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Just Leave it Alone

Intro:

The issue of our investment in the ocean is not one which can easily understood. It is
something so fragile, but we view it as so important and not just for its resources. The
Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, perfectly described the delicate situation when he said,
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
Other quotes (you never know might do some good):

American writer Joseph wood Krutch described this problem when he said, If
people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy
something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.
Award winning novelist Tui Allen described this problem when he said, "It's like
digging up your neighbour's yard to get their buried goodies. If we humans have to soil our own land
that's bad enough, but can we please leave the ocean alone?"

Inherency: ocean in danger


The ocean is a fragile environment in need of assistance.
Khaleej Times, 4/ 25/ 2014 Stop tampering with nature http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display1.asp?xfile=/data/editorial/2014/April/editorial_April50.xml&section=editorial, //AR
Mankinds quest for adventure is often accomplished at the peril of nature.
While taming the seas and exploring the unknown led to the creation of the world as we
know it today, our own adventures cannot cost our future generations their Planet Earth heritage. Setting
ourselves audacious goals and achieving them is good motivation for individuals but not necessarily a good thing for community.
The avalanche on Mount Everest could only have been a natural phenomenon with no human trigger but the

impact of our

actions on fragile ecosystems must not be under-estimated.


Mankind has already caused gaping holes on the ozone layer, triggered climate change,
polluted rivers and water-bodies, squeezed out natural aquifers and endangered several species of
animals.
The depletion of natural resources has forced us to embrace sustainable living not as an option but an imperative. If our
commitment to a sustainable Earth is real, we must also learn to leave nature to its own peace.

Solvency: development is truly the destruction of the ocean


The development of the ocean discourse is managerial. It reinforces the control over the
fragile ocean environment and sees it as only a resource for human ends.
Escobar, Associate professor of anthropology at the university of Massachusetts, 95 (Arturo,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, P.193-4)
Our Common Future launched to the world the strategy of sustainable development as the great alternative for the
end of the century and the beginning of the next . Sustainable development would make possible the eradication of poverty and the protection of the environment in one single feat
of Western rationality. The discourse is based on cultural histories that are not difficult to trace. Seeing the Earth from space was no great revolution, despite the commissio n's claim. The vision
from space belongs to the paradigm defined by the scientific gaze of the nineteenth-century clinician. But in the same way that "the figures of pain are not conjured away

by means of a body of neutralized knowledge; they [are] redistributed in the space in which bodies and eyes meet" (Foucault 1975, 11), the
degradation of the Earth is only redistributed and dispersed in the professional discourses of environmentalists, economists, and politicians. The
globe and its problems have finally entered rational discourse. Disease is housed in nature in a new manner. And as the medicine of the
pathological led to a medicine of the social space (the healthy biological space was also the social space dreamed of by the French Revolution),
so will the "medicine of the Earth" result in new constructions of the social that allow nature's health to be preserved. This new construction of
the social is what the concept of sustainable development attempts to bring into place.
The Bruntland report inaugurated a period of unprecedented gluttony in the history of vision and knowledge with the concomitant rise
of a global "ecocracy." Some might argue that this is too harsh a judgment, so we should carry the argument step by step. The opening paragraph
makes clear another important aspect of the sustainable development discourse, the emphasis on

management. Management is the twin of gluttonous vision, particularly now when the world is
theorized in terms of global systems. The category "global problems" is of recent invention, deriving its main impetus from the
ecological fervor fostered by the Club of Rome reports of the 1970s, which provided a distinct vision of the world as a global system where all

Management has to be of planetary proportions, because we are


talking about a "fragile ball." Carrying the baton from Bruntland, Scientific American's September 1989 special issue on
the parts are interrelated (Sachs 1988).

managing planet Earth reveals, at its surface, the essence of the managerial attitude. Whether it is the Earth as a whole, its industrial or
agricultural systems, its climate, water, or population, what is at stake for these groups of scientists and businessmenall of them menis the
continuation of the models of growth and development through appropriate management strategies. "What kind of planet do we want? What
kind of planet can we get?", asks the author in the opening article (Clark 1989, 48). "We" have the responsibility to manage

the human use of planet Earth. "We" "need to move peoples and nations towards sustainability" by effecting a change in
values and institutions that parallels the agricultural or industrial revolutions of the past. The question in this discourse is what
kind of new manipulations can we invent to make the most of the Earth's "resources."
But who is this "we" who knows what is best for the world as a whole? Once again, we find the familiar figure of the Western
scientist turned manager. A full-page picture of a young Nepalese woman "planting a tree as part of the reforestation project" is exemplary of the mind-set of this "we." It is not the women of
the Chipko movement in India, for instancewith their militancy, their radically different forms of knowledge and practice of forestry, defending their trees politically and not through carefully
managed "reforestation" projectswho are portrayed, but an ahistorical young dark woman, whose control by masculinist and colonialist sciences, as Vandana Shiva (1989) has shown, is
ensured in the very act of representation. It is still assumed that the benevolent (white) hand of the West will save the Earth; it is up to the fathers of the World Bank, mediated

to
reconcile "humankind" with "nature."
But can reality be "managed"? The concepts of planning and management embody the
belief that social change can be engineered and directed, produced at will. Development experts have always
by Gro Harlem Brunt-land, the matriarch scientist, and a few cosmopolitan Third Worlders who made it to the World Commission,

entertained the idea that poor countries can more or less smoothly move along the path of progress through planning. Perhaps no other concept
has been so insidious, no other idea gone so unchallenged, as modern planning (Escobar 1992a). The narratives of planning and

management,

always presented as "rational" and "objective," are essential to developers. In this narrative, peasants appear as the half-

A similar blindness to these


aspects of planning is found in environmental managerialism. The result is that, as they are being
incorporated into the world capitalist economy, even the most remote communities in the Third World are torn
apart from their local context and redefined as "resources."
human, half-cultured benchmark against which the Euro-American world measures its achievements.

It would be tempting to assign the recent interests in the environment on the part of mainstream development experts and politicians to a renewed awareness of ecological
processes, or to a fundamental reorientation of development, away from its economistic character. Some of these explanations are true to a limited extent. The rise of the ideology of sustainable
development is related to modification in various practices (such as assessing the viability and impact of development projects, obtaining knowledge at the local level, development assistance
by NGOs), new social situations (the failure of top-down development projects, unprecedented social and ecological problems associated with that failure, new forms of protest, deficiencies that
have become accentuated), and identifiable international economic and technological factors (new international divisions of labor with the concomitant globalization of ecological degradation,

What needs to be explained, however, is precisely why the response


to this set of conditions has taken the form that it has, "sustainable development," and what important problems
coupled with new technologies to measure such degradation).

might be associated with it.

Alt solv: The only Alternative to truly develop the ocean is to abandon the ocean as an
economic force. We must develop by a leave it alone paradigm
Sachs, Chair of Greenpeace, Germany, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, 1997 [Wolfgang, The Need for
the Home Perspective, The Post Development Reader]
It is one of the unelaborated assumptions of the home perspective that, conceptually speaking, the quest of justice needs to be decoupled from the
pursuit of conventional development. This insight arises from the struggles of many communities, be it in Chiapas or in the Narmada Valley. But
not only that: such an insight also arises forcefully from the limits of development in terms of time. Since

the crisis of nature blocks


the universalization of development, it is also in the name of justice that the conventional development idea should
be abandoned. The crisis of justice, according to this perspective, cannot be dealt with by redistributing
'development', but only by getting off people's backs, limiting the development pressures emanating
from the various Norths' in the world.
This approach links those activists, NGOs, politicians and dissident intellectuals the social base of the home perspective in the North who are
concerned about justice with those who are concerned about nature. Both groups converge in expecting the North to retreat from utilizing other

After all, most of the Northern countries leave what


an `ecological footprint' on the world which is considerably larger than their territory. They occupy
foreign soils to provide themselves with tomatoes, rice, feedstuff or cattle; they carry away raw materials
of any kind; and they utilize the global commons like the oceans and the atmosphere far beyond
their share. By way of example, Germany not to mention the USA uses seven times more energy per capita than Egypt, fourteen times
people's nature and to reduce the part of the global environmental space it occupies.
W Rees has called

more aluminium than Argentina, and 130 times more steel than the Philippines.8 As everyone knows, the Northern use of globally available
environmental space is excessive; the

style of affluence in the North cannot be generalized around the globe, it


is oligarchic in its very structure. The protagonists of the home perspective conclude that those who want
more fairness in the world will work towards reducing the 'ecological footprint' which their society leaves
on others.

to reduce the environmental burden it puts on other countries,


and to repay the ecological debt accumulated from the excessive use of the biosphere over decades,
indeed centuries. The principal arena for ecological adjustment is thus neither the Southern
hemisphere nor the entire globe, but the North itself. It is the reduction of the global effects of the
North to the radius of real responsibility that is at the centre of attention, not the extension of Northern
responsibility to coincide with the radius of the effects. The home perspective believes in making room for others by an orderly
retreat; it proposes a new kind of rationality, which could be called 'the rationality of shortened chains of effect' for meeting
the crisis of justice and of nature. Neither the astronaut's perspective nor the fortress perspective shape this perception, but rather the
For this way of thinking, the North is called upon

ideal of a good global neighbourhood. It requires a reform of home, out of a cosmopolitan spirit.

Plan: the only true development of the ocean, as seen by the


sachs card, is no development at all. So
Plan plank 1: the USFG should leave the ocean alone and not as
something to be consumed.
Plan plank 2: Ships shall be allowed to import and export but that is the
limits of our sea use but nothing else

Contention 1: capitalism is the root cause of the ecological problem


A.) Capitalism is the root cause of the ecological crisis and the commodification of the
ocean
Yonghong Zhang, professor of economics, Capitalism and Ecological Crisis, 2013, Journal of
sustainable society vol. 2, No. 3, Pgs. 69-73 // AR

Before the birth of the capitalist mode of production, environmental problem was but a regional one,
which, in most cases, had only a minor and partial negative impact on the human society. But, in several hundred years
of capitalist globalization and in the process of conquering nature by the capitalist mode of
production, the environmental problem has been becoming more and more serious and ravaging the
world. Nature occasionally brings up its sword of Damocles and retaliates on humanity.
With the progress of the Western-dominated globalization, some global environmental problems become increasingly serious.

According to 1998 data from World Wide Fund For Nature, the Earth lost 1/3 of the
natural resources from 1970 to 1995; freshwater index decreased by 50%; the marine
ecosystem index fell by 30%; the world's forest area declined by 10%.According to the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, the annual tropical deforestation rate is
about 0.7% and still in constant acceleration. Rain forest reduction results in floods and climate change, especially the rampant El Nino
Phenomenon, as well as the destruction of biodiversity, and so on. The extensive use of Freon and other substances results in the growing
Antarctic ozone hole, which makes creatures on earth facing more and more serious threat from solar ultraviolet radiation; massive

emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases exacerbate the existing greenhouse effect,
causing global climate to rise and making glaciers melt and sea levels rise; the earths
organisms are being destroyed and desertification is developing rapidly. In this case, human beings are
probably losing natural respiratory organs and their survival base.
That Hundreds of years of capitalist accumulation of capital has damaged or
destroyed the natural ecological environment is obvious. No one has made specific statistics of this destruction. Todays
economic and technological achievements the Western world has reached, result, in a certain sense, from the plundering of the Third World resources and destruction
of the Third World ecology by the West monopoly bourgeoisie for several centuries.
Numerous facts have proved that the capitalist system is the real root cause of human environmental crisis. Awareness of this issue will
affect the prospects for mankind. As the American scholar Paul Sweezy said: Already, a very large section of the worlds
scientific community is fully aware of the seriousness of the ecological threat facing the planet, but what is
not widely recognized is that the cause of the threat is capitalism itself. Bourgeois economics seeks to hide or deny
this fact. No wonder. If it were generally understood, capitalism would soon be identified for what it
is, the mortal enemy of human kind and many other forms of life on the planet. In these circumstances, our responsibility is not

only to help the ecologists to get their message across, important as it is, but to convince the ecologists themselves as well as the public at large of

the truth about capitalism, that it must be replaced by a social system that puts the life giving capacity of the earth as its first and
highest priority. As the unfolding of capitalism's deadly consequences proceeds, more and more people, including 'bourgeois ideologists who have raised
themselves to the level of understanding the historical movement as a whole,' will come to see what has to be done if our species is to have any future at all.

Our

job is to help bring this about in the shortest possible time.

B.) The ecological crisis has led itself to two impacts: resource depletion and nature
fighting back.
Yonghong Zhang, professor of economics, Capitalism and Ecological Crisis, 2013, Journal of
sustainable society vol. 2, No. 3, Pgs. 69-73 // AR
Ecological crisis is actually a crisis of survival
and the principal contradiction between man and nature. From a global perspective, many
countries have experienced ecological crisis. 250 AD was the heyday of Mayan civilization, but around 800 AD it began to
Earth is our home, which provides us necessary environment and living space.

collapse because of the deterioration of the ecological environment. Similarly, the Babylonian civilization was destroyed by ecological crisis: The
Babylonians had invented the cuneiform, the Code of Hammurabi and 60 hex timing method, and had also built one of the world's seven wonders the Hanging
Garden. Babylon was once the world's largest city, but its civilization disappeared in the end.

Ecological crisis

will inevitably result in the destruction of species. Different species on the planet are all
indispensable members of the planet's ecosystem. Extinction of a species would affect the survival of 30 species at
least, and even affect the ecological balance of the entire planet. However, due to human overbearing, many species
have disappeared or are on the verge of extinction. According to scientific statistics, an average of more than
70 species disappear forever from the earth daily; more than 9400 kinds of plants and animals in
the world face extinction. Well, who will be the last species on earth? Zoological Society of London co-editor Jonathan Loh said:

We are acting ecologically in the same way as financial institutions have been behaving
economicallyseeking immediate gratification without due regard for the consequences. The
consequences of a global ecological crisis are even graver than the current economic meltdown.
As early as 100 years ago, Engels, the author of Dialectics of Nature warned us that: we should not be
intoxicated with our victory against the natural world. For each victory, nature has retaliated on
us. For each victory, we got our expected result indeed at the first step. But at the second or the third step,
there are completely different and unexpected impacts, which often eliminate our previous achievements. In 1950, there
suddenly appeared a strange disease in a fishing village called Minamata in southern Kyushu, Japan. This disease is called Minamata disease. It's a neurological
syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning. Symptoms include ataxia, numbness in the hands and feet, general muscle weakness, narrowing of the field of vision,
and damage to hearing and speech. In extreme cases, insanity, paralysis, coma, and death follow within weeks of the onset of symptoms. A congenital form of the
disease can also affect foetuses in the womb. Minamata disease was caused by the release of methyl mercury in the industrial wastewater from the Chisso
Corporation's chemical factory, which continued from 1932 to 1968. This highly toxic chemical bio-accumulated in shellfish and fish in Minamata Bay and the
Shiranui Sea, which, when eaten by the local populace, resulted in mercury poisoning.

In addition, critical resource problems occur, for example, water availability for agriculture. Its believed that to grow
one pound of grain, 500 to 1,000 pounds of water are needed. Countries short of water are searching for other regions to grow food for their
people also believe that if a country is short of food, it should go to the free
international market to purchase food. But with the rapid rise of food prices on international markets in recent years, a
number of countries have to have food grown abroad. The United Nations 2013 Human Development Report
says that without coordinated global action to avert this situation, the number of people living in
extreme poverty might increase by up to 3 billion by 2050.The intensifying ecological crisis has
posed a threat to the survival of mankind.
people. Many

C.) Alternative: The danger of a capitalist ecology can only be countered by a critical
rethinking our involvement with the fragile ocean.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
June-July 2003, Alternatives, p. 413-14
These new modes of existence present us with an opportunity. A world where one asks,
What are world politics? and then fundamentally doubts all the answers about what the
political world is taken to be gives both individuals and groups the opportunity to transform
their spaces for effective action. Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their
advantage by defining how the world is known. Unless they also face resistance, questioning, and
challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will remain the dominant forces. Looked at
by itself, the neat division of the world into the realms of international relations and environmental
affairs remains somewhat colorless. Such terms continuously remediate our most common
modes of interpretation, as they now prevail in the world. Indeed, this language spins particular words
globalization, sustainability, developmentinto either important choke points or major rightsof-way in the flows of political discourse. The connections between international relations and the environment assume
considerable importance in the 2000s because much of the worlds ecology has deteriorated so rapidly during the past ten, thirty, or fifty

omnipolitanizing deterioration, in fact, has spread so quickly that neither green


fundamentalist preservationism nor corporate capitalist conservationism can do much to solve
the pressing ecological problems of the present. Now, after the industrial revolution, nowhere in the world
holds out against machines; high technology is everywhere. After two world wars, few places anywhere in the
years. This

world hold onto traditional formulas of authority; liberal democracy is spreading everywhere. After the Cold War, nowhere seriously holds

only a truly critical approach to


international relations and the environment can unravel why these forces interact, and maybe
correct how they create ecological destruction. Improving the understanding of international
relations as a scholarly discipline is one possible response to this new context. Strangely enough, the dysfunction of
forth as a real alternative to the market; corporate capitalism is everywhere. So

markets and states is a key constituent component of the contemporary world systems environmental crisis.

Contention 2: The ocean will always be used for biopolitics


A.) The ocean is a battleground of biopolitics and the newest victim of the biopower enemy has
become the climate.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2009 The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina,
Culture, Theory and Critique, 50: 2, 289 305, //AR
Enabled and sustained by Atlantic world slavery, sovereign marine power turned the oceans into divisions known
as territorial waters, the high seas, rights of passage and the right to trade that shaped imperial experience and cost many lives in
the process. Beginning with the reckoning of longitude in 1759, newly accurate charts, maps, navigation tables and depth soundings of the
seascape were

the rendition of imperial boundaries, expansions and claims that, as Marx and Engels highlighted in
emerged in the nineteenth century as a limit and resource
for settler colonies and the circulation of industrial capital. It was the product of human interaction with the marine
environment, the attempts to govern and profit from that exchange, and the resulting subjectivities. As an
instrument of global modernity, marine biopower at once sustains circulation in the networks of power
and indicates its periodic episodes of crisis. The present crisis of neoliberal circulation has now become interactive
with the climate crisis to produce dizzying exchanges between real and metaphorical floods and sea levels.
The Communist Manifesto, engendered a global Free Trade. Marine biopower

B.) Biopolitics of the ocean leads to a devaluing of life, Rendering each person alive in body but
dead in soul.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2009 The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina,
Culture, Theory and Critique, 50: 2, 289 305, //AR
In Slavers, the spectator is far out to sea, at one of several potential viewpoints, a trebled sensation of biopower. One can look from
the point of view of those about to drown, not yet dead, who can still see through the water. Second,
there is the viewpoint of the sea creatures, both the fish and the curious creature on the far right, whose look is marked by Turner as part of his
visualized drama. Critics have speculated as to whether this animal is the Typhon of the title, the fearsome deity who took on Zeus himself and
was father to the storm winds, Cerberus, the Sphinx and other such anxiety-provoking figures. Next,

there is the place marked by


the pillar of light, the place of Benjamins angel of history. This light cannot be the sun unless it
represents the passing of divine time, which would be in dialectical contradiction with the instant of
human time that is seen in the water.
History, the commodification of people, the actuarial rendering of that property, and doubled visualities resonate across this painting. The
enslaved body was the primitive form of biopower in the sense of Marxs concept of the primitive accumulation that preceded the
formation of capital. In the understanding of that history formed from the storms of the middle passage, those bodies are always on the point
of drowning, not yet gone, not yet forgotten. To be enslaved was to be in social death, a place
outside the social and the protections of the law. Immersed in the sea, adrift in the seas of the multitude, these people are no
longer slaves and not yet the object of an insurance claim. Turners suspension of time extends the restoration of personhood, as claimed by those
enslaved who drowned themselves, and makes it dialectical

in Benjamins sense: this transitional moment jumps


out of the history in which slavery has already been abolished into a present in which the body is
sustained between states of life by the sea.

C.) Alt solv: The alternative is that we must interrupt this cycle before we get caught up
in the cycle
Michel Foucault, Director, Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF
KNOWLEDGE, 1969, p. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm.
Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous manifestations of a single mind or of a collective mentality,
beneath

the stubborn development of a science striving to exist and to reach completion at the

very outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical
activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions. Interruptions whose status
and nature vary considerably. There are the epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard: they
suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force
it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and its original motivations, cleanse
it of its imaginary complicities; they direct historical analysis away from the search for silent
beginnings, and the never-ending tracing-back to the original precursors, towards the search
for a new type of rationality and its various effects. There are the displacements and transformations of concepts:
the analyses of G. Canguilhem may serve as models; they show that the history of a concept is not wholly and
entirely that of its progressive refinement, its continuously increasing rationality, its
abstraction gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its
successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and
matured. There is the distinction, which we also owe to Canguilhem, between the microscopic and macroscopic scales of the history
of the sciences, in which events and their consequences are not arranged in the same way: thus a discovery, the
development of a method, the achievements, and the failures, of a particular scientist, do not
have the same incidence, and cannot be described in the same way at both levels; on each of
the two levels, a different history is being written.

Contention 3: any effort politically toward the ocean is imperialistic


and leads to militarism
A.) Any attempt at bettering the relation with the ocean through political means, denies any
hope of a greener sea and only enforces Western ideals, this is imperialitic
Deborah Kennedy, degree of Doctor of philosophy of Murdoch University, 2007, Ocean Views: An
investigation into human-ocean relations // AR
For the past several hundred years, international laws of the sea have been based on the principle of mare liberum, or
freedom of the seas. The principle of freedom of the seas holds that access and use of the oceans are
common to all nations and individuals. Beyond its legal impact alone, freedom of the seas has become so
firmly entrenched in Western societies it is typically taken for granted as part of the essential or natural
character of the oceans.
However, the legal concept of freedom of the seas is not self-justifying or natural.
The oceans have not always been regarded as open for everyone to use and enjoyexamples of which I discuss inthe course of this Chapter.The
laws of the sea have shifted over time in relation to the economic and political interests of the European maritime powers and, more recently, the

the concept of freedom of the seas has been securely embedded in European
legal discourse since the eighteenth century, which is long enough, it would seem, for it to become
regarded as normative, or even natural across a society. Moreover, freedom of the seas has come to
dominate the actions, if not perspectives, of many non-Western societies.
United States. Nonetheless,

B.) Imperialism leads to the outbirth of militarism.


Johnson 7 (Chalmers, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire: Is America in Decline? May 6 http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/chalmersjohnsons-blowback-the-costs-and/page-4/) JL
Tom Plate, a columnist for the Los Angles Times, once described United States as "a muscle bound crackpot with
little more than cruise missiles for brains. US media glorify the warrior roles and justify the
use of military force in world affairs. The reported statement of Madeleine Albright best exemplifies this: If we have
to use force, it is because we are America. We are an indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future. Echoing his
concern Johnson

observes, In the decade following the end of the cold war, the US largely
abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral
institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force,
and financial manipulation. In pursuit of its imperial dreams US maintains its elaborate military
bases all over the world. Its military expenditure dwarfs imagination. Conservative estimate places the US
military expenditure in the region of four hundred billion dollars a year. According to Brookings
Institution study, it costs US $5.5 trillion to build and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon Industrial Complex sets its own agenda
and it has a voracious appetite for more and more resources. The military system has become an autonomous system. With corporate
interests permeating the military, the civilian control over the military is at best tenuous. Policymaking

is dominated by
militarism, a vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with
armies and wars and yet transcending true military purpose which is the defense of its realm.
C.) Alt Solv. Deconstruction of the idea of the empire is critical.
Michael Hardt, Literature Professor, and Antonio Negri, former political science professor, U Paris,
2000 (EMPIRE, http://textz.gnutenberg.net/text.php?id=1034709069754&search=hardt+negri+empire)

Our critical approach addresses the need for a real ideological and material deconstruction of
the imperial order. In the postmodern world, the ruling spectacle of Empire is constructed through a
variety of self-legitimating discourses and structures. Long ago authors as diverse as Lenin, Horkheimer and Adorno
and Debord recognized this spectacle as the destiny of triumphant capitalism. Despite their important differences, such authors offer us real
anticipations of the path of capitalist development. Our deconstruction of this spectacle cannot be textual alone, but must seek continually to
focus its powers on the nature of events and the real determinations of the imperial processes in motion today. The

critical
approach is thus intended to bring to light the contradictions, cycles and crises of the process
because in each of these moments the imagined necessity of the historical development can open
toward alternative possibilities. In other words, the deconstruction of historia rerum gestarum, of the spectral reign of
globalized capitalism, reveals the possibility of alternative social organizations. This is perhaps as far as we can go with
the methodological scaffolding of a critical and materialist deconstructionism but this is
already an enormous contribution.

Extensions
FW: The role of the ballot is to choose between competing ideasthere is an alternative to
capitalism.

Lebowitz 5 Michael A. Lebowitz, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University


(Canada), 2005 (The Knowledge of a Better World, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist
Magazine, Volume 57, Issue 3, July-August, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic
Search Elite, p. 67)
The most immediate obstacle, though, is the belief in TINA, i.e., that there is no alternative. Without
the vision of a better world, every crisis of capitalism (such as the one upon us) can bring in the end
only a painful restructuringwith the pain felt by those already exploited and excluded. The concept
of an alternative, of a society based upon solidarity, is an essential weapon in defense of humanity.
We need to recognize the possibility of a world in which the products of the social brain and the
social hand are common property and the basis for our self-developmentthe possibility in Marx's
words of "a society of free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their
subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth" (Grundrisse [Penguin, 1973],
158). For this reason, the battle of ideas is essential.

Topicality
Development is to be based on the subject, so if the oceanic development is: that which is the best
for the environment and not the actor
Matthias Gromann and Maya Schnell, 2011, Personal perceptions make a difference,
http://www.dandc.eu/en/article/why-subjective-indicators-development-are-meaningful, //AR
The question how development and prosperity can be measured and assessed has long been
debated. One of the core findings of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, that was assigned
by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was that conventional indicators, such as gross national product (GNP), are not sufficient measurements of
prosperity (Stiglitz et al., 2009). The Commission recommended considering the subjective quality of life an aspect of prosperity too (see
Michaelis, D+C/E+Z 2009/12, p. 470f.), so specific data should complement objective indicators.

But which indicators serve best to assess development and prosperity? Is higher income more important than a pristine environment?

Repairing environmental damages, for instance,


contributes to economic growth, but it does not achieve anything beyond re-establishing matters as
they were before the damages. Does that count as development?
And do the indicators really reflect what they are supposed to?

Much-used country rankings such as the HDI, moreover, often paint only relative pictures:
changes in ranking do not necessarily signify successful development; they may simply result from other
countries gaining or slipping in the rankings.

Subjective indicators are based on insights by behavioural economists and psychologists. Factors such as
peoples belonging to certain communities or their attitudes towards life influence their subjective well-being
and behaviour. Objective indicators cannot reflect such dimensions. Moreover, subjective well-being is
about how people rate the conditions in which they live. That, in turn, influences decisions and behaviour.
Research on happiness considers such issues and leads to proposals for improving peoples individual well-being. There are various

relevant indicators that reflect peoples emotional assessment of their personal circumstances. Fear
and hope are examples. Others refer to peoples cognitive appraisal of their quality of life or their satisfaction concerning a certain event or
outcome.

Subjective indicators are increasingly being appreciated in the development debate, reflecting our changing
understanding of what development means. The old idea of trusteeship has been dropped. We no longer believe in
developed actors making suggestions to less developed actors on what to do and how to do it. Today,
ownership matters, and development is considered a cooperative process. These ideas are reflected
in procedures that promote participation as well as in the emphasis on national development strategies.
Today, development cooperation is, for the most part, about broad-based participation in defining goals and
methods as well as the joint implementation of programmes. Development cooperation is
understood as helping others to help themselves, with the individual being the focal point of this
process. How individuals perceive development matters accordingly.

NOTE: Defend it as the common use of development. Etymologically the use of development has been
subjective. When we see development we think of what? Oh! Of the economy, or Oh! Of the ocean
development of the ocean defines the subject of the ocean and as such should be for the ocean.

Environment
A2: most climate responses
Jennifer Lea Rice, 9 (PHD in Phil Thesis, U of Arizona, MAKING CARBON COUNT: GLOBAL
CLIMATE CHANGE AND LOCAL CLIMATE GOVERNANCE IN THE UNITED STATES,
http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/194452/1/azu_etd_10727_sip1_m.pdf#page=1
11)
But, the politics of climate change knowledge are complex. Research

has shown that US media stories on


climate change include more coverage of climate skeptics than countries such as Germany (Grundmann 2007),
for example, and that balanced reporting practices in the US contribute significantly to
misunderstandings about IPCC consensus science among US residents (Boykoff 2008). This
suggests that increased exposure to minority views about the science of climate change in
the US has likely influenced public and policy opinions about climate change. Blennow and
Persson (2009), furthermore, find that the strength of a persons belief in climate change and
adaptive capacity greatly influenced their willingness to implement climate adaptation
measures, indicating that personal opinions of climate change, in addition to government
policies, have the potential to influences actions related to climate change. Even where decisionmakers have worked to integrate climate science into management practices, there is increasing evidence that better science does not always
lead to more effective resource planning (Tribbia and Moser 2008). These studies illustrate that peoples understandings of climate change
science are negotiated in multiple spaces (from the home to the nations capital) and through multiple sources (from media coverage to personal
action). The sociopolitical context of how and where environmental knowledge is consumed, it seems, is as important as the practice of scientific
inquiry itself.

A2: global warming is fake


Hell Saarikoski 7 Economics and Management @ Helsinki '7 "Objectivity and the Environment

epistemic value of biases" Environmental Politics 16 (3) p. Informa


The suggestion that we could choose between knowledge claims on the basis of their truth value might sound objectionable to
environmental constructivists who emphasise the thoroughly negotiated nature of knowledge. Szerszynski (1996: 117), for example,

denies the existence of any extra-discursive reality to which we can resort in order to judge between different
interpretations; the world and our understanding of it are unavoidably constituted through
language and meaning. Therefore, he urges social scientists to abandon the 'the ghostly vestige of a "real in favour of a more antagonistic
vision of cultural competition between competing discourses (Szerszynski, 1996: 117). Not all environmental
constructivists are willing, however, to dispense with empirical evidence and scientific
knowledge altogether. Hannigan (1995: 34) distinguishes between 'strict constructionists', who reject all notions of reality external to
discourse, and 'contextual constructionists', who maintain that claims can be evaluated on the basis
of empirical evidence. Hannigan (1995: 188) explicates the latter position by using an example of global warming. The
constructionist claim that the issue of global warming is socially constructed does not imply
that greenhouse gas" emissions do not exist or that they might not influence global climate.
Instead, the argument is that the actual changes in global climate are rendered meaningful only through
social processes of assembling and presenting environmental claims, visualising them, and
mobilising support and acknowledgement for them. The 'contextual constructionists' position is compatible with a
revised realist view of science put forward by Antony and Nelson. The world is indeed out there, imposing on us
brute facts such as increased levels of atmospheric CO2 emissions or losses of bodiversity.
What is more, it is possible to formulate theories which represent the outside world in the
relevant respects, however, though empirical evidence can help us to evaluate the effects and their magnitude, it cannot decide whether
the effects are 'serious' and 'harmful' and constitute a 'problem'. As Bluhdom (2000: 47) notes, the extent to which the undeniable changes in the
physical environment can be described as environmental problems is always and.\ necessarily a social construction. He writes (2000: 46):
'[Constructionists] emphasize that processes of political agenda-setting and environmental policy making respond first and foremost to socially
constructed concerns rather than to the so-called objective empirical realities.

Capitalism
development creates the ocean as a new space for neoliberal capitalism

Steinberg (Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London) 10


(Philip E., Sekula, Allan and Nol Burch 2010 The Forgotten Space, reviewed by Philip E. Steinberg
http://societyandspace.com/reviews/film-reviews/sekula/)
In other words, in the capitalist imagination, the sea is idealized as a flat surface in
which space is abstracted from geophysical reality. As the seas space is reduced to an
abstract quantity of distance, or time, it is constructed as amenable to annihilation by
technologies that enable the compression (or, better yet, the transcendence) of space-time, like the containership. While this
construction of the ocean provides rich material for geographers of capitalism and modernity (e.g. Steinberg 2001), it provides precious little
material for filmmakers. Under capitalism, the ocean is valued only in its (idealized) absence, and absence is notoriously difficult to film. Thus,
as Brett Story, the other geographer who has commented on the film, has noted, he film spends surprisingly little time on actual water (Story
2012, page 1576, emphasis added). By my count, only about ten minutes of the 110-minute film are spent at sea (all on the Hanjin Budapest) and
even in this footage the material ocean is not a force that needs to be reckoned with, except as a source of rust.
For viewers who are familiar with Sekulas book Fish Story, as well as with his other film The Lottery of the Sea, the relative absence of the
ocean in The Forgotten Space is, as Story suggests, surprising. In contrast with The Forgotten Space, Fish Story begins with a meditation on the

the oceans materiality


persists despite the best intentions of capital to wash it away. Thus, for instance, we learn in Fish Story that
large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of largecrude materiality of the sea (Sekula 1995, page 12) and he reminds the reader throughout the book that

capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships
not far beyond that of the first quarter of [the twentieth] century (Sekula 1995, page 50). In Fish Story, the ocean is a space of contradictions and
a non-human actor in its own right. However, no such references to the seas geophysical materiality and the barriers that this might pose to its
idealization as a friction-free surface of movement appear in The Forgotten Space.
Human frictions on the sea likewise feature in Fish Story: militant seafarers, longshoremen, and mutineers all make appearances in the text. In
contrast, these individuals receive scant attention in The Forgotten Space (a point noted by Story as well), and much of the attention that they do
receive is about their failings. A relatively hopeful account of union organizing in Los Angeles is paired with a story of labours defeat in the face
of automation in Rotterdam and that of a faded movement in Hong Kong where the union hall has become a social club for retirees and their
widows.

the heterotopia of the ship celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal


dystopia. The world of containerization is Foucaults dreaded civilization without boats, in
For Sekula,

which dreams have dried up, espionage has taken the place of adventure, and the police have taken the place of pirates (adapted from Foucault
1986, page 27). Echoing Foucault, Sekula asks near the beginning of the film, Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and
adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery? Although Sekula never answers this question directly, his response would seem to be in the

the sea is no longer a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed.


failure to depict the ocean as a space of dialectical encounters (whether
between humans or among human and non-human elements) reproduces a dematerialization of the sea that is
frequently found in narratives of globalization, including critical narratives (Steinberg 2013).
This leads the filmmakers to inadvertently reaffirm the capitalist construction of the ocean as an
external space beyond politics. By turning away from the frictions encountered at sea, Sekula and
Birch end up tacitly endorsing the very forgetting of the sea promoted by capital, as it
subscribes to an ideology of limitless mobility.
affirmative:

Sekula and Burchs

The negs response of economics first is the business lobby


Michael E. Kraft and Sheldon Kamieniecki, 7 (Editors, Business and Environmental Policy
Corporate Interests in the American Political System,
http://www.wosco.org/books/avaxhome/Business_and_Environmental.pdf#page=108
Although environmentalists have been extraordinarily successful, business has
figured out how to counter their influence with outsidelobbying campaigns of its own.
When faced with the prospect of an environmental regulation that threatens their bottom
line, businesses adopt a three-pronged strategy in hopes of preventing the problem from
becoming salient. First, they discredit the science that underpins environmentalists claims
by portraying it as highly uncertain and distorted by biased scientists and advocates.
Second, they portray environmentalists as elite, misanthropic extremists who frighten the
public in order to fill their own coffers. Third, they draw attention to the economic costs of
addressing the problem, particularly the impact of regulation on jobs and consumer prices. To
enhance their credibility, businesses have funded sympathetic experts and think tanks that
provide technical backing for their arguments.

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