One is that the
protection of human social diversity, and in particular the differences provided by the subaltern (
antimodern, oppressed resistant groups), is important. Also, that knowledge serves certain
interests; and scientific knowledge especially does so, given its credibility, which ironically
comes from the improper assumption that it is objective and without ideology. Caveats and
suspicions about science need to be kept alive so that the power in knowledge is not concentrated
in any one purpose, interest, or part of the world. This is a theoretical reason to remain skeptical
about, for example, fishery knowledge or methods that come from "globalizing" nations and
attempts to replace other fishery knowledge, such as traditional artisanal fisher knowledge. It is
also a reason to have more faith in the reverse because the orientation of power through
modernity is organized against artisanal fishers. Finally, that agents of modernity seek to convert
natural resources on large scales also homogenizes cultural values toward instrumental reason
since instrumental reason pacifies resistance in the name of Mother Earth or other
noninstrumental relationships with the natural world (Ridgeway 1996). Critical theory provides a
framework for viewing specific structural economic conditions and pressures through its neoMarxist founding in conjunction with its critique of Western science and hegemonic culture.
Consequently, critical theory is a balance against romanticizing the human "we" (even though I
believe it is still a reasonable orientation) by looking at the power found in structures created to
promote a globalizing interest. As Held and others ( 1999) note, all globalization studies need to
confront modernity in some way; using critical theory as a theoretical framework is my way to do
this.
First World capitalists have constructed the ocean in a manner that selectively reproduces and
emphasizes its existence as a space apart from land-based capitalist society. This construction
has been adjusted over time to serve specific stages of capitalism, much as the techniques of
imperialism have shifted over time from plantations and trading posts to colonies to post-colonial
domination. Yet through all the different definitions and social constructions of ocean-space, the
ocean consistently has been a creation of capitalism even as it has lacked some of capitalism's
essential characteristics, just as the Third World continually has been (re)constructed to serve
capitalism even as it has remained immune from the labor system that is paradigmatic of the
capitalist mode of production. Indeed, in both the Third World and the ocean, the designation of
these spaces as "incomplete" (or "less developed") justifies further intervention and
manipulation. .> A third theory of capitalist spatiality that informs the territorial political
economy perspective employed here is spatial dialectics theory. According to spatial dialectics
theorists, the cycles of investment and disinvestment that characterize modern political economy
are driven by the interplay of two contradictory tendencies of capital. On the one hand, capital
characteristically is mobile as it seeks out new markets, low-cost inputs, and undervalued
investment sites. Thus, there is a tendency toward diffusion of investment across space,
eventually tending toward geographical equalization. On the other hand, productive investments
and their supportive physical and social infrastructure frequently are immobile, and so there is
also a tendency toward capital concentration as investors attempt to maximize their return on
investments. This tendency toward capital concentration suggests that investments and value will
be distributed highly unequally over space (Harvey 1982; Smith 1990). Like world-systems and
articulation theories, spatial dialectics theory holds that the spatial patterning of the world is not
merely incidental to capitalist expansion; it is a result of and a necessary condition for
foundational capitalist processes. The very existence of an "underdeveloped" Third World is due
both to the capitalist drive toward mobility and expansion (hence the incorporation of the Third
World into the capitalist-dominated trading and investment system) and the capitalist tendency
toward fixity (hence the lack of comprehensive investments in the Third World that might spur
Western-style "development"). Thus, the conflict between capital's two spatial tendencies is
dialectical, and one result of this conflict is a third, long-run tendency toward systemic
dysfunction: Uneven development (which results from the tendency toward capital fixity)
encourages mobility which encourages equalization which, in the long-run, stymies the
unevenness and mobility necessary for the continuation of capital investment and valorization.
Among spatial dialectics theorists, Manuel Castells (1996) is particularly germane because of his
work on how contemporary society is being impacted by a qualitative transformation in this
tension between the "spaces of flows" within which social processes of movement occur and the
lived spaces of production and reproduction. Although Cas tells' assertion of a fundamental shift
in this tension is questioned (see Chapters 5 and 6), this book is fully in accord with his argument
that in order to understand the evolving spatiality of capitalism (and its social ramifications), one
must study dialectical change in the spaces of flows as well as the spaces of fixity.
Leadership/Hegemony Link
US Ocean leadership and forward presence relies on unsustainable
exploitation. The pursuit of hegemonic power creates the insecurity it
attempts to solve.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) 6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
156-159
Regarding the major ecological changes around the world, the United States is a leading force in
the cruise ship industry, supplying a bulk of the passengers and a majority of the consumers for
the drug trade that plagues the Caribbean. The United States is also the world's leading emitter of
carbon, the most important human-related climate change driver. T his is literally killing coral
reefs in large percentages, and is an act which has direct impacts on fish nurseries and coastal
storm and sea level rise protections for people who typically do not contribute to global carbon
emissions in commensurable ways. The fact that the United States is also the primary aquariumfish consumer is also a major factor in the loss of coral reefs. Further, the United States is one of
the top two consumers of shrimp. The other is Japan, another important global center, and this is a
factor in unsustainable coastal development, social policy, and commons management. All of
these factors also have local counterpart agents, but there is no doubt that the United States is
among the more powerful agents in ocean matters- it is, for example, the only globally forward
deployed navy (Jacques and Smith 2003)-and it is mostly driving ecological conditions toward
undesirable and potentially irreversible changes. Through complex systems theory, the United
States can be seen as an attractor of information and structure through its own matrix of
commerce and material power, which then is significant in creating the system itself. In order to
change the global capitalist system, the relationships with the United States and the rest of the
world will have to change. CST demands that ultimately, if the United States is in part creating a
stable system, the system will become more complex because more and more nodes will be
allowed to gain a foothold. Globalization of commerce is increasing the diversity of members in
the global market, though there is a measurable concentration of firms at the top, even if the
quality of these relations is suspect. However, when we connect the commercial system to the
ecological one, a more complex biological world is not apparent. Therefore, if we define the
Earth system as being the sum of the commercial/ economic, social, and all ecological systems
together, the loss of diversity in the latter two indicates an unstable larger system. In other words,
the United States may be stabilizing the global economic subsystem, but this effort is
undermining other parts of the Earth that will ultimately disrupt these very efforts. This would
also mean that changes are likely on the way for the role of the United States in the larger
sociopolitical world. The United States cannot be expected to continue to maintain its position of
relative hegemony if this very unipolar position destabilizes vast social and ecological patterns
around it; this structure has already begun to unravel in Southeast Asia (Beeson 2004 ). From a
hermeneutic perspective, the role of the United States and its hegemonic power is one that
interferes with the messages from other agents and the ecological world. The United States itself
has the power to consume other countries' and regions' resources while distancing itself from
local consequences. Also, given its use of instrumental reason and ethics in relation to nature, the
United States has undoubtedly created numerous intermediary relations with nature so that the
direct signs from nature, and its limits, are hidden. I assume that this kind of communication
block is another way that limits the viability of U.S. hegemony and its future security. Similarly,
from a critical theory perspective, such as according to Wallerstein's ( 1989) "world system
theory," where the hegemonic powers order a coherent and single capitalist system, this power
historically operates in phases where hegemons overextend themselves so much that they devour
their own power base and create their own disintegration, opening up the way for a new hegemon.
Indeed, as much as this perspective is informed by the concept of historical material dialectic, the
creation of a hegemonic order creates and embeds its own antithesis, and the role of civil society
and other nations and forces will be to undermine this material power in the world over time
through counterhegemonic resistance. Thus, through all of these theories, it is possible to see that
singular agents of unsustainable systems create their own means of insecurity in the same way
that they create insecurity for others. Pragmatic ramifications of this loss are the changes that
are occurring in fisheries, and therefore in food security for the world. Overfishing has been
shown to affect fisheries in nonlinear ways, indicating that the lessons from complex systems
theory may be important. For example, if the Atlantic cod is any indication, fisheries can sustain
themselves in the face of mounting pressures until they approach some "cliff" of permanent
decline and perhaps decimation. Given that about three-quarters of the world's fisheries are facing
such pressures, we should view this potential with the utmost gravity. The language of the ocean
continues to tell us through fairly clear signs that this limit is real-fish are becoming harder and
harder to catch, and the kinds of fish caught are increasingly found lower on the food chain. The
world's poor, even when their commons are not being enclosed for private interests, are going to
feel the first human burden because they depend on this fish for more basic survival than affluent
consumers who have other choices. That fish is simply becoming more expensive and harder to
attain is one example of how our depletion of fisheries will further threaten the security (overall
well-being) of the most vulnerable people. Ecological and social diversity is becoming simplified
at the same time, and should not be seen as accidental, but rather as a function of structural
pressures creating global patterns, demonstrated by loss of higher trophic levels of fish, the loss
of coral reef around the world through climate changes and unsustainable coastal development,
and the loss of mangroves and coastal forest and grasslands in addition to the losses of indigenous
cultures, languages, and lifestyles that have pers isted for eons (which in itself says something
about their sustainability ). Complex systems theory sees this as unsustainable in relation to the
future options systems can take; hermeneutics sees this as unsustainable because it is a sign of a
sincere loss of meaning in the world; and critical theory sees this loss of social and ecological
diversity as an unsustainable concentration of power that enables abuse and exploitation of nature
and nonhuman nature. In all cases, humanity is diminished by such losses because we are a part
of these threatened spheres of the World Ocean. Between the three perspectives, then, ocean
communities are reducing their options for future pathways, losing depth and meaning in addition
to the relative power to resist such trends. Gender inequality pervades each of the regions with
only a little variation, apparently found mostly on the local level. Women are disempowered in
each of the regions, and this has important implications for sustainability according to each of the
three theories. In CST, the suppression of nodes in the system will again have a negative effect on
available options in future syst ems. In hermeneutics, a reading of the whole social system sees
that welfare is not improving, and key conditions indicate that over 50 percent of the world's
population experience a disproportionate share of violence, poverty, and ecological problems in
their labor in the household and in the workforce. Sustainability is implausible for only one
gender, and these conditions indicate that the meaning of sustainability very often overlooks the
condition of women in society. Even as I make this note, I admit that the conditions of women
have not been the focus of this study and I can see that this area requires more research and
theorizing. From what little attention I have paid this issue, it is clear that information and
knowledge are organized without a gender component, leaving the lives of women unaddressed
and mostly silent, a state that is a prerequisite for the institutionalization of social hierarchies
(Enloe I 990). So long as current power relations and governance structures in and out of civil
society remain the same and rely on the continued silent work and suppression of women, none of
the improvements in sustainability will matter much, and half of the world's lifestyles will be
relying on the other half's work. In the end, this is representative of the different levels of
hierarchy that are experienced in civil society and in the organization of government that Gandhi
and Borgese warn against. So long as society looks more like a pyramid with the apex resting on
the conditions of the base, the World Ocean communities will not be sustainable.
explicitly social angle- such as Modelski and Thompson (1988), who trace the rise and fall of
maritime powers as indicators of world-systemic long cycles and the shifting fortunes of
individual countries - fail to investigate the ocean itself as a space within which the social contest
is played olf'l\ Rather than being a neutral surface across and within which states have vied for
power and moved troops, the sea, like the nation-states themselves, has been socially constructed
throughout history. Although in the modern era the sea has been constructed outside the territory
of individual states, it has been constructed as a space amenable to a degree of governance within
the state system. Indeed, as Thomson (1994) has shown, this construction of the sea has played an
important role in the construction of modern norms of international relations. As was the case
with Harlow's definition of the sea as unregulatable transport space, the very act of defining the
sea as a space of anarchic military competition both reflects and creates specific social
constructions of both ocean-space and land-space.
Wind Links
Wind energy promotion supports overconsumption. The ideology of
production-first solutions guarantees environmental exploitation.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) 12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 55-60
Their response was telling. They made it apparent that even though the report claims to contain
influential scientific information, its analyses might not be recognized as such by the greater
scientific community.40 One of the reports lead editors told me, The 20% Wind work was
carried out to develop a picture of a future in which 20 percent of the nations electricity is
provided from the wind, and to assess the feasibility of that picture. The work was based on the
assumption that reasonable orderly advancement of the technology would continue, and that key
issues needing resolution would be addressed and favorably resolved. Hence the work used input
information and assumptions that were forward-looking rather than constrained by recent
history.41 Indeed, the authors did not allow recent history to stand in their way. In fact, some
might argue that their answer echoes the rhetoric used to defend the fabrication of data for which
no historical justification or cultural context exists. Energy players employed such lines of
reasoning to suggest that by the 1960s, nuclear energy would produce abundant clean energy for
all, that by the 1970s, fusion power would be too cheap to meter, and that solar cells would be
fueling the worlds economies by 1986.42 With the advantage of hindsight, historians of science
romp in the particulars of how such declarations rose to prominence. They show how genuine
inquiry was often pushed aside to make room for the interests of industrial elites in their attempts
to pry open taxpayer coffers for subsidies. Will future historians judge the 20% Wind Energy by
2030 report similarly? Yes, reasons Nicolas Boccard, author of two academic papers recently
published in Energy Policy.43 In his opinion, the kind of tomfoolery going on at the doe is
nothing particularly shocking. Boccard, who studies the phenomenon of capacity factor
exaggerations in Europe, found that when solid data do not exist, wind proponents are all too
willing to make unsubstantiated guesses. They get away with it because the public, politicians,
journalists, and even many energy experts dont understand how capacity factors are involved in
influencing prospects for wind power development. Or, perhaps caught up in the excitement
surrounding wind energy, proponents may simply not care, due to a psychological phenomenon
called selection bias, whereby people tend to overvalue information that reinforces their ideology
and undervalue that which contradicts it. Boccard insists, We cannot fail to observe that
academic outlets geared at renewable energy sources naturally attract the authors themselves
supportive of renewable energy sources, as their writing style clearly indicates. As a consequence,
this community has (unconsciously) turned a blind eye to the capacity factor issue. He compared
wind farm data across many European countries, where wind power penetration is many times
higher than in the United States. He uncovered a worrisome gap between the anticipated and
realized output of wind turbines. In fact, Boccard maintains, the difference was so large that wind
power ended up being on average 67 percent more expensive and 40 percent less effective than
researchers had predicted. As a rule of thumb, he maintains that any country-level assumptions of
capacity factors exceeding 30 percent should be regarded as mere leaps of faith.44 It might
seem counterproductive for wind firms to risk overinflating expectations, but only if we assume
that real-life turbine performance will impact their profit potential. It wont. Consulting firms
such as Black and Veatch stand to lock in profits during the study and design phase, long before
the turbines are even brought online. The awea manufacturers stand to gain from the sale of wind
turbines, regardless of the side effects they produce or the limitations they encounter during
operation. And by placing bets on both sides of the line, with both wind turbines and natural gas,
Pickens was positioned to gain regardless of the winds motivations. If the turbines dont return
on the promise, its no big deal for those in the money. The real trick is convincing the
government, and ultimately taxpayers, into flipping for as much of the bill as possible. And one
of the best tools for achieving that objective? A report that can be summarized in a sound bite
struts with an air of authority, and can glide off the presidents tongue with ease. 20% Wind
Energy by 2030. It may be tempting to characterize this whole charade as some sort of cover-up.
But the Department of Energy officials I interviewed were certainly open (if nervous) to my
questions; anyone with an Internet connection can access the report and its suspect
methodologies; and the doe regularly publishes its field measurements in a report called the
Annual Energy Outlook. Theres no secret. Energy corporations develop forward-looking
datasets favorable to their cause, government employees slide those datasets into formal reports,
the Department of Energy stamps its seal on the reports, and the Government Printing Office
publishes them. Then legislators hold up the reports to argue for legislation, the legislation guides
the money, and the money gets translated into actionsusually actions with productivist
leanings. It isnt a cover-up. Its standard operating procedure. This may be good or bad,
depending on your political persuasion. This well-oiled system has operated for years, with all
actors performing their assigned duties. As a result, Americans enjoy access to ample and
inexpensive energy services and we have a high standard of living to show for it. But this process
nevertheless leads to a certain type of policy development one that is intrinsically predisposed
to favor energy production over energy reduction. As we shall see, this sort of policy bentwhile
magnificently efficient at creating wealth for those involveddoes not so clearly lead to longterm wellbeing for everyone else. Step Away from the Pom-Poms When Big Oil leverages
questionable science to their benefit, environmentalists fight back en masse. As they should. But
when it comes to the mesmerizing power of wind, they acquiesce. No op-eds. No investigative
reports. No magazine covers. Nothing. If environmentalists suspected anything funny about the
20% Wind Energy by 2030 report, they didnt say anything about it in public. Instead, fifty
environmental groups and research institutes, including the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Sierra Club, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory opted to double-down their windy bets
by formally backing the study. When the nations smartest and most dedicated research scientists,
physicists, and environmentalists roll over to look up googlyeyed at any corporate energy
production report, its worthy of our attention. This love affair, however, is harmful to the
environmentalists cause for a number of reasons. First, fetishizing overly optimistic expectations
for wind power takes attention away from another grave concern of environmental groups
reducing dirty coal use. Even if the United States could attain 20 percent wind energy by 2030,
the achievement alone might not remove a single fossil-fuel plant from the grid. There is a
common misconception that building additional alternative energy capacity will displace fossilfuel use; however, over past years, this hasnt been the case. Producing more energy simply
increases supply, lowers cost, and stimulates additional energy consumption. Incidentally,
some analysts argue that the mass deployment of wind turbines in Europe has not decreased the
regions carbon footprint by even a single gram. They point to Spain, which prided itself on being
a solar and wind power leader over the last two decades only to see its greenhouse gas emissions
rise 40 percent over the same period. Second, the pomp and circumstance around wind diverts
attention from competing solutions that possess promising social and ecological value. In a cashstrapped economy, we have to consider the trade-offs. As journalist Anselm Waldermann points
out, when it comes to climate change, investments in wind and solar energy are not very
efficient. Preventing one ton of co2 emissions requires a relatively large amount of money. Other
measures, especially building renovations, cost much lessand have the same effect.45 The
third problem is the problem with all myths. When they dont come true, people grow cynical.
Inflated projections today endanger the very legitimacy of the environmental movement
tomorrow. Every energy-production technology carries its own yoke of drawbacks and
limitations. However, the allure of a magical silver bullet can bring harms one step closer.
Illusory diversions act to prop up and stabilize a system of extreme energy consumption and
waste. Hype surrounding wind energy might even shield the fossil-fuel establishmentif clean
and abundant energy is just over the horizon, then there is less motivation to clean up existing
energy production or use energy more wisely. It doesnt help when the government maintains two
ledgers of incompatible expectations. One set, based on fieldwork and historical trends, is used
internally by people in the know. The second set, crafted from industry speculation and
unconstrained by history, is disseminated via press releases, websites, and even by the president
himself to an unwitting public. It may be time for mainstream environmental organizations to
take note of this incongruence, put away the clean energy pom-poms, and get back to work
speaking up for global ecosystems, which are hurt, not helped, by additional energy production.
Because as we shall see, the United States doesnt have an energy crisis. It has a consumption
crisis. Flashy diversions created through the disingenuous grandstanding of alternative energy
mechanisms act to obscure this simple reality.
proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of "better" and "worse" devoid of explicit
content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts
appear willing to set wind to the task of making "whatever"-whether that is the manufacture of
low-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all of these
applications potentially make some in society "better off' (if one accepts that economic growth
and higher incomes are signs of improvement). Possible detrimental side effects or externalities
(an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by the possession of more
purchasing power, which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste and
make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in the
abstraction of consumption and production. Consumption of-what, by-whom, and -for-whatpurpose, and, relatedly, production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues. The
construct altogether ignores the possibility that "more-is-better" consumption production relations
may actually reinforce middle class ideology and capitalist political economy, as well as
contribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming market
victory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not readily
distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of the conventional energy
regime. Wind enthusiasts also appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward larger and larger
turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results, and the advancing
complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about these sorts of trends in the
modern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor
is a critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raise
is whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicated-namely, a "technological
mystique" (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen
and searches for fulfillment in the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marc use,
1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005). This prospect is not a distant one, as a popular
magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking "After Oil," National
Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, the
Statue of Liberty, and noted that the new machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol
(Parfit, 2005: 15- 16). It was not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of Big Wind's
liberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological
marvels, repeating the theme that, with its elevation in height and complexity lending the
technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers
(Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder of
electricity generated by an artificial tornado in which wind is technologically spun to high
velocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity.
Indeed, wind is being contemplated as a rival able to serve society by the sheer technical prowess
that bas often been a defining characteristic of modern energy systems. Obviously, wind energy
has a long way to go before it can claim to have dethroned conventional energy's "technological
cathedrals" (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant other spectacular
methods of generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise express no
qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical grounds. In fact, Big Wind
appears to seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent
alliance of the American Wind Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to
champion national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver greenand-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big Wind to plug into Giant Power's hardware and,
correspondingly, its ideology (see American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting
"Transmission Infrastructure Modernization"). The transformative features of such a politics are
unclear. Indeed, wind power-if it can continue to be harvested by ever larger machines-may
penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will diffuse, without perceptible
disruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly
noted: science will have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources that a
wealthy life has grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve sustainability may actually be
unnecessary by this political view of things, as middle-class existence is assured via clean, lowcost and easy-to-plug-in wind power.
constitution at the same time.45 A situation in which there is an invasion of the outside into the
discourse is termed dislocation. It occurs when disruptive events cannot be explained or
represented in the existing discursive order. They threaten the stability of existing social
structures, which become subject to political contestation again. Therefore, dislocation appears in
the form of a structural or organic crisis, in which there is a proliferation of floating
signifiers.46 Dislocation is followed by a hegemonic struggle over the integration of those
floating signifiers into the dominant discourse. It might result in a passive revolution47 whereby
hegemonic forces succeed in resettling social structures. Or it is followed by social change
initiated by counter-hegemonic actors. However, because it is necessary to make new decisions
on a terrain of undecidability,48 either way dislocation gives rise to indeterminate human
action. The subject is nothing but the distance between the undecidable structure and the
decision.49 These considerations clarify why Laclau states that discourse theory introduces a
primacy of the political into the analysis of hegemony.50 He distinguishes between two layers
of society. The social represents the sedimented structures of a given social setting that are taken
for granted. On the contrary, the political refers to those areas of social life where this
implicitness has dissolved through dislocation. This sphere is marked by contestation and
instability. Unlike the whole tradition of critical theory which articulates the two in a more or less
hierarchical way, deriving the political superstructure from the social structure,51 poststructuralist
discourse theory rejects such an essentialist economism. It acknowledges the fact that all social
structures have primarily been established by political acts of hegemonic closure. Hegemonic
discourses, hence, may not be derived from capitalist relations but represent the very terrain on
which these are constructed and defended. In sum, the various concepts that centre around the
notion of discourse make up the toolbox for analysing change and continuity in discourse. If a
governmentality perspective highlights how government is interweaved with discourses,
discourse theory can trace the mutations of these discourses: how they emerge, spread, transform,
become hegemonic and decline.52 Through climate mainstreaming, from this perspective,
climate protection turns into an empty signifier and so succeeds in transforming demands for
climate protection into the hegemonic order via a passive revolution. Such a perspective will be
introduced in the remainder of this article. Dislocation and the Global Governmentality of
Climate Protection Against the background of this theoretical framework, the history of climate
change can be read as a history of growing discursive dislocation. Global warming appears as an
ever aggravating and still not sufficiently tackled problem with potentially catastrophic
consequences for human civilisation.53 Thus, it represents the discursive outside that tends to
rupture the existing hegemonic order and reactivates various other signifiers that seemed to be
deeply sedimented. This is especially the case for the basic social structures of the world
economy: climate change undermines the genuine modern narrative of infinite progress and
growth. It is located within the wider discursive field of environmental destruction that since the
1970s systematically linked pollution and resource depletion to capitalist patterns of production
and consumption and put issues such as limits to growth and renouncement of consumption on
the agenda. It relates continued ecological destruction to the treadmill of production .54 The
need to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions is a particular challenge to carboniferous
capitalism55 the model of fossil-fuel-based growth that still overwhelmingly dominates the
world economy. This is not to say that climate change actually stops these economic logics from
working at least not in its present stage. What it does do, however, is to stop them from working
as taken-for-granted institutions and undermines their social acceptance. In this sense, it can be
said that climate change dislocates the legitimacy of global capitalism that is, its hegemonic
position. Attempts to deal with the dislocatory character of climate change gave rise to the
politics of sustainable development. This hegemonic discourse can be seen as a passive revolution
in the sense introduced above. Its primary aim was to remedy the dislocatory effects of climate
allow organisations to become part of the climate protection discourse without significantly
altering their behaviour. Climate protection works as an empty signifier that links together a
range of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory practices into a unified discourse but
prevents fundamental social changes. The following sections discuss in detail how globalism,
scientism, growth ethics and efficiency serve as discursive strategies to construct climate change
as such an empty signifier. Subsequently, subordinate discursive patterns are presented which
contest the climate protection discourse but were only rarely found in the sample.65
discursive articulation, which is dominant in all three cases, represents the exceptional rhetoric of
the logic of security; or, in terms of hegemony theory, it articulates an antagonism. In line with
our theoretical argument, however, the nature of this antagonism needs to be further specified.
Important in this regard is the notion of catastrophe. A striking example is the perception that
climate change poses an imminent risk of catastrophic events/catastrophic outcomes (see, for
example, Up in Smoke Coalition, 2004: 8; UNDP, 2007: 7; Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009:
ii). These include the possibility of unpredictable and non-linear events that could open the door
to ecological catastrophes (UNDP, 2007: 2). What does the notion of catastrophe tell us about
the nature of antagonism? A very useful approach to the political implications of this term is
offered by Aradau and Van Munster (2011), whose genealogy of the unknown traces different
forms of knowledge and practices for dealing with an unknown future in Cold War security
policy. They distinguish between dispositifs of security centring on crisis, on disaster, and on
catastrophe, while showing how these subsequently strengthened each other. The dispositif of
catastrophe deals with low-probability, high-impact risks. These are characterized by their
disruptive and transformative impact and involve a tipping point the point of no return
between a relatively linear and steady development and a radically contingent and potentially
chaotic future. The crucial point for the argument of this article is that catastrophe merges the
logic of security with that of risk. We argue that the securitization of climate change draws on the
central characteristics of catastrophe but advances it towards a new stage in this series of
dispositifs of security: the logic of apocalypse.8 First, while catastrophic risks often affect a
particular delimited political community (such as the West threatened by terrorism), a logic of
apocalypse inherently invokes an encompassing and universal threat. Climate change, for
example, is very often articulated as a global war (Sorcar, in UN Security Council, 2007b: 10)
or even as comparable to the two world wars (UNDP, 2007: 2). This war metaphor definitely
implies an agglomeration of various catastrophes. In line with this, climate is defined as a threat
multiplier, so that climate change threatens markets, economies and development gains. It can
deplete food and water supplies, provoke conflict and migration, destabilize fragile societies and
even topple governments (Ban Ki-moon, 2009: 6). In this sense, it takes the form of a masterthreat that is not simply a catastrophe: climate change is a security issue, but it is not a matter of
narrow national security. It has a new dimension. It is about our collective security in a fragile
and increasingly interdependent world (Becket in UN Security Council, 2007a: 19). In line with
the approach of Buzan and Wver (2009), the discursive strategy at play here could be called a
macro-securitization at the global level. As Figure 2 illustrates for the case of the Security
Council, it creates a chain of equivalence combining a broad range of phenomena that are
increased or induced by climate change into the master-threat of dangerous climate change. On
the other hand, however, it simultaneously invokes humanity as the one collective victim and
opponent of dangerous climate change. Hence Kofi Annans statement at the beginning of the
15th Convention of the Parties to the UNFCCC: Climate change threatens the entire human
family. Yet it also provides an opportunity to come together and forge a collective response to a
global problem (Annan, 2006). Hence the battle against dangerous climate change is part of the
fight for humanity (UNDP, 2007: 6); and hence, there are no sides in the fight for climate
justice (Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009: iv). The hegemonic discourse of climate change
eradicates differences across the globe and presents humanity as a universal sufferer
(Swyngedouw, 2010). In this sense, across the three cases, the climate-change discourse
articulates global warming as an external antagonism that coincides with the limits of humanity
and so constitutes the latter as a homogeneous social space that can be governed according to the
logic of risk a point to which we will return below. Second, the temporality displayed by the
logic of apocalypse differs from that of the catastrophe. While the catastrophe represents the
interruption of a linear development by an unknowable event, the apocalypse represents the
Alternative - Ext
Changing our relationship with ocean policy from a development frame to a
sufficiency frame is a pre-requisite for sustainability.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) 6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
10-11
The Borgese Test Most simply, sustainability is the convergence of improving social, political,
economic, and ecological conditions (Goodland I995). In what I am calling the "Borgese Test," I
specify what this means for the ocean. Borgese was a political scientist and international-law
scholar at Dalhousie University in Canada, as well as a strident advocate for the ocean and hunun
justice. Moreover, along with her colleague and Maltese delegate, Arvid Pardoe, she was a
sincere advocate for the "common heritage of humankind" (chapter 3) provision within the Law
of the Sea, which intends to distribute resources from the high sea soil to the poor and the cause
of international development. Borgese wrote several important documents, but The Oceanic
Circle (published in I 998) was among her most important contributions. The Oceanic Circle
describes sustainable ocean governance, and she uses Gandhian thought to make her case for
saving the seas and people who are dependent on them. Nonhierarchical and nonviolent social
relations should inform local management of resources with global cosmopolitan consciousness
(knowing that what one locality does affects and has a responsibility to others). This is what she
meant by making "oceanic circles," which she believed reflected the actual organization of the
ocean itself. Her plea is for radical democracy, nonviolence, and material equity, which are
essential to nonhierarchical relations. Importantly, global equity means that no one is deprived of
basic needs. It does not imply equal shares of goods or wealth. Further, she argues that this social
change can occur as societies develop a deepening relationship with the global ocean. This
requires grassroots empowerment to make global governance accountable; nonviolence;
knowledge of interdisciplinarity; and global North-South equity, some of which is articulated by
Gandhi in his poem "Oceanic Circles" (Borgese I998). Resources should be comanaged through
decentralized democratic authority, with the aim of using and improving ecological productivity
and function, coordinated with national, regional, and global governance (part of
"comanagen1ent"). North-South equity implies that material conditions of the industrialized
countries should not impoverish poor countries. Interdisciplinary science is used to avoid
hierarchical knowledge-based power to approach complex environmental problematiques with
"solutiques," or holistic global solutions. I impose on this definition the expectation that
sustainability is a set of long-term processes, instead of an ideal which can easily become a form
of authoritarian design from above; I believe Borgese would find this acceptable (see Lee I993;
Capra 2002). In sum, sustainability is the evolution of nonviolent governance accountable to
multiple levels of human organization ensuring global human material equity and productive
ecologies through interdisciplinary knowledge. I will refer to this definition of sustainability as
the "Borgese Test." One region cannot live unsustainably without endangering the livelihoods of
the rest. This is captured in Borgese' s ideas of North-South equity. If the North lives off of and
undermines Southern ecology while the South lives in squalor, social and ecological
sustainability is endangered, to varying degrees, around the world. Also note that sustainability
could be defined as simple stocks and flows of energy and material, but I use Borgese' s ideal
because it includes the politics of justice that determine human use of stocks and flows. Steep
social hierarchy, often empowered through violence, allows for ecological resources to become
concentrated and overexploited, reinforcing the hierarchy and flow of resources and potentially
triggering scarcity and more violence, ad infinitum until the system reaches impenetrable limits
inadvertently reinforces this center, even if the stated aim is to transform it (Gibson-Graham
1996). Although one's first instinct may be to direct efforts at social change toward processes
(and spaces) that are central to existing power structures, postmodern theorists suggest that
margins - where the "fit" of systemic practices is problematic- also may be fruitful locuses for
social contestation. It is at the margins that actors struggle over individual, social, and spatial
constructions that are both inside and outside the system. As zones of partial incorporation,
margins provide fertile ground both for imagining and constructing alternative social futures
(hooks 1984). ..J The second response derives from the insight of Henri Lefebvre (1991), who
views all spaces as sites of contention. As Peet notes in his summary of Lefebvre: Every society,
every mode of production, produces its own space. But the production of social space is not like
the production of commodities, because space subsumes many different things, is both outcome
and means (of fresh action), and is both product (made by repetitious labor) and work (i.e.
something unique and original).lt consists of objects (natural and social) and their relations
(networks and pathways). Space contains things yet is not a material object; it is a set of relations
between things. Hence, we are confronted with many, interpenetrated social spaces superimposed
one on the other, a "hypercomplexity" in which each fragment of space masks not one social
relationship but many. For Lefebvre, the "problematic" of space has displaced that of
industrialization. (Peet 1998: 103) ~s capitalism progresses, space increasingly becomes
"abstract" (i.e. socially constructed), and as this happens there is increasing potential for the
various elements that construct a space to conflict with each other. Thus, the production of space
emerges as an arena for the implosion of the structural contradictions of capitalism. j Lefebvre
presents a more robust model of socio-spatial construction than that offered by Castells. For
Castells, social change may engender massive changes in spatial organization, but once those
changes are implemented the new spatial formations are unstable only to the extent that there is
instability in the social system underlying them. Thus certain spaces, such as the first layer of the
space of flows, may be written off by Castells as relatively unproblematic. For Lefebvre,
however, spaces require continual reproduction, and, because every space has multiple facets, the
act of space construction inherently is dialectical, the intensity of this dialectic increasing
commensurate with the level of a space's abstraction. It follows that every socially constructed
space - including the sea which, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, increasingly is
constructed as a multi-faceted, abstract space- is a potential site and subject of social change.
While the sea may not be a space where significant value is added and it may not be experienced
directly by most individuals, it is a space of social construction, and as individuals construct the
sea they are participating in the construction of the institutions and structures that govern their
lives. Consumers of the Nike sneakers that remained on the Hansa Carrier during the 1990 storm
referred to at the beginning of this book probably did not think of the sea when they purchased
their pair of sneakers, but through this action they did more than reproduce the exploitative social
relations at the factory in Asia where the shoes were made. They also reaffirmed the construction
of the sea as a friction-free transport surface, a necessary counterpoint to the hierarchical division
of the world into a series of developable investment sites that are at different rungs on the ladder
of modernizatim[The social construction of ocean-space, like that of land-space, is a process by
which axes of hierarchy, identity, cooperation, and community are contested, establishing bases
for both social domination and social opposition. J There is a long history of marine-based social
formations serving as models for social change in land-space. While the Grotius-Freitas-Selden
debate was an exercise to construct a regime for a marginal area of the world-economy, it resulted
in the establishment of a structure for all interaction among land-based states. Indeed, it was
because of his contributions to the nascent Law of the Sea that Grotius is known as the "Father of
the Law of Nations" (Colombos 1967: 8). Likewise, the efforts by sixteenth-century
cartographers to draw lines through the ocean as they reinterpreted the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas
contributed to the establishment of the modern norm of the sovereign, territorial state (Steinberg
2000). In a similar vein, late mercantilist-era sailors established many of the norms and
solidarities that went on to characterize the industrial capitalist-era proletariat (Rediker 1987).
Early twentiethcentury communists, anarchists, and syndicalists looked to the sea as a likely
arena for developing new structures to govern social relations in land-space (Sekula 1995), and a
number of contemporary anarchists and scholars continue to find inspiration in the communal,
non-statist ethics of the mercantile-era pirate band (Kuhn 1997; Osborne 1998; Rediker 1987;
Wilson 1995).
productivity. Properly channeled, it could hold the key to environmental sustainability as well.35
The next year the United Nations developed a sustainable development action plan called Agenda
21, which charged technological development with alleviating harmful impacts of growth. As the
new centerpiece of social policy, there was little debate around technology, other than how to
implement it. During the 1980s and 90s, environmental organizations began to disengage from
the dominant 1960s ideals, which centered on the earths limits to growth. They shifted to
embrace technological interventions that might act to continually push such limits back, making
room for so-called sustainable development. The former enthusiasm for stringent government
regulation waned as environmental organizations expanded the roles for corporate
responsibility and voluntary restrictions. As a result, legislators pushed aside public
environmental stewardship and filled the gap with corporate techniques such as triple-bottomline
accounting and closed-loop production systems, which purported to be good for the environment
and good for profits.36 In 2002, breaking with past mandates, the United Nations World Summit
on Sustainable Developments Plan of Implementation narrowed its assessments by assuming that
technological sustainability would require little if any political and cultural negotiation about
modern lifestyles, or about the global systems of production, information, and finance on which
they rest.37 And by 2004, Australia Research Council Fellow Aidan Davison observed that the
instrumentalist representation of technologies as unquestioned loyal servants had come to fully
dominate sustainable development policy.38
from the National Research Council, entitled The Hidden Costs of Energy, explicates numerous
disadvantages, limitations, and side effects of energy production and use. But it specifically
excludes some of the most horrible of theseincluding deaths and injuries from energy-related
activities as well as food price increases stemming from biofuel production.45 The authors
dedicate several pages and even a clumsy appendix to convincing readers that such factors
neednt be interrogated because they dont meet the economic definition of externalities. Here
their tightly scripted definition comes to run the show. It stands in for human judgment to decide
what gets counted and what doesnt. Within this code, a whole world of side effects neednt be
interrogated if they dont fit neatly within the confines of a definition.46 In a moment of trained
incapacity, the authors miss that its the definition itself that requires interrogation.47 Its not
particularly shocking that this could happen in a formal policy report. It happens all the time.
Whats shocking is that a report featuring such glaring omissions could attract the signoff of over
one hundred of the nations most influential scientific advisers. There are some oversights it takes
a PhD to make.48 Since we live on a finite planet with finite resources, the system of everincreasing expectations, translated into ever-increasing demand, and resulting in again increased
expectations will someday come to an end, at least within the physical rules of the natural world
as we understand them. Whether that end is due to an intervention in the cycle that humanity
plans and executes or a more unpredictable and perhaps cataclysmic end that comes unexpectedly
in the night is a decision that may ultimately be made by the generations of people alive today.
Perhaps we should find the courage to do more than simply extrapolate recent trends into the
future and instead develop predictions for a future we would like to inhabit. These are, after all,
the aspirations that will become the basis for policy, investment, technological development, and
ultimately the future state of the planet and its occupants.49 The immediate problem, it seems, is
not that we will run out of fossil-fuel sources any time soon, but that the places we tap for these
resourcestar sands, deep seabeds, and wildlife preserves will constitute a much dirtier, more
unstable, and far more expensive portfolio of fossil-fuel choices in the future. Certainly
alternative-energy technologies seem an alluring solution to this challenge. Set against the
backdrop of a clear blue sky, alternative-energy technologies shimmer with hope for a cleaner,
better future. Understandably, we like that. Alternative energy technologies are already
generating a small, yet enticing, impact on our energy system, making it easier for us to envision
solar-powered transporters flying around gleaming spires of the future metropolis. And while this
is a pristine and alluring vision, the sad fact is that alternative-energy technologies have no such
great potential within the context that Americans have created for them. An impact, yes, perhaps
even a meaningful one someday in an alternate milieu. However, little convincing evidence
supports the fantasy that alternative-energy technologies could equitably fulfill our current energy
consumption, let alone an even larger human population living at higher standards of living.
current approach runs some serious risks to biodiversity, equity, and climate change mitigation
itself for some fairly tenuous benefits. All of this is not to say that the Liberal climate policy is
for naught: it contains many important elements, and may well result in a reduction of domestic
GHG emissions. It may also do so in a way that is economically beneficial to the province.
However, the energy policy element of it also runs the risk of worsening the longer term
sustainability profile of the province. Most worrisome in this regard is the further exclusion of the
public from any engagement with energy policy itself. Decisions are being made at a range of
scales that will determine the character of BC for the foreseeable future its economic structure,
large-scale infrastructure, environmental impact (both generalized and specific), capacities for
mitigating and adapting to climate change without the explicit engagement of the citizens of the
province. And the trend is towards reducing their capacity to participate in such decisionmaking:
with the passage of the Clean Energy Act, all major energy decisions in the province will be
removed from any independent oversight. These are decisions with direct ramifications for
climate change: whether to build a large transmission line to northwestern BC to facilitate largescale oil and gas development there, for example, or whether to build a large (900 MW) dam on
the Peace River. Likewise the decision to change BCs own energy policy priority from one of
cost-effective self-sufficiency to being a clean energy powerhouse suggests a maximization
of energy production in the province, something that may in fact be deeply problematic in
terms of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The point I wish to emphasize here concerns
less the substance of the decisions being made, however, than the implications of, on the one
hand, failing to robustly integrate climate and energy policy, and, on the other, of excluding the
public from engagement with these policy decisions. If we accept the framing of climate change
as an energy problem presented above, these decisions are some of the most vital when it comes
to choosing how to respond to climate change. Further, they are decisions with direct and very
long-term implications for society. Given the nature of climate change as an energy problem, the
energy system could provide a powerful tool to assist society in responding to climate change.
Establishing feedback loops around energy use and impact, for example, could encourage
individual, social and technological innovation to increase the sustainability of society. Creating
the possibility that the energy system should be developed in accordance with wider social values
and commitments could in this way provide a robust focus for the kind of social transformation
necessary to respond effectively to climate change. Perhaps many of the decisions reached
collectively would mirror or echo those being made on behalf of the public now, but if so they
would proceed with social license and understanding and appreciation of what is at stake in the
decisions rather than the resistance they face today. As this suggests, perhaps the most
important issue raised when we reframe climate change as an energy problem is the issue of
politics. When we understand how central energy systems are both to climate mitigation and to
social, economic, and ecological futures, it poses the question of how to respond to this
politically. It causes us to confront the considerable momentum around an emissions reduction
policy focus that might indeed achieve part of its goal, but whose goal is insufficient to the
potential we face. At the very least, a primary focus on emissions reduction is a risky strategy
the possibilities for climate change mitigation that arise from an energy systems focus are much
more diverse and robust. But more, such a focus excludes the social, ecological and political
benefits that could arise from a serious engagement with energy systems. What such an
engagement might look like is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can see potential roots of it
emerging in the struggle of environmental groups in BC to situate energy policy within an
ecological, social and political context. To put it perhaps most bluntly: the challenges of putting
energy systems at the center of environmental politics are myriad, but in a world seeking to
respond to climate change there is no more salient political focus.
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic
abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive
but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but
also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating
conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually
degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling
bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral,
eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades,
even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated
species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted
cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media
venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate
need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and
narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous
and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven
technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into
stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these
emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our
time? This book's second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those
people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty
is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our
media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as
disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those
whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called" disposable people ."z It is against such
conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent
environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not excluSively) across the so-called global
South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on
resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or
through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal
alliances. "The poor" is a compendious category subject to almost infinite local variation as well
as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation.
Confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development, impoverished
communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. How
much control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence and
market strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive survival? How will that community negotiate
competing definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, and
the moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvised
alliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverished
resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are
seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat
not as a planetary abstraction but as a set of inhabited risks, some imminent, others obscurely
long term.
In the late 1980s, concern about dwindling resources and worldwide pollution reached the
commanding heights of international politics. Multilateral agencies now distribute biomass
converters and design forestry programmes, economic summits quarrel about carbon dioxide
emissions, and scientists launch satellites into orbit in order to check on the planet's health. But
the discourse that is rising to prominence has taken on a fundamentally biased orientation: it calls
for extended management, but disregards intelligent self-limitation. As the dangers mount, new
products, procedures and programmes are invented to stave off the threatening effects of
industrialism and keep the system afloat. Capital, bureaucracy and science - the venerable trinity
of Western modernization - declare themselves indispensable in the new crisis and promise to
prevent the worst through better engineering, integrated planning and more sophisticated models.
However, fuel efficient machines, environmental risk assessment analyses, the close monitoring
of natural processes and the like, well-intended as they may be, have two assumptions in
common: first, that society will always be driven to test nature to its limits, and second, that the
exploitation of nature should be neither maximized nor minimized, but ought to be optimized. As
the 1987 report of the World Resources Institute states programmatically on its first page: 'The
human race relies on the environment and therefore must manage it wisely. ' Clearly, the word
'therefore' is the crux of the matter; it is relevant only if the competitive dynamic of the industrial
system is taken for granted. Otherwise, the environment would not be in danger and could be left
without management. Calls for securing the survival of the planet are often, upon closer
inspection, nothing more than calls for the survival of the industrial system . Capital-,
bureaucracy- and science-intensive solutions to environmental decline, in addition, are not
without social costs. The herculean task of keeping the global industrial machine running at ever
increasing speed, and at the same time safeguarding the bisophere, will require a giant leap in
surveillance and regulation. How else should the myriad decisions, from the individual to the
national and the global levels, be brought into line? It is of secondary importance whether the
streamlining of industrialism will be achieved, if at all, through market incentives, strict
legislation, remedial programmes, sophisticated spying or outright prohibitions. What matters is
that all these strategies call for more centralism , in particular for a stronger state. Since ecocrats
rarely call into question the industrial model of living in order to reduce the burden on nature,
they are left with the necessity of synchronizing the innumerable activities of society with all the
skill, foresight and tools of advancing technology they can muster. The real historical challenge,
therefore, must be addressed in something other than ecocratic terms: how is it possible to build
ecological societies with less government and less professional dominance? The ecocratic
discourse that is about to unfold in the 1990s starts from the conceptual marriage of 'environment
' and 'development', finds its cognitive base in ecosystems theory, and aims at new levels of
administrative monitoring and control. Unwilling to reconsider the logic of competitive
productivism that is at the root of the planet's ecological plight, it reduces ecology to a set of
managerial strategies aiming at resource efficiency and risk management. It treats as a technical
problem what in fact amounts to no less than a civilizational impasse - namely, that the level of
productive performance already achieved turns out to be not viable in the North, let alone for the
rest of the globe. With the rise of ecocracy, however, the fundamental debate that is needed on
issues of public morality - how society should live, or what, how much and in what way it
should produce and consume - falls into oblivion . Instead, Western aspirations are taken for
granted, and not only in the West but worldwide, and societies that choose not to put all their
energy into production and deliberately accept a lower throughput of commodities become
unthinkable. What falls by the wayside are efforts to elucidate the much broader range of
futures open to societies that limit their levels of material output in order to cherish whatever
ideals emerge from their cultural heritages. The ecocratic perception remains blind to diversity
outside the economic society of the West.
politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality,
which "deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, [and]
overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately
control over [hu]man[ity] himself, the chief purpose of existence" (Mumford, 1964: 5).
Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regarded
as scientifically and technologically unassailable.
modern societies represents one possible path of development, a path shaped by the demands of
power. In subjecting human beings to technical control at the expense of traditional modes of life
while sharply restricting participation in design, technocracy perpetuates elite power structures
inherited from the past in technically rational forms. In the process it mutilates not just human
beings and nature but also technology. Technology has beneficial potentialities that are
suppressed under capitalism and state socialism. These potentialities could be realized along a
different developmental path were power more equally distributed. Critical theory of technology
identifies the limits of the technical codes elaborated under the rule of operational autonomy. The
very same process in which capitalists and technocrats were freed to make technical decisions
without regard for the needs of workers and communities generated a wealth of new "values,"
ethical demands forced to seek voice discursively. Democratization of technology is about
finding new ways of privileging these excluded values and realizing them in technical
arrangements. A fuller realization of technology is possible and necessary. We are more and more
frequently alerted to this necessity by the threatening side effects of technological advance. These
side effects constitute feedback loops from the objects of our technical control to us as the
subjects of that control. Normally the feedback is reduced or deferred so that the subject of
technical action is safe from the power unleashed by its own actions. But technology can "bite
back," as Edward Tenner reminds us, with fearful consequences as the feedback loops that join
technical subject and object become more obtrusive (Tenner 1996). Today we are most obviously
aware of this from the example of climate change, an unintended consequence of almost
everything we do. The very success of our technology ensures that these loops will grow shorter
as we disturb nature more violently in attempting to control it. In a society such as ours, which is
completely organized around ever-more-powerful technologies, the threat to survival is clear .
reduce environmental harms, where would you spend it? Numerous researchers have attempted to
locate where youd get the best bang for your buck. Nearly a decade ago, Robert Socolow and
Stephan Pacala published an article in Science envisioning fifteen potential wedges to flatten
the upward trend of co2 emissions (e.g., vehicle efficiency, carbon sequestration, solar power,
cropping alterations, etc.), only seven of which would have to be fully implemented for success.2
Another team at the consultancy McKinsey and Company extended this work by ranking co2
reduction schemes by cost and benefit.3 Their rankings fall into three overlapping clusters: (1)
energy-efficiency strategies that typically save money, (2) agriculture and forestry management
that either save a little or cost a little, and (3) energy-production strategies that cost the most per
ton of avoided co2. Both of these prominent studies greatly influence environmental research
and policy. Nevertheless, while these studies are helpful analytical tools, they are perfectly
unsuitable for high-level decisionmaking. First, they draw upon the ahistorical assumption that
increasing efficiency or expanding alternative-energy production will automatically displace
fossil-fuel use. Further, they limit their options to trendy interventions and leave their results to be
narrowly dictated by convenient cost and co2 abatement measurements. More fundamentally,
they attend to the symptoms rather than the sources of our energy troubles. Foundational
strategies such as human rights, or costs extending beyond dollars and cents, or benefits aside
from co2 abatement are all unintelligible within such fact-making missions. Truths are as much a
matter of questions as answers.
AT: Perm
Discourse of sustainable development intensifies the ecological and economic
contradictions in capitalist exploitation of the oceans.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham 1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 176-180
The stewardship of ocean-space The third aspect of the postmodern era's social construction of
oceanspacestewardship - fuses the late capitalist concern for nature with the concept of
stewardship that characterized the Roman Mediterranean and mercantilist-era ocean-space
constructions as well as elements of the industrial capitalist-era construction. Under the
stewardship paradigm, the ocean is seen as a socially significant space providing crucial resources
(whether these are resources of connection or material resources). To ensure access to these
resources, the ocean (or areas thereof) is designated as off-limits to territorial appropriation, but
individual states, the community of states, and/ or non-state actors are permitted to exercise social
power in the interest of stewarding marine resources. I The postmodern doctrine of marine
stewardship continues and intensifies this construction, but with a key difference: In the
mercantilist era, the sea was designated as a special space insulated from the norms of possession
and property (res extra commercium) because of the special function that it served as a surface for
trade. In the postmodern era, the basis for this designation has been expanded because the sea
increasingly also serves as a special space of nature. In contrast to the intervening industrial era,
when the sea was denigrated as a void between the terrestrial spaces of production and
consumption, the ocean once again is constructed as a significant space wherein states and
intergovernmental entities are permitted to exercise non-territorial power so as to manage the
ocean's resources in a rational, efficiency-maximizing manner and to ensure continued access to
resources deemed necessary for the long-term survival of the social system. -1 This "naturespace" (or "resource-space") perspective on the ocean, which expands upon some of the resourcespecific non-territorial treaties of the late industrial era, can be seen in a number of recent
intergovernmental initiatives, such as Part XII of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
(United Nations 1983); Chapter 17 of Agenda 21, the report of the UN Conference on
Environment and Development (United Nations 1993); and the events and programs surrounding
the International Year of the Ocean, 1998. These programs and documents, especially the latter
two, explicitly place the world-ocean within the discourse of sustainable development, a
discourse that others have noted is devoted to the rational management of scarce resources so that
nature can continue to serve as a material base for capital accumulation well into the twenty-first
century (M. O'Connor 1994a). As the statement of objectives for the International Year of the
Ocean (IYO) reads, in its entirety: The overall objective is to focus and reinforce the attention of
the public, governments and decision makers at large on the importance of the oceans and the
marine environment as resources for sustainable development. The major aim of the joint efforts
during 1998 will be to create awareness and obtain commitments from governments to take
action, provide adequate resources and give the priority to the ocean and coastal areas which they
deserve as finite economical assets. This is most important, in view of the increasing threats of
pollution, population pressure, excessive fishing, coastal zone degradation and climate variability
to the finite resource the ocean represents. Without a healthy ocean, the life-supporting system of
the earth would be seriously endangered. (TOC 1997b, emphasis added)5 An IYO planning
document leaves little doubt about its overall orientation toward what Esteva (1992) calls "the
reign of scarcity": "Finite size must be emphasized" in all IYO activities and publications
(Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 1997a). This application of the sustainable
development discourse to the ocean at the intergovernmental level has been supported by
representations of the ocean in the popular media. In 1995 alone, two major US publications,
Time and National Geographic Magazine, featured cover stories celebrating the ocean as a
resource-rich, but fragile environment (Lemonick 1995; Parfit 1995). Time tells an optimistic
story: The sea is a frontier replete with opportunity, at last capable of being "conquered."
National Geographic Magazine tells a more pessimistic story: The sea is an endangered
environment wherein new technologies both respond to and reproduce scarcity. Both stories,
however, place the sea within a discourse of sustainable development similar to that constructed
by the promoters of the IYO: As the sea is a space of "finite economical assets," the
commodification of its environment should be guided by long-term planning for maximum
efficiency and productivity. Also associated with these efforts to promote investment in the
sustained exploitation of the ocean's riches is a general campaign for what Leddy (1996) calls the
"Cousteauization" of the oceans, a popular movement to cultivate public interest in the ocean's
biota with the effect of generating support for further marine research and governmental and / or
corporate stewardship of marine resources, similar to the "Audubonization" of birdlife identified
by Luke (2000). In the United States, perhaps the most visible spokesperson for this movement
has been publicist/ author / bureaucrat/ oceanographer Sylvia Earle, supported by a marine
research and development military-industrial complex represented by individuals such as
computer entrepreneur and former US Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard and retired
Admiral James Watkins, a former US Chief of Naval Operations and US Secretary of Energy,
who headed the Consortium for Oceanographic Research ,a..n . d Education to January 2001
(Broad 1997). 1 Like the other two aspects of the postmodern ocean-space construction, the rise
of the stewardship principle reflects specific aspects of the spatiality of postmodern capitalism.
Capitalism has a tendency to abstract space and time from nature (Lefebvre 1991) and, as
Altvater (1994) notes, this abstraction has become exceptionally intense as the parameters of time
and space within which individual capitalists make investment decisions collide with the reality
of nature, which is variable, contingent, and unpredictable. The discourse of sustainable
development is an attempt to bypass capitalism's "ecological contradiction" by incorporating the
material obstacles of space and time into the business cycle, with corporate leadership providing
environmental stewardship (M. O'Connor 1994b). The discourse of a resource-rich, but fragile
ocean in need of comprehensive management and planning is the result (Nichols 1999). Kfhus,
National Geographic Magazine asserts that individuals engaged fishing must come to terms with
"this world of inevitable limits" and give way to long-range planning undertaken by states and
corporations (Parfit 1995: 29). Although National Geographic Magazine regrets the loss of the
independent fishing boat owner plying the ocean's wilds, the bureaucratization of ocean
management and the privatization of rights to its resources is presented as the maturation of our
attitudes toward nature. The stewardship of marine resources by agents of capital is naturalized
through explicit parallels to the enclosure of agricultural land in the western United States:
Fisheries, like post-Dust Bowl agriculture, must be allowed to evolve into "big industry: highly
regulated, tidy," where rational management is applied for long-term sustainability (Parfit 1995:
37). A similar perspective is advocated by The Economist: If people want both to preserve the sea
and extract the full benefit from it, they must now moderate their demands, and structure them.
They must put aside ideas of the sea's immensity and power, and instead take stewardship of the
ocean, with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies. (Economist 1998: 18) /While this
element of the postmodern construction of ocean-space should meet some of the requirements of
postmodern capitalism, it, like the other two elements, cannot offer a permanent solution to the
problems that inspired its creation. Considering that every adjustment in capitalism's mechanism
for (de)valuing nature implicitly poses a challenge to its means of ordering social relations
(Harvey 1996), it appears unlikely that corporate decision-makers truly will be willing (or able) to
adopt a calculus that incorporates the spatial and temporal conditions of production (J. O'Connor
1994). _\ r Secondly, even if an ocean-management regime consistent with the stewardship
principle were to negotiate successfully the ecological contradiction of capital, it still would need
Changing the set of resources the ocean provides doesnt alter the
development frame.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham 1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p.19-20
Because the international regime/resource management perspective begins with the observation
that there are multiple, conflicting uses (and users) of ocean-space, this perspective especially is
amenable to a more complex rethinking of the relationship between land-space and oceanspace.
The "pluralist" nature of this perspective allows it to be expanded to include non-extractive
"resources" provided by the ocean, including the "resources" of connection (as mobilized through
shipping) and domination (as mobilized through naval power). The merging of the various
perspectives on ocean-space also has been encouraged by the intensification of ocean-space uses.
J uda and Burroughs (1990), for instance, have argued that extractive-, military-, and transportoriented activities now conflict so often within any given region of the ocean that the time has
come for a series of strong, regional ocean-space regimes to replace the many global single-use
organizations (e.g., the International Whaling Commission) that currently prevail. This expansion
of the resource management perspective amidst multiple, conflicting uses is exemplified by a
"multiple use" chart published in The Times Atlas and Encyclopaedia of the Sea, in which
navigation/ communication, waste disposal/ pollution, strategy I defense, research, and recreation
uses and concerns are considered alongside and in interaction and competition with the extraction
and harnessing of mineral/ energy and biological resources (Couper 1989: 208). ~Still, even this
perspective fails to provide a framework for viewing ocean-space as an integral space of ongoing
social processes. The "expanded" resource management perspective, like the other traditional
perspectives, still implies that the ocean is a space designed and managed by land-based societies
to serve land-based societies. In contrast, it is proposed here that the ocean - like land-space - is
simultaneously an arena wherein social conflicts occur and a space shaped by these conflicts. The
"socially constructed" ocean that results then goes on to shape social relations, on land and at sea.
In short, the ocean is not merely a space used by society; it is one component of the space of
society.
AT: Enviro-Pragmatism
Pragmatism maintains dualism between theory and practice. purely
pragmatic response cant create value changes in our approach to energy.
Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland 8 The Neoliberal State, Environmental
Pragmatism, and its discontents Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 648-649
This last tendency to separate practise from theory pervades contemporary Pragmatism.
Separating practise from concepts is extremely detrimental and serves to maintain a very
conservative position amongst Pragmatic environmentalists. For example, in the prologue of their
book Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz (1996) make extraordinary claims against
theorising about the environment that The ideas within environmental ethics are, apparently,
inert like Humes (1958) Treatise, they fall deadborn form the press. They argue that
theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement
on basic policy imperatives (Light & Katz, 1996: 7). The aim of contemporary Environmental
Pragmatists is to stifle some elements of environmental debate, especially poststructuralist
positions, in favour of a consensus of ideas which are presumed to guide policy from above.
Unlike their predecessors (who were more like Hume than their later namesakes), contemporary
Pragmatists make a stark distinction that separates practice from theory, and they valorise one
side of other dualisms such as anthropocentricism over non-anthropocentricism, instrumentality
over intrinsic value, and culture over nature. The common sense assumptions of contemporary
Pragmatist emerge from a very explicit group of Classical Grand Masters Pierce, Royce, James,
Mead, Dewey and a less explicit set of theoretical influences, most notably Hegel, materialism
and Liberal Utilitarianism. Cultural conservatism makes contemporary Pragmatism inadequate
for attempting the kinds of cultural transformation that are necessary to adequately achieve a
more ethical and genuinely sustainable interaction between human societies and the ecosystem.
The heyday of recent Environmental Pragmatism seems to have been in 1996 yet it is important
to examine it because like many other American ideologies, it dominates much environmental
theoretical debate at present. In 2001 Mintz advocates contemporary Pragmatism as a guide for
the law because, pragmatic thought has much to add to contemporary discourse regarding
environmental laws and policies. Pragmatisms stress on concrete facts, flexibility,
experimentation, and practical, workable solutions to realworld problems, combined with its clear
preference for democratic consensus-building and social justice, appears to provide a sensible
intellectual framework for innovation and reform in environmental decision-making at all levels.
(Mintz, 2001) Pragmatists address the perceived gap between environmental theorists and policy
analysts, activists, and the public. To achieve this cohesiveness contemporary Pragmatists
theorise a normative basis that will provide the ground for the convergence of activists on policy
choices and at the same time win theoretical and meta-theoretical arguments about moral
pluralism as opposed to poststructuralist relativism in normative environmental theory.
this is the only element of interest in his essay, The case for a practical pluralism, which is a
superficial skate over what is for him familiar terrain. He does little to explain the various forms
of pluralism apparently advocated by the authors he surveys. He blithely avoids any engagement
with deconstructive poststructuralist differance (Light, 2002b: 15) by naming and shaming it as
moral relativism.
Relativism entails abandoning the view that there are some moral stances better than others that
could guide our ethical claims about how we should treat nature. If we admit relativism then, one
could argue, we would give up on attempts to form a moral response to the cultural justifications
put forward to defend the abuse or destruction of other animals, species or ecosystems.
Relativism entails that ethics is relative to different cultural traditions. (Light, 2002b: 7)Light
maintains a North American faith in the normative force of American cultural superiority. This
criticism of relativism neglects the emphasis on critique, where evaluation based on mutual
respect for differing viewpoints can still come to an ethical decision but quite possibly not a
consensus. Pragmatic resignation to Western prejudice avoids the hard development questions
about uneven global wealth distribution, skewed global economic and environmental policy.
Avoiding theory results in ignoring the absorption of old liberal and more recent environmental
terms, such as choice, freedom, equality, sustainability into the neoliberal lexicon and its
resultant policy initiatives that are being implemented in nations around the planet. Ignoring
theory is to ignore what is actually going on.
political convergence, or dialectical synthesis is not necessarily going to be the case. Clearly not
all political views are interested in environmental protection. Some interest groups claim to be
environmentally motivated, such as big business including sustainability in their mission
statements and advertising without any genuine attempt to alter capitalist practices in a farreaching way. Conflicting strategies produce divergent politics that play out in the practices of
activists, politicians, citizens and schoolteachers. Theoretical premises affect the organising
paradigms, selfunderstanding and the actions of societies, communities, and individuals. In a
global world, anthropocentric capitalism dominates the view that the media, advertising,
education, work ethic, consumerism and so forth take on the environment. As Heidegger cogently
argues, everything in the modern world is enframed and understood as potential resource. So
thinking our way out of these conundrums is vitally important, in both the short and long term,
for realigning the relationship that humanity as a whole has with the earth in all its aspects.
Diverging ideas about how the relationship between humanity and the earth can be best cared for
is a constructive way forward (and impossible to annihilate) because different contexts generate
different relationships. Thought is like biodiversity; difference shelters contingent possibilities for
unexpected problems, monoculture fails when confronted with new disease, or new weather
conditions, new predators, new constraints, and new conditions of possibility.
exploitation. I am a globalist in the sense that I do see . humanity in a common lot; however, this
lot has been purposefully segregated and cosmopolitan ("we are all in it together") sentiments do
not ring true while the majority of people in the world suffer important deprivations while a
minority dine elegantly. Consequently, I assume that because we are in a common lot, this
extreme difference in well-being is undesirable, and that moderating the extremes of economic
globalization for the middle ground of economic wellbeing is morally right (see Conca 200 I for a
discussion on "sustaining the middle"). When we take a global frame of reference, we are forced
to place ourselves and our subjectivity within the system, because there is nowhere for human
subjectivity to hide, and human interests become tied into the interests of the whole. This is
because ifi am thinking of the whole, I am included within the configuration, and it is implausible
to think that there is a viable mechanical distance between the subject and objects of inquiry.
Overtly dissolving mechanistic claims of distance and objectivity are important, since many
philosophers have indicated this line of attack is often used to conceal exploitation of nature and
society. A mechanistic epistemology breaks the pieces into distinct units and studies them apart
from the whole, like cogs in a machine. The object of inquiry becomes the parts, not their
relationships, which may be equally or more important. What are the pieces that are obscuring the
whole in ocean politics? Perhaps the most dizzying factor is that of the single-species fishery
catch statistics. So much of our current understanding of the state of fisheries is made up of these
numbers. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of fish caught does not and
cannot indicate the health of a fish population because the precise number of the populations are
not known, and are very often estimated based on those very catch levels, as a proportion of effort
used in catching the fish. This is referred to as "catch per unit of effort." An increase in effort but
not in fish catch implies a lower population. Second, this means we are relatively limited in the
knowledge about fish populations outside what people try to catch. Because about 7 5 percent of
the world's marine fish focuses on 200 species, or about I percent of existing known species, the
knowledge that is not captured in single marine fish catch statistics is startling (Holmlund and
Hammer I999). The fact that fish catch has risen tren1endously since the 1950s (by about 300
percent) gives the impression that fish stocks are fine. This does not say anything about the
structure of these fish, such as how much of the catch is top predator and how that proportion has
changed over time, nor does it say anything about the state of marine biodiversity in general
through these increased catches. Despite the fact that there have not been studies that justify
single-species fish statistics as a measure of how much catch can be sustained, this is the primary
method by which fishing policies are made (Earle 1995; Jacques and Smith 2003). Even more
menacing is the fact that fishing policies based on these singlespecies catch trends By in the face
of increasing ecological change. Loss of mangroves and other important coastal destruction, as
noted in chapter 6, is disconnected from future policy on fishing levels, despite the importance of
mangroves for fish nurseries. Likewise increased pollution levels from urbanizing areas in both
the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Likewise for climate changes for any of these regions. Thus
focusing on the single-species catch per unit of effort is terribly inadequate to set sustainable
fishing levels. As a way to conceive of the ocean system without making the above kind of
critical error (some of which cannot be avoided given available information), I have conceived of
the World Ocean system as an amalgam of material, energy, and life that is functionally
integrated. The material of the system is the water column, which contains heat and kinetic
energy and the coastal zone that phases the terrestrial into the marine. Life in the system is seen
through coral reefs and fisheries. I think of the coral and the fisheries as communities that
function within these material settings, but changes in either can impact both. For example,
changes in the coastal zone impact fish populations, which then change the diversity and kinds of
plants and animals on the reefs. This specific functional relationship is seen in all of the regions
because overfishing is contributing to declining reefs. The energy in the system- the heat and
currents and waves (not to mention the chemical energy not discussed here )--impacts all of these
sections. Thus, mechanistically breaking the "object" of knowledge into pieces fundamentally
distorts our ability to see "reality" and empirically and morally understand the world around us.
Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant has famously argued that changing from an organic model of the
planet-one that promoted the image of the earth as a single living organism- to a mechanistic one
was the beginning of industrialized environmental degradation because there was no ethical
obligation to dead, discrete cogs in the earth (Merchant I 980). However, one does not need to be
an ecofeminist to argue in favor of holistic epistemologies. Raymond Holder Wheeler argued as
early as I936 that science is cyclic in its focus on the whole and on the part, what he terms
vitalism/ organicism versus atomism/ mechanism. To see this cycle, Wheeler must use a holistic
analysis: In order to see clearly, why science is now turning organismic, it is necessary to look at
history as a whole. Such a perspective shows us that the main problem of science, any science,
always has been to solve the part-whole relation, the problem of the many in the one, of pluralism
and unity, of permanence and change, if the role played by the part in the whole. (30; emphasis in
original) The possibility of holism is precluded by the mechanistic approach to knowledge. This
problem extends into ecology. If one turns to ecological scientific journals, the inevitable findings
will be particularistic, minutely specified research working off assumptions of ceteris paribus,
that is, all things being equal. Through an assumption of ceteris paribus, isolation of a part and its
changes can be subjected to reproducible tests of causation from independent variables. Tests
purposefully isolate influences on the object to see which one can explain more, accurately.
Precision is gained from mechanism, but context and the meaning and importance of constitutive
relationships are lost. One of the things we have learned (hopefully) in social science is that one
method should not dominate and undermine other equally valid approaches, since the voice of
research starts with its methodology. Relying only on mechanistic science reduces the diversity of
voices and analysis that will be essential for creative and innovative thinking crucial for complex
problem solving. Further, reading about the effects of one microinfluence in a microregion on a
particular species needs to be balanced with interpretations of the "big picture" that these studies
create. I acknowledge here that choosing holisms blinds me to the specifics of a part-in this case,
the dynamics of a single country. I also acknowledge that looking at these parts is important
work, and I am glad others do this work; but this effort is one which, for better or worse, is
hoisted on the mast, looking at the horizon, not at the waves on the bow. This too is of value. I
will now discuss some epistemological frames for globalizing changes in the World Ocean. This
thought experiment begins with complex systems theory.