Ecophenomenology Critique

NOTES
- Radical Ecology Swagggg

- Ecophenomenology is the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of
other creatures.
- Read this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
- This is a pretty confusing arg the 2NC overview does a pretty good job of explaining it (or so I like to
think) - if you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask me at edy0797@gmail.com and I will be happy
to help
#Ska
1NC
1NC Ecophenomenology Critique

Contemporary environmentalism was induced by the understanding
of nature as distinct from humans. This dualistic thinking is the root
cause of ecological destruction.
Vanderheiden 11 Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University
of Colorado at Boulder, as well as Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public
Ethics (CAPPE) in Australia (Steve, Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom, Global
Environmental Politics 11.1)//ED
While constructions of nature have in the past provided environmentalists with focal points and
normative ideals, has the concept of nature outlived its usefulness? Wapner suggests in Living Through the End
of Nature that it has, as environmentalists have reified nature, building their movement around its
preservation in what he terms the dream of naturalism and describes as the proposition that
we live best when we align with the natural world (pp. 5455). Here, nature stands in for an ideal
of a physical world untarnished by humanity, defined as unnatural and a threat to its pristine
condition, and an impossible reference point for maintaining natural environments in the face of all-pervasive anthropogenic interference
in what can thus no longer accurately be viewed as such. For Wapner, Bill McKibbens announcement of the end of nature comes not
as a glum obituary or cause to lament the ubiquity of human influence, but represents a profound opportunity for the
environmental movement to liberate itself from a nature-centric perspective (p. 12). Nature, he
argues, stands at the center of the movement, but has become a distraction from the most
pressing issues at hand. Without nature obstructing our view of human settlements and affairs,
concern for the environment can be reoriented toward the problems and possibilities that
surround us (as in the German umwelt, or surrounding world) rather than being cast away from people as
corrupting influences on that environment. As Wapner writes, this postnature environmentalist trajectory can address
urban sustainability, social justice, poverty alleviation, and the rights of indigenous peoples (pp. 1213), precisely because it need not take
nature preservation or restoration as the movements core imperative. Issues
of justice and human rights, which a few

scholars and activists have for years trumpeted as environmental issues while most dismissed
them as only peripherally related or opposed to environmental protection aims, emerge as the old
construction of nature as devoid of human stain recedes. People are not just the
sources of pollution and resource depletion, as Wapner reminds us, they are also
its victims. Ever since Aldo Leopold admonished his readers to view themselves as plain citizens of the biotic community, and
despite his plea for an integrative view of humans within nature, the human/nature dichotomy has served as the basis
for counterproductive nature teleologies and uncritical generalizations about the human place in
the world. Anthropocentrism has become a term of abuse in some green circles and outright misanthropy a calling card in others,
reinforcing the very human exceptionalism that drives ecological degradation by implying than
humans are exempt from natures laws, equating reverence for nature with contempt for
humanity. Along with this false and potentially self-defeating naturalism, Wapner finds in
contemporary constructions of nature a related desire for mastery, or the successful control of
natural forces and manipulation of natural resources for human ends, based on the sort of
unguarded optimism noted above. As before, this view posits humans as outside of nature, capable of
imposing their will upon the natural world rather than being subject to its laws. While the
Cartesian desire for mastery of nature is often identified as responsible for motivating
environmental harm, it is less clear what postnature environmentalism would condemn in it.
Wapner suggests that these two ideal types have become almost theological in character, and that environmental politics has been mired for
too long in an endless debate (p. 24) about which should carry the environmentalist flag. Nonetheless, he ends up endorsing a modest version of
mastery in describing the postnature environmentalist goal as one of creating a livable world for all (p. 218).
This ecological outlook is a violent discourse of control and

discipline which seeks to construct and maintain ecologicallyminded subjects that internalize biopolitical operations and
tendancies.
Darier 99 Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster
University (Eric, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 22-25)//ED
This concern for life (biopolitics) identified by Foucault is largely anthropocentric, in that the prime target is the control of all aspects of
human life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction. Current
environmental concerns could be

seen as an extension of biopolitics, broadened to all life-forms and called ecopolitics
(Rutherford 1993). On this scenario, the normalizing strategy of ecopolitics is the most recent attempt to
extend control (management) to the entire planet (Sachs 1993). In this context, the promotion of ecocentrism by deep
ecology, for example, can be seen as not only a critique of prevalent, increasing instrumental control of the natural world, but as inserting
itself very well into the new normalizing strategy of an ecopolitics. My point here should not be interpreted as a negative evaluation of
deep ecology per se. Instead, I want to illustrate the complexity of power relations and the constant dangers but also opportunities
lurking in the field of power. In this context, the adoption of a Manichaean approach to environmental issues by many environmental
theorists fails to acknowledge that their tactic of environmental
resistance is always what de Certeau calls

maneuver within the enemys field of vision, and cannot be positioned as a referential
externality (de Certeau 1984: 37). This is why Foucaults genealogical approach is so important for
an environmental critique. Foucaults approach to space is the third concept which might also be extremely relevant to an
environmental critique. Foucault explored the problematization of space within a historical context (Foucault 1984e; 1989d: 99106).
According to the framework of governmentality, the security of the state is guaranteed not so much directly by the control of a territory
(space), but rather through the increasing control of the population living in that territory. In fact, Foucault suggested that at the beginning
of the seventeenth century the government of France started to think of its territory on the model of the city. According to Foucault, The
city was no longer perceived as a place of privilege, as an exception in a territory of fields, forests and roads Instead, the cities, with the
problems that they raised, and the particular forms that they took, served as the models for the governmental rationality that was to apply
to the whole of the territory. A state will be well organised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of the cities extends over
the entire territory. (Foucault 1984b: 241) Consequently, one
historical rupture which became a condition for

the environmental crisis was the attempt to extend the system of social control in place in
the cities to the countryside. This historical analysis of the increasing control of the non-urban space (the more natural
environment) is similar to the critique of social ecologists who might agree with Foucault that the domestication of nature was part of a
system of (urban) power relations among humans which had for its objective the maintenance of the given social order (Bookchin 1982).
As the environmental crisis was one of the results of specific power relations such as social
inequalities and political hierarchy it would presumably have to be addressed before or at least at the same time as the environmental crisis. Obviously, deep ecologists, like George Sessions, would interpret this focus on human issues as the continuation of
anthropocentrism which created the environmental crisis in the first place (Sessions 1995b). Locating Foucault with social ecologists
against deep ecologists is not accurate either. Foucaults studies of the emergence and rise of human sciences in the context of
governmentality as a specific reason of state based on security could also be the basis for a critique of anthropocentrism. However,
unlike deep ecologists, Foucault would not suggest replacing anthropocentrism by ecocentricism, which also presents its own set of traps.
For example, Foucault
would probably agree with Timothy Lukes critique of ecocentrism (i.e. anti/nonanthropocentrism) as being also, ultimately, a humanly constructed category which is policed by
all-too-human ecocentrists. Justifying human actions in the name of nature leaves the
unresolved problem of whose (human) voice can legitimately speak for nature and the
inherent dangers of such an approach. As Luke remarks admirably, deep ecology could function as a new strategy of
power for normalising new ecological subjects human and non-human in disciplines of self-effacing moral consciousness. In
endorsing self-expression as the inherent value of all ecospheric entities, deep ecology also could advance the modern logic of domination
by retraining humans to surveil and steer themselves as well as other beings in accord with Natures dictates. As a new philosophy of
nature, then, deep ecology provides the essential discursive grid for a few enthusiastic ecosophical mandarins to interpret nature and
impose its deep ecology dictates on the unwilling many. (Luke 1988: 85) This longing for nature, either through the self-effacement of
humans before wilderness (deep ecology)22 or through nostalgia for a simpler social order in harmony with nature (social ecology)23 is
possible only in the context of an intimate distance brought about by the dislocation of nature in modernity (Phelan 1993).
Consequently, the space that Foucault is talking about is not the unproblematized physical and material environment of the environmentalists, but the various problematizations of space raised, for example, by feminists (Lykke and Bryld 1994). In this sense, Foucault
and the environmentalists are not located in quite the same space! However, the reconceptualization of space for example, as
heterotopias (Foucault 1986) enabled Foucault to create a break in our current physical understanding(s) of space. We shall come
back to the important concept of heterotopias as two of the contributors to this volume, Thomas Heyd and Peter Quigley, apply it.
All interactions between humanity and ecologies have become

regulated by managerial power-knowledge regimes, resulting in
endless biopolitical violence and ecological degradation.
Luke 99 University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political Science.
Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory.
(Timothy W, Training Eco-Managerialists: Academic Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge
Formation. Living with Nature: Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics, eds. Frank Fischer and
Maarten Hajer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 103-120.)//ED
The ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable development discourse are

intriguing. And, perhaps if they were implemented in the spirit that their originators
intended, the ecological situation of the Earth might improve. Yet, even after two decades of
heeding the theory and practice of such eco-knowledge, sustainable development mostly has
not happened, and it most likely will not happen, even though its advocates continue to be
celebrated as visionaries. Encircled by grids of ecological alarm, sustainability discourse
tells us that todays allegedly unsustainable environments need to be disassembled,
recombined and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in
such enviro-disciplinary frames, any environment could be redirected to fulfil the ends of
other economic scripts, managerial directives and administrative writs denominated in
sustainability values. Sustainability, then, engenders its own forms of environmentality, which would embed alternative
instrumental rationalities beyond those of pure market calculation in the policing of ecological spaces. Initially, one can argue that the
modern regime of bio-power formation described by Foucault was not especially attentive to the role of nature in the equations of
The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the

machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and parcel of strategically
adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism,
however, did generate systems of bio-power. Under such regimes, power/knowledge systems bring life and its
biopolitics (Foucault 1976: 13842).
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations, making the manifold disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into new sorts
Once this threshold was crossed, social

experts began to recognize how the environmental interactions of human economics, politics
and technologies continually put all human beings existence as living beings in question.
Foucault divides the environmental realm into two separate but interpenetrating spheres of
action: the biological and the historical. For most of human history, the biological
dimension, or forces of nature acting through disease and famine, dominated human
existence, with the ever present menace of death. Developments in agricultural technologies,
as well as hygiene and health techniques, however, gradually provided some relief from
starvation and plague by the end of the eighteenth century. As a result, the historical dimension began to grow
of productive agency as part of the transformation of human life (ibid. 145).
in importance, as the development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural
techniques, and the observations and measures relative to mans life and survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life
averted some of the imminent risks of death (ibid. 142). The
historical then began to envelop, circumscribe or

surround the biological, creating interlocking disciplinary expanses for the environmental.
And these environmentalized settings quickly came to dominate all forms of concrete human
reality: in the space of movement thus conquered, and broadening and organising that
space, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and
undertook to control and modify them (ibid.). While Foucault does not explicitly define these
spaces, methods and knowledges as environmental, these enviro-disciplinary manoeuvres
are the origin of many aspects of environmentalization. As biological life is refracted
through economic, political and technological existence, the facts of life pass into fields of
control for any discipline of eco-knowledge and spheres of intervention for the management
of geo-power. Foucault recognized how these shifts implicitly raised ecological issues to
the extent that they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical
episteme for defining human interactions with nature. Living became environmentalized as humans, or a
specific living being, and specifically related to other living beings (ibid. 143), began to articulate their historical and biological life in
profoundly new ways from within artificial cities and mechanical modes of production. Environmentalization arose from this dual
position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the
latters techniques of knowledge and power (ibid.). Strangely, even as he makes this linkage, Foucault does not develop these ecological
insights, suggesting that there is no need to lay further stress on the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence (ibid. 1434) .
Even so, Foucault

here found the conjunction needed for the environment to emerge as an eco-knowledge
formation and/or a cluster of eco-power tactics for an enviro-discipline. As human beings
begin consciously to wager their life as a species on the products of their biopolitical
strategies and technological systems, a few recognize that they are also wagering the lives of
other, or all, species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as just one of many lacunae in
his analysis, everything changes as human bio-power systems interweave their operations in
the biological environment, penetrating the workings of many ecosystems with the
techniques of knowledge and power. Once human power/knowledge formations become the
foundation of industrial societys economic development, they also become a major factor in
all terrestrial life-forms continued physical survival. Eco-knowledge about geo-power thus
becomes through enviro-disciplines a strategic technology that reinvests human bodies
their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole
space of existence with bio-historical significance. It then reframes them within their biophysical environments, which are now also filled with various animal and plant bodies positioned in geo-physical settings, as essential elements in managing the health of any human
ecosystems carrying capacity.
Western thought also relies on the dualism between nature and
human, which is, of course, hierarchal and anthropocentric. The
impact is the devaluation of everything considered sub-or-nonhuman
Hoetzer 10 Law lecturer at the Sydney International Campus of Central Queensland University. Irene is
currently completing a PhD in environmental law at Macquarie University, (Irene, Ecofeminism and
Environmental Justice http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hoetzerpaper.pdf p.
4)//ED
One explanation of why a society does not feel morally compelled to protect nature can be
attributed to its underlying belief system. In the Western world, this is largely shaped by
Christian ideals and traditions, according to which nature is viewed to exist for human use,
thus as something to be exploited for its materials and resources and sources of knowledge,
which in turn lead to power and control.15 Also under this belief system, [hu]mankind is
created in the image of a God, who is omnipotent, omniscient but also benevolent. Whilst
the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience are clearly evident in the desire for power
and control, the aspect of benevolence is however clearly overlooked, perhaps because
utilitarian objectives intuitively do not take the interests of others into account. Thus, the
moral standing of the West is to value others only in terms of its own interests, so all
judgments are made in terms of Western perceptions, values and experiences. Furthermore,
Western thought also organises things into hierarchical dichotomies according to which the
world is to be interpreted and interactions with it dictated. As it is believed that humans are
created in the image of God, humans are considered to be the most important entity on earth
and to have been granted greater powers than others, as evidenced in the power of reason.
This anthropocentric view of the world, which distinguishes between instrumental and
intrinsic values, fails to acknowledge the intrinsic value of anything that is not human.16
Environmental ethicists challenge this view and claim that all of nature has its own, separate intrinsic value. Ecofeminists also hold this
view but further argue that the culture over nature dichotomy that dominates Western thought is representative of the
dominance/subordinance hierarchy that permeates the fabric of patriarchal capitalist society and results in women and nature sharing a
common inferior position. For ecofeminists, therefore, the ecological crisis is more than a question of environmental destruction and
human misery. By drawing attention to the interconnection of women and nature, ecofeminists argue that egalitarian, non-hierarchical
structures must be created, in which the inherent value of nature is acknowledged and the relationships between humans, non-humans and
the natural environment become just and sustainable.17
Interspecies violence operates at the caliber of genocide,

colonialism, and war.
Kochi and Ordan 08 Queens University & Bar Ilan University (Tarik & Noa, An argument for the
global suicide of humanity, vol 7, no 4, Borderlands,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf)//ED
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as
an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and
cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which
humanity might comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such
actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which
the Holocaust was evil, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable
numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. borderlands 7:3 10
Hence, if we are to think of the content of the human heritage, then this must include the
annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in
which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people
of the West generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of
colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of
annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human
history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so
many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting
human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and the
appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of
colonialism highlights the central function of race war that often underlies human social
organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This
history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the
Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the
heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the
globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially inferior and in
some instances that they were closer to apes than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence
justified by an erroneous view of race is in many ways merely an extension of an
underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of nonhuman species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human
violence (via the mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies violence, is
well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans consider
themselves the crown of creation, for animals all people are Nazis and animal life is an
eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750).
Our alternative is to affirm a rethinking of our ontological
relationship with Nature through adoption of a relational ontology
that has radical openness to fields of flesh. Flesh is the fabric of
our relationship to the world around us. It is this connection that
allows us to question our ontological relationships in the world by
recognizing that our bodies are made out of the same flesh as
everything else in this world.
Bannon 11 Wesleyan University (Bryan E, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys
Relational Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357)//ED
Having explored the notion of the flesh of things, we are now prepared to reformulate the
meaning of the flesh of the world. We receive a clue as to what this flesh might be like in the
earlier cited note from May 1960 where Merleau-Ponty states, Flesh of the world, describe
(a propos of time, space, movement) as segregation, dimensionality, continuation, latency,
encroachment.90 We can characterize the flesh of the world descriptively in terms of time,
space and movement; these are, after all, how we predominately experience ourselves in the
world. Nonetheless, what allows us to experience the world in these ways are relations that
segregate things, the different dimensions through which things relate to one another, the
persistence and mutability of these relations across a duration, the latent processes of
relation that we do not perceive, and the ways in which various field-beings encroach upon
one another. The implication here is that the flesh of the world is the overarching fabric of
space and time that we perceive, made possible by the many fleshes occurring between
bodies in a place. To go on to say that my body is made of the same flesh as the world and
the flesh of my body is participated in by the world is simply to say that the body
participates in the same kinds of relations as those that obtain between all other things within
the field and that the world in turn is the product of these relations. The flesh of the world,
then, is of seen-Being;91 it is the Gestalt formed by the contact between field beings; it is
the overlapping of fields that remains pregnant with myriad possibilities. As such a Gestalt,
the flesh of the world reflects the distribution of beings within its field, but is not reducible
to the sum of its parts. This flesh exists insofar as bodies are open to affection and therefore
organize a spatial and temporal field about themselves. Ontologically speaking, the flesh of
the world is the fabric of space, time, and movement within which we dwell, produced by
the interrelation of the myriad bodies that exist. It is not, however, a substance out of which
beings are composed, since space, time, and movement are themselves relational processes.
We seek to analyze our ontological assumptions about the world by
adopting a relational ethos that is dynamic and open-ended. This
allows us to rethink the way we conceive our relationship with
Nature.
Malette 10 University of Victoria, (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics:
Toward an Ontological Relationality,)//ED
After examining the current fragmentation and absorption of the ecological movement by
what appears to be an overarching rationality of governmenta rationality best described by
Foucaults notion of governmentality as applied by green governmentality scholarsthe
second part of my dissertation will engage Foucaults ontological assumptions
assumptions that enable his critique but that are bound up with the rationality he puts into
question. I wish to suggest that Foucaults critical project should be examined from a more
thoroughly ecological standpoint, leading toward the adoption of a broader, less ethnocentric
and anthropocentric ontology. As such, I am neither advocating for obvious institutional
changes, nor for any quick-fix solutions to the complex arrangements between our
conceptions of politics and Nature that have led to the creation of a predominantly
Eurocentric, exploitative, materialistic and anthropocentric global way of life. To challenge
the complex sedimentation that has led to our modern ways of life, I rather suggest the
adoption of a relational\critical ethos: that is a dynamic and open-ended shift in our attitude,
sensibility and awareness (rather than a fixed solution) that may encourage us to rethink the ways in
which we conceive ourselves in relation to the differences we find both in our human and
non-human encounters, including with this irreducible, symbiotic and dynamic diversity I
call Nature.
2NC ESSENTIALS
2NC Overview
Nature is not something external to us; living experience IS nature
things like rocks, trees, and water do not comprise a nature that
surrounds us, or a nature that we live in, but rather, they are a part
of us, an extension of ourselves. We are composed of the same
fabric or "flesh" as those things, so we should respect and embody
that connectivity, rather than sever ourselves from it as
technocrats, scientists, environmentalists and politicians would
have us do in the name of staving off crisis. Separation of OUR flesh
from the flesh of the world allows us to dehumanize objects,
subjects, entities that we view as separate from ourselves and leads
to instrumentalization and destruction. Rather than an ontology
based around a subject acting on an object, we should embrace a
relational ontology; one of relative experience and an awareness
about that experience to shape our lives.
Thus, the role of the ballot is to establish a radical openness
towards nature through fields of flesh. This is a necessary
prerequisite for ethical relations between beings because otherwise
we only view nature as a resource to consume. Even if they win a
technical approach could succeed in the short term, it still renders
annihilation inevitable because it deprives nature of its inherent
value. More importantly, without a relational ontology there is no
ethical basis for weighing any of their impacts because the deaths
of other beings is referred to as a merely the breaking of a tool. The
aff is necessary to escape this nihilism - thats Malette, Luke, and
Brook. This means that we will always be a prerequisite to any
pragmatic solutions that they provide and perms wont solve.
We control the only internal link to human extinction the
misguided annihilation of non-human causes extinction because we
underestimate our dependence on non-humans thats Luke.
We also control the root cause of anthropocentrism - Specism is the
root of exploitation and annihilation because it was the founding
distinction that allowed for discrimination. Its extensions allows for
separation and relations of exploitation between races and classes thats Kochi and Ordan.
2NC A2 FW
Our interpretation: the negative is allowed one conditional test of
the methodology posited by the affirmative
First our offense
A) Its a gateway the validity of ones method of knowledge is
the entire starting point for political query
B) Key to education no epistemic certainty exists without
establishing and defending a method.
C) It is necessary to question the presuppositions of our discourse
to allow an ontological interrogation of how we relate to
nature. How we think precedes and determines politics.
Dalby 02 Prof. of Geography and Political Economy at Carleton Univ (Simon, 2K2 Simon,
Environmental Security)//ED
That said, however, I have been heavily influenced by many post-structuralist writers, and although the sources, arguments, and evidence used in what follows are
much less than obviously post, the themes of space, identity, and colonization, and my overall strategy of problematicizing the taken for granted, fit with its ethos.
This book is a work of criticism, a contribution to investigations in a number of overlapping academic fields, as well as an argument with the ongoing discussions
about security in North America and Europe. As such I follow David Campbells remainder to readers of his Writing Security, regarding what Michel Foucault said
about critique: A
critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of
pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchalleneged, unconsidered
modes of thought the practices we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the
social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and
in human relations as thought. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to
change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as
self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile
gestures difficult. While I do not wish to suggest that the environmental security discourse is facile, in many ways its premises, and its assumptions about
environment in particular, are not nearly as self-evident as its many authors sometimes apparently think. And how we, of whatever fictional
community, think leads not only to how we act politically, but also to our understandings of who we
act politically, but also to our understandings of who we are, what we value, and what we are
prepared to countenance to protect our self-preferred identities. This is the very stuff of security . This
book does not engage in any detail with either the history of environmental philosophy or the specific compatibilities of various streams of environmentalist writing
and politics with international relations of security studies. Such efforts have been undertaken recently by other scholars. Neither does it revisit the major debates in
the 1970s about the limits of growth, steady states, and political alternatives that were, in some ways, precursors to the contemporary discussions. Invoking various
narratives of environment, and in particular a critique of colonizing practices, does not simply suggest that this environmental story line offers some transcendental or
objective discourse that provides the singular truth from which policy can be derived. Such themes are very much the stuff of both environmental and international
politics; nature has been invoked in numerous contexts to rationalize many political programs. Rather, the
counter-narrative that follows

aims to disrupt the conventional formulations of environment as a technical matter for expert
regulation or as a matter for global management, big science, and specifically security discussions.
In the process it will show how the politics of invoking something called environment works and
will suggest that the geographical presuppositions in the discourse are especially important. By
focusing on historical antecedents of the contemporary crisis, the terms in which we currently
understand both environment and security can be criticized and their politics investigated. This is
not a matter of disputing the claims that environmental change is or is not occurring, or challenging
the technical practices of numerous disciplines. Whatever the finer points of the specification of global ecological processes, there
are many reasons for great concern on all manner of issues and in numerous contexts from biodiversity decline to stratospheric ozone holes, and from rising childhood
What is most worrisome to anyone who

observes these matters is not any single concern- be it climate change, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals, deforestation, long-lived
asthma incidence rates to the contemporary sufferings of marginalized peasants and refugees.
radioisotopes, or any one of many other matter, but
the totality of the disruptions caused by modern industrial systems

and the consumption of their products, whose cumulative and increasing impact has reached into
all parts of the biosphere. This is, of course both the strength of the environmentalist argument and, given the diversity of its subthemes,
simultaneously its greatest political difficulty. The focus in some of what follows in this volume is on the use of fossil fuels, both because they are so integral to
contemporary modern modes of economic existence, and hence can be read as symptomatic of the larger condition, and because at a very simple level, by literally
turning rock into air, their widespread use draws attention directly to the anthropogenic alterations of basic planetary systems. What is most important for the
argument that follows is a recognition that contemporary
endangerments materialize within political and cultural

contexts that constrain, in important ways, how these matters are represented. The political and economic order
of modernity is rarely fundamentally questioned in such discussions. The commodification of nature is taken for granted as
an unavoidable necessity. In particular, despite all the ambiguities of modernity, the developmentalist assumptions that suggest that each state will
become modern along approximately similar trajectories of industrialization and modernization are implicit in most conventional analyses. Environmental
discourses occur within larger discursive economies where some identities have more value than
others, and crucially where the dominant development and security narratives are premised on
geopolitical specifications that obscure histories of ecology and resource appropriation. They also
frequently operate in discursive modes that reassert geopolitical identities by how they specify other peoples and places. Environmental politics is
very much about the politics of discourse, the presentation of problems and of who should deal
with the concerns so special. These discourses frequently turn complex political matters into
managerial and technological issues of sustainable development where strategies of ecological
modernization finesse the questions by promising technical solutions to numerous political
difficulties and, in the process, work to co-opt or marginalize fundamental challenges to the
contemporary world order. In Tim Lukes apt summation: Underneath the enchanting green patina, sustainable development is
about sustaining development as economically rationalized environment rather than the
development of a sustaining ecology. Linking such themes to security, with its practices of
specifying threats and its managerial modes for responding to dangers, suggest a broad congruency
of discourse and practice. But what ought to be secured frequently remains unexamined, as does
the precise nature of what it is that causes contemporary endangerments. Like other disciplinary endeavors, both
environmental management and security studies have their practices for the delimitation of
appropriate objects, methods, and procedures. Making these explicit and showing how they both
facilitate and simultaneously limit inquiry is an unavoidable task for any study that takes
Foucaults formulation of critique seriously. Challenging conventional wisdom is rarely easy, and disrupting geopolitical categories can
be especially unsettling. Asking unsettling questions about the identities of those who think in the conventional categories is not easy either. But it seems very
necessary now, given the limitations of both the security and the environmental discourses we have inherited from the past and the pressing need to think intelligently
about what kind of planet we are making.
D) Reps precede policy on the environment

comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory,
(Timothy, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)//ED
nature then remains for the most part a readerly text. Different human beings will observe its
patterns differently; they will choose to accentuate some while deciding to ignore others. Consequently, nature's meanings always
will be multiple and fixed in the process of articulating eco-managerialist discourses. In the United States,
So the book of
the initial professionalized efforts to resourcify nature began with the second industrial revolution, and the original conservation movements that emerged over a
century ago, as progressively minded managers founded schools of agriculture, schools of engineering, schools of forestry, schools of management, and schools of
the entire planet was reduced through

resourcifying assumptions into a complex system of inter-related natural resource systems,
whose ecological processes in turn are left for certain human beings to operate efficiently or inefficiently as
mining, to master nature and transform its materiality into goods and services. By their lights,
the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure. Directed towards generating greater profit and power from the rational insertion of natural and artificial
the discourses of resource management work continuously to

redefine the earth's physical and social ecologies, as sites where environmental professionals can operate in many different openbodies into the machinery of global production,
The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to

environmental policy, however, are rarely rendered articulate by the existing scientific and
technological discourses that train experts to be experts. Still, a logic of resourcification is woven into the technocratic lessons
ended projects of eco-system management.
that people must acquire in acquiring their expert credentials. In particular, there are perhaps six practices that orient how work goes here. Because I have a weakness
for alliteration, I call them Resource Managerialism, Rehabilitation Managerialism, Restoration Managerialism, Renewables Managerialism, Risk Managerialism, and
Recreationist Managerialism.
E) Phenomenology comes first and is the best method

Brown 03, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs.
X-xi)//ED
philosophy does have a contribution to make in today's practical decision making, this contribution will
with steady and insightful clarification of our ethical and metaphysical assumptions about
ourselves and the world around us. These basic assumptions- about the relation between
individual and society, human nature, the nature of nature, and the nature of the Good-underlie
all of our current behavior, both individually and culturally. But the assumptions that have guided
our past behavior reveal their limitations as we think about, imagine, and live through the events
and consequences of what we call the environmental crisis. When confronted with the
consequences of our actions-mass extinctions, climate change, global pollution, dwindling
resources-we inevitably experience a moral unease over what has been done, what we have done,
to nature. We cannot help but ask about the root of this deep-seated moral reaction, and the
changes it calls for in our current practices. To answer these questions, we need the help of philosophy' The suggestion that
If
likely begin
philosophy should play a role in reorienting our relation with the natural world will no doubt come as a surprise to many. It may be even more surprising that the
role phenomenology can play in developing this new

relation with nature, given its reputation as a highly abstract theoretical inquiry into
consciousness or being. In fact, one of the basic themes of the present collection of essays is that phenomenology, as a
contemporary method in philosophy, is particularly well suited to working through some of the
dilemmas that have faced environmental ethicists and philosophers of nature. Originating in the work of
present volume is dedicated to the
Edmund Husserl and developed and enriched by thinkers such as Max Scheler Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas,
phenomenology has won a worldwide following, not only among philosophers, but also ,among scholars in fields ranging from anthropology and architecture to
phenomenologists have
continued to share the rallying cry first introduced by Husserl himself: "To the things themselves!"
Phenomenology takes its starting point in a return to the "things" or "matters" themselves, that is,
the world as we experience it. In other words, for phenomenologists, experience must be
treated as the starting point and ultimate court of appeal for all philosophical
evidence.
geography and nursing. While there have been methodological divergences over the course of phenomenology's first century,
We also have some defense

A) Its fair the AFF can either defend their method, argue that
this type of criticism is bad, or impact turn the K
B) Its predictable pretty much every K on this topic that isnt
some generic cap 1NC is going to talk about ecological
discourses you should be ready to engage this by now
C) Default negative if they win a superior framework, its only
a reason to reject our filter, not our argument or the team.
You still weigh our impact and link claims as a case turn.
This means they should NOT get perms
A) the aff is a rhetorical artifact - theyve already picked their

method and they are stuck with it till the end
B) if they win the perm vote neg on presumption because it
proves the 1AC was FLAWED and we should re-think strategies
you should vote on the 1AC verion of the aff, not the 2AR
version, because that would justify the aff completely shifting
their advocacy and making it impossible for the negative to be
competitive
2NC A2 Perm (Policy Aff)

1. The perm either links or it severs severance is a voter for
fairness and education
2. The drive to reform science through the political dooms the
permutationit is a guise to reinscribe a bad form of
knowledge production
Luke 09, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Chair, Department of Political
Science. Professor Luke's areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
(Timothy, Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for
green governmentality, in Harry F. Dahms (ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives
in Social Theory, Volume 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.129-159)//ED
The prospect of seeing Earth as a coupled human and natural system, which could be plagued by a sudden deep disruption, non-linear change,
and chaotic complexity, is real. It first became a definite material possibility in a very decisive fashion on August 6 and 9, 1945. During this 96hour period over six decades ago, it became quite evident as various thinkers foresaw how atomic weapons technologies could proliferate and
then different thermonuclear stockpiles would grow that humanity immediately could be a profoundly earth-altering force in 60 minutes or less
on any given day. Acknowledged openly in the MAD doctrines of the 1960s, and the nuclear winter debates of the 1980s, a full-blown nuclear
war very quickly would prove human beings powers to alter the planet on a historical and geological timescale (Luke, 1989a, 1989b). And, no
matter what Earth System Science does to imagine the planet as a system ready and able to be closely controlled for the best environmental
outcome through expert planetarian ecomanagerialism, this game-changing alternate type of planetary change also will sit on the sidelines as long
as nuclear weaponry exists and nuclear power is used to abate the greenhouse gassing of caused by fossil fuels. While part of the environmental
science being mobilized here and now is concentrated upon improving its practitioners instruments, laboratories, theories, and data, all of the
current findings they offer come with the proviso that the data typically are incomplete, the theories are not entirely confirmed, the laboratories
currently in operation are too few, and the instruments already are not fully reliable. Ordinary
principles of good scientific

practice, then, should stress the need for constant caution, determined doubt, and stiff skepticism
about the findings of Earth System Science. Some producers and consumers of their findings do display this professional
wariness about the entire enterprise. Yet, too many other consumers and producers of Earth System Science
tend to have an unwarranted certitude about what is well-founded scientific knowledge, and what
might be only provisionally detected and/or incompletely confirmed observations about the
planet's many complex coupled systems. Regrettably, these less cautious centers-of-calculation
often become involved in latently political, or even manifestly institutional, networks of policy
debate about what must be done. Expertarch jargon about market mechanisms, fair programs of
industrial growth, vulnerability assessments, and inducement regimes are mystifications of their grab for greater green
governmentality. The conduct of conduct is the target of such green governance. Moving directly from statements
about what is actually or allegedly true to statements, on what ought to happen is rarely
productive, and logically flawed as rules of ethical and political practice. Nonetheless, one sees these
elaborate networks of scientific mapping, technical monitoring, and managerial modeling
operating in principle as engines of alternative administrative approaches, platforms of shadow cabinet consultation, or foundries for
protyped environmental regulation.
3. Science is not intrinsically bad, but your approach is. You cant
just pick and choose the portions of the aff and the alt you
want to do this is the EXACT managerialism were criticizing.
Science cannot be understood outside of its connection to the
flesh of the world
Kirkman 07, Georgia Institute of Technology. (Robert, A Little Knowledge of Dangerous Things:
Human Vulnerability in a Changing Climate, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling
on the Landscapes of Thought, Edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, State University of
New York Press, 2007)//ED
The problem with the objectivist account is precisely that this disem-bodiment can never be
complete. The retreat to objectivism is the equiva-lent of locking oneself in a room with a
two-way mirror: the objectivist pretends to gaze out at the world with
magisterial detachment, but remains nonetheless a creature of
flesh in a world of flesh. In one of his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
reminds himself to justify science as an operation within the given situation of knowledge,
and to characterize the scientific treatment of being, time, evolution, and so on, as a
locating of features of the Universe or of fea-tures of Beings, a systematic explanation of
what they imply in the virtue of their role as hinges. Scientists are participants in the flesh
of the world, even if they do have highly specialized ways of speaking and acting in the
world. It is only as participants that they can make any headway in reveal-ing the structures
of the world, its hinges or pivots, as Merleau-Ponty also calls them, certain traits of the inner framework
of the world (VI 279/225).
4.
If they win the perm, kick the alt for us and vote neg on a case turn you can still evaluate our
links and impacts as a DA to the affs metho+d
2NC A2 Utilitarianism/Consequences
Their utilitarian impact calculus is indistinguishable from selfdestructionExploding crises speak to the incapacity of
anthropocentrism to account for limitless violence against our
common world
Oliver 10, prof phil at Vanderbilt U, [Kelly, Animal Ethics: Towards an Ethics of Responsivenss
Research in Phenomenology 40: 267-280]//ED
In this era of global warming, species extinction and shrinking biodiversity, endless war, military
occupation and expanded torture, record wealth for the few and poverty for the rest, gatedcommunities and record incarceration, more than ever we need a sustainable ethics. A sustainable ethics is
an ethics of limits, an ethics of conservation. Rather than assert our dominion
over the earth and its creatures, this ethics obliges us to
acknowledge our dependence upon them. It requires us to attend to our response-ability by virtue of that
dependence. It is an ethics of the responsibility to enable responses from others , not as it has been defined as the
exclusive property of man (man responds, animals react), but rather as it exists all around us. All living creatures are
responsive. All of us belong to the earth, not in the sense of property, but rather as inhabitants of
a shared planet. Echoing Kant, a sustainable ethics is an ethics circumscribed by the circumference of
the globe, which, if we pull our heads out of the sand, compels us to admit to our own limitations
and obligates us to relearn our primaryschool lesson: we need to share. Given the environmental
urgency upon us, generosity is a virtue that we cannot afford to live without. Acknowledging the ways in which we are human
by virtue of our relationships with animals suggests a fundamental indebtedness that takes us
beyond the utilitarian calculations of the relative worth of this or that life (so common in philosophies of animal
rights or welfare) or economic exchange values to questions of sharing the planet. This notion of sharing does not require
having much in common besides living together on the same globe. But it does bring with it responsibility. The question, then, is not what
characteristics or capacities animals share with us but, rather, how to share resources and life
together on this collective planet.
LINKS
Link Energy
Discourses about energy turn energy into a product, defining the
epistemology of Nature, the only goal of policymakers and scientists
is to gain management and control over the environment.
(Timothy W, Training Eco-Managerialists: Academic Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge
Formation. Living with Nature: Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics, eds. Frank Fischer and
Maarten Hajer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 103-120.)//ED
Before scientific disciplines or industrial technologies turn its matter and energy into
products, nature already is being transformed by discursive work-ups into 'natural resources'.
Once nature is rendered intelligible through these interpretative processes, it can be used to
legitimize many political projects. One vital site for generating, accumulating, and then
circulating such discursive knowledge about nature, as well as determining which particular
human beings will be empowered to interpret nature to society, is the modern research
university. As the primary structure for accrediting individual learners and legitimating
collective teachings, graduate programmes at such universities do much to construct our
understanding of the natural world (Gibbons et al. 1994). Over the past generation, graduate study in environmental
science on many American university campuses has become a key source of new representations for'the environment' as well as the home
base for those scientific disciplines that generate analyses of nature's many meanings .
Indeed, a new environmental

episteme has evolved over the past three decades, allowing new schools of environmental
studies either to be established de novo or to be reorganized out of existing bits and pieces of
agriculture, forestry, science, or policy studies programmes. These educational operations
now routinely produce eco-managerialists, or professional-technical workers with the
specific knowledge-as it has been scientifically validated-and the operational power-as it is
institutionally constructed-to cope with the environmental crisis' on what are believed to be
sound scientific and technical grounds. Increasingly, graduate teaching in such schools of the environment has very
little room for any other social objectives beyond the rationalizing performativity norms resting at the core of the current economic regime.
To understand the norms of this regime, as Lyotard asserts, 'the State and/or company must
abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new
goals: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is
power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to
augment power' (Lyotard 1984: 46).
Science continually seeks to infrastructuralize the earth by
attempting to capture energy and manage the natural environment,
this produces a system in which green governmentality will
continually manage the earth.
Luke 96 Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
Blacksburg, VA, (Timothy, Generating Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of Environmental
Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF)//ED
Here, environmental
sciences infrastructuralize the Earth's ecologies. The Earth becomes, if only in

terms of technoscience's operational assumptions, an immense terrestrial infrastructure. As the
human race's "ecological life-support system," it has "with only occasional localized failures" provided "services upon
which human society depends consistently and without charge." 19 As the environmentalized infrastructure of technoscientific production, the
Earth generates "ecosystem services," or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable. 20
This complex system of systems is what must survive; human life will continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue. And,
as
Colorado State's, Yale's, Berkeley's or Duke's various graduate programs all record, these infrastructural outputs
include: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy,
conversion of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification/distribution of water, control
of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro and macro
climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering
mechanisms in catastrophes, and aesthetic enrichment. 21 Because it is the terrestrial
infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the planet's ecology requires highly disciplined
reengineering to guide its sustainable use. In turn, the academic systems of green governmentality will
monitor, massage, and manage those systems which produce all of these robust services. Just as the
sustained use of any technology "requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically," so too does the "sustainable use of the planet
require that we not destroy our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural
amenities." 22
Link - Renewables
Under managerial schemes nature is broken up into a system of
systems that can be dismantled, analyzed and recombined to suit
the needs of wealthier, industrialized states renewables are
merely the newest form of managerialism.
(Timothy, Ecocritique, p. 78-80)//ED
The work of the Worldwatch Institute rearticulates the instrumental rationality of resource managerialism on a global scale in a
transnationalized register. Resource
managerialism is one very particular articulation of ecology. This is

ecology as it has been constructed by modern nation-states, corporate capital, and scientific
professional organizations. Although voices in favor of conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the
real establishment of this particular approach to Nature as actual policy comes into being, first, with the closing of the open
frontier in the American West during the 1880s and 1890s in the United States and, second, with the advent of the Second
Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s.11 Whether one looks at John Muirs preservationist programs or Gifford
Pinchots conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industrys power to deplete natural resources, and hence the need for
new protective arrangements for conserving resources or slowing their rate of exploitation, is well established by the early
1900s. President Theodore Roosevelt made these policies a cornerstone of his presidency. In 1907, for example, he organized
the Governors Conference to address this concern at the federal and state levels, inviting the participants to recognize that the
natural endowments upon which the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already
exhausted.12 Over the past nine decades, the
fundamental premises of resource managerialism

have changed significantly. On one level, they have become more formalized in bureaucratic
applications and legal interpretations. Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution,
which empowered technical experts (or engineers and scientists) on the shop floor, and professional managers (or corporate
executives and financial officers) in the main office, resource
managerialism has imposed corporate

administrative frameworks on Nature in order to supply the world economy or
provision national society with more natural resources through centralized state
conservation programs. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature is reduced to a
system of systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to
produce its many resources efficiently and in adequate amounts when and where needed in
the modern marketplace. On a second level, during the 1970s and 1980s, resource managerialism transcended
simple strategies of merely conserving available quantities of nonrenewable resources by
moving toward more expansive programs of protecting various types of environmental quality and providing for new
systems of renewable resource generation. Still, these shifts are not a major departure from the original
premises of conservation. They only broaden the conceptual definitions of resources either being created from or conserved
By envisioning it as an elaborate system of systems, Nature can be continually tinkered with

in this fashion to find new fields within its systematcities to rationalize, control, and
exploit for the benefit of human beings in wealthy, powerful nation-states . Beautiful vistas,
within Nature, while expanding the prerogatives of managerial authority to renew as well as conserve resources.
clean air, and fresh water are redefined as resources that should not be overconsumed or underproduced, and the managerial
impulse easily can rise to this challenge by creating recreational settings, scenery, and ecosystem services as entitlements to be
administered by the stae for multiple use in the economy, society, and culture.
Regimes of renewable energy and sustainability discursively frame

the Earth as nothing more than a standing reserve which, is
preserved to be rendered perpetually useful and exploitable to
humanity
Luke 99, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, (Timothy,
Discourses of the Environment, p. 146-47)//ED
The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of eco-knowledgeable,

geo-powered forces to police the fitness of all biological organisms and the health of
their natural environments. Master concepts, like survival or sustainability for
species and their habitats, empower these masterful conceptualizers to inscribe the
biological/cultural/economic order of the Earths many territories as an elaborate
array of environments, requiring continuous enviro-discipline to guarantee ecological
fitness. The survival agenda, as Gates argues, applies simultaneously to individuals, populations, communities, and
ecosystems; and it applies simultaneously to the present and the future (Gates 1989: 148). When approached through this
mind-set, the planet Earth
becomes an immense engine, or the human races ecological

life-support system, which has with only occasional localised failures provided services upon which human society
depends consistently and without charge (Cairns 1995). As this environmentalized engine, the Earth then generates
ecosystem services, or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable
(Westmen 1978). This complex is what must survive; human life will continue if such survival-promoting services continue. They
include the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into
biomass, accumulation/purification! distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of
breathable air, control of micro- and macroclimates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of
buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns 1995). As
an environmental engine,
the planets ecology requires eco-engineers to guide its sustainable use, and
systems of green governmentality must be adduced to monitor and manage the
system of systems which produce all these robust services. Just as the sustained use
of technology requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically, so
too does the sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy our ecological
capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural
amenities (ibid.3).
Link - Mapping and Managing

Environmental policymaking is focused on viewing the earth as a
resource that dispenses services and creates natural and artificial
events. Their goal is to map, measure, monitor and manage ecology.
The ordinary
operations of environmental policy-making typically approach the Earth in one of three

ways: first, as a site of accumulated material resources, which contains/holds stock; second, as a
structure of vital processes, which dispenses/vends service; or third, as sites and structures of
coupled artificial-and-natural events, which constitutes/delimits system. In assessing the new risks of second
modernity (Beck, 1992), many environmentalists have accepted these root metaphors to guide social
practices as they institutionally map their new organizational initiatives for the sustained
conservation of natural resources or the more secure preservation of the Earth (Cairncross, 1992; Chertow
& Esty, 1997; Bliese, 2001). On the one hand, the imagination of Earth as a store of accumulated material
stocks to be exploited judiciously and hopefully never depleted (WCED, 1987), or, on the other hand,
as a structure of rising-and-falling vital processes with ecological services to be utilized on a
more transparent cost/benefit basis (Westmen, 1978) already have served as productive policy stances
(Gobster & Hull, 2000). Both of these conceptual frames have allowed experts to recognize the Earth's capacious, but still limited, carrying
capacity to prevent any crippling degradation. Such
analytical and axiological frames have underpinned the

many resource mangerialist strategies employed in most American political jurisdictions for
decades (Gore, 1992, 2006; Gottlieb, 1993). Having surveyed those practices extensively elsewhere (Luke, 2004, 2002, 1999b), this study
will focus more on the growing importance granted in ecological policy studies to a notion of system. More recently, national scientific bodies,
transnational scientific networks, and international nongovernmental organizations have augmented the spatial scope of their engagement as
environmental protection agencies at local, regional, and national scales of analysis with a more global perspective, adopting a planetarian
viewpoint that looks beyond stock and/or service to system (Luke, 2008b, 2005a, 2008a). No single jurisdiction has sovereign command-andcontrol of this planetary spatiality, but there are many organizations, firms, and individuals intent upon preparing to direct responses to such
system-level challenges on a strategic basis rather than tactical action (De Certeau, 1988). Designs like these approach the environment and
society as coupled systems both artificial and natural whose complexly tight, loose, or indeterminate couplings will be appraised by
technical networks known as Earth System Sciences. Their
role is to map, measure, monitor, and manage the

environmental sustainability of complex social and natural systems generated from all the
ecological services and natural resource stocks of the planet (Luke, 2005b). Consequently, the dispositif of Earth
System Sciences opens the planet's workings to clusters of expert power and knowledge formations intent upon accounting for, and then perhaps
administering, the systems of the Earth as coupled complex ecologies and economies (Briden & Downing, 2002).
Link - Mind-Body Dualism

Attempts to quantify the environment as a thing exercises
problematic mind-body dualism.
Sanart 97, Sanart Association for the Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod,
former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS,
http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)//ED
Although custom and etymology may lead us to think of environment as surroundings, the idea
remains complex and elusive. It may already be apparent that I do not ordinarily speak of "the" environment. While this is the usual
locution, it embodies a hidden meaning that is the source of much of our difficulty. For "the" environment objectifies
environment; it turns it into an entity which we can think of and deal with as if it were outside
and independent of ourselves. In The Beauty of Environment, a comprehensive and systematic inquiry into environmental
aesthetics, Yrj Sepnmaa accepts the conventional usage. Although his sensitive discussion of the concept of environment retains its association
with the external world of an observer, he expands its scope to include the cultural environment and the constructed environment, in addition to
the natural one. See The Beauty of Environment (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1986), p.17. Where, however, can
we locate
"the" environment? Where is "outside" in this case? Is it the landscape that surrounds me where I
stand? Is it the world beyond my window? Outside the walls of my room and house? On the
other side of the clothes I wear? Is environment the air I breathe? The food I eat? Yet the food
metabolizes to become my body, the air swells my lungs and enters my bloodstream, my clothes
are not only the outermost layer of my skin but complete and identify my style, my personality,
my sense of self. My room, apartment, or home defines my personal space and world. And the
landscape in which I move as I walk, drive, or fly is my world, as well, ordered by my
understanding, defined by my movements, and molding my muscles, my reflexes, my
experience, my consciousness at the same time as I attempt to impose my will over it. Indeed, many of
us spend much of our lives in the electronic space of television and computer networks. " The" environment, one of the last
survivors of the mind-body dualism, a place beyond which we think to contemplate from a
distance, dissolves. "The" environment dissolves into a complex network of relationships, connections, and continuities of those
physical, social, and cultural conditions that circumscribe my actions, my responses, my awareness, and that give shape and content to the very
life that is mine. For
there is no outside world. There is no outside. Nor is there an inner sanctum in

which I can take refuge from inimical external forces. The perceiver (mind) is an aspect of the
perceived (body) and, in like manner, person and environment are continuous. Thus both aesthetics and
environment must be thought of in a new, expanded sense. An aesthetics of engagement rather
than contemplation also suits our understanding of environment as continuous with us, its inhabitants. In both cases, art and
environment, we can no longer stand apart but join in as active participants.
Link - Dualism
The cause of the ecological crisis and the human nature binary, it
has its roots in the human desire and drive toward alienation that
operates prior to any other mode of ethical relationality.
Brown and Toadvine 03, Professor of philosophy @ Emporia State University, Assistrant professor of
Philosophy @ University of Oregon (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself ,
New Yoork University Oress)//ED
For the existential philosopher, the
roots of the ecological crisis may be much deeper than the Radical
Ecologists realize. The humanity-nature disorder is perhaps best conceived as a manifestation of
the tendency toward alienation inherent in the human condition one that operates prior to any
particular meaning system. This tendency toward alienation, leading to war and oppression in the
past, has now been coupled with the technological power to sustain a massive homo centrus
centrus population explosion, the by-products of which are poisoning and dismantling the earth's
bio-web. There is a certain irony here as the realization of massive, ecological destruction occurs just when we had
thought that our science and technology would save us from the ravages of the organic world.
lnstead we find ourselves hurtling toward or perhaps through an irrevocable tear in the fabric of
the planetary biotic web (and perhaps beyond). l) Dreams of technological Utopia have been replaced
overnight by nightmares of ecological holocaust. The existential philosophers remind us that the replacement of
one conceptual system for another is not enough unless there occurs with it a corresponding shift
or lifestyle change that actually ushers in a new mode of being for humanity. Such thinking
reinforces the claim of radicality within the projects of Radical Ecology.
The current ecological catastrophe is interconnected with viewing
humanity as outside of nature. The development of a new form of
thought is a necessary step to resolving the ontological and
normative implications that an inadequate relationsip with nature
has brought upon us.
Husserl's rather passionate critique of the evils of naturalism make him a clear but unnoticed ally of contemporary ecological philosophers who
have argued that there
are important and largely unnoticed connections between our worldviews,

metaphysical systems, and forms of rationality, on the one hand, and social and environmental
domination, on the other. Such philosophers, often known as Radical Ecologists, typically are social ecologists, deep ecologists, or
eco-feminists. According to their specific diagnoses, each offers suggested cures involving some kind of revolution
in thinking that would produce the kind of spiritual metanoia needed to develop and sustain
socially just and environmentally benign practices. Radical Ecologists share the conviction that
the massive ecological damage we are witnessing today, as well as inequitable and unjust social
arrangements, are the inevitable products of those ways of thinking that separate and privilege
humanity over nature. The Radical Ecologist's call to overcome this kind of thinking and replace it with
a new understanding of the humanity-nature relation that would result in the emergence and
maintenance of environmentally benign Practices requires a thinking of both the meaning of
humanity and the meaning of nature in which normative and ontological issues are at stake. Such
questions lie in the very interesting crossroads of metaphysics and value theory but also intersect
with a Green political agenda and (forgive the term) a "spiritual" quest for the cultivation of a new state
of humanitas 3 that transcends the relative barbarism of homo centrus centrus. The Radical
Ecologists see this damage as symptomatic of a deeper disorder embedded within the humanitynature relation. It is embedded within the way nature and humanity are experienced in daily life,
in myth, in literature, and in abstract thought. To the extent that the ecological devastation we
witness today is the result of anthropocentrism androcentrism, or a dualistic value hierarchical
worldview (as many have claimed), the ecological crisis is a crisis of meaning. It is ultimately the
meaning of nature and humanity that is at stake. As such it can be managed, solved, or perhaps
overcome by new myths or improvements in thinking that would reconceptualize the boundaries,
as well as the content, of our understanding of humanity and nature.
Link - EcoGov Ontology Bad

Need to challenge the ontological assumptions of eco gov
Malette 10, B.A., M.A. (Laval University), Ph.D. (University of Victoria), Postdoc (University of
Melbourne) (Sbastien, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)//ED
Analytically speaking, notions
such as green or eco governmentality seem natural extensions of

Foucaults own notion of governmentality. But normatively and ontologically speaking, the
critical ethos assumed by most Foucaultian and green governmentality scholars remains
problematic, in part because such ethos assumes that Nature cannot be an entity in its own right or a
vector of transcultural norms, but only is the result of some conceptual and cultural constructs toward
which we should be particularly suspicious. Our challenge is thus to better understand how the
current greening of our political rationalities can be seen as deepening governmental studies
through notions such as green or eco governmentality (this by raising our awareness to that
which may well form the next global modes of domination and subjectification), while
simultaneously engaging the underlying ontological and political assumptions found in green
governmentality studies, which, far from challenging the edifice of modern governmentality, may well be in its very
heart.
Link - Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a form of political managerialism aimed at
preserving bad forms of modernity
Yet, despite the challenges addressed to the culture of modernity, environmentalism
is also generating various political

rationalities which aim at shaping human behaviours through their ecological modulations. As
Webers assessment of modernity suggests, the spread of such rationalities would entail a managerial and
instrumental ethos more than an ethical re-examination of our relations with Nature. The rise of
environmentalism would contribute to the creation of eco-management tendencies, often relegating
ontological and ethical discussions about Nature to academic philosophers. The domain of political ecology would not
only broaden the scope of the instrumental rationalities and the cult of innovation for the sake of
innovation they serve, which are the hallmarks of the culture of modernity, it would also propagate the seeds of this
managerial ethos beyond the traditional enclaves of modern government.
Your environment approach is not the exception
All these concerns have sparked a plethora of environmental discourses arguing for restructuring or re-conceptualizing our relations with Nature so as to provide for thedevelopment of sustainable
societies and environmental justice. 2 On the one hand, we find supporters of authoritarian-conservative
approaches for whom an increasing centralization of power and control over institutionalized
violence still appears as the best remedy to the various crises humanity may encounter, including
ecological ones (Hay 2002, pp.173-93). On the other hand, we find supporters of socialist, anarchist and
deep ecology approaches confident that current environmental problems can best be solved by a
profound reconfiguration of our modern ways of life, including the power dynamics at play. We also find
various thinkers for whom the entry of ecological thinking into politics would be safer under the
guidance of the democratic and liberal ethos that Western civilizations have crafted to ensure
universal progress and ultimately save the world from the barbarity otherwise pervasive (Ferry
1992; Hayward 1995). Of course, the emergence of the environmental movement cannot simply be reduced to green delineations of conservatism,
liberalism, socialism and anarchism. We
find numerous environmental approaches mixing or borrowing

solutions from every ideological corner, making it difficult to understand their positions strictly
in term of the Left versus Right or any other consistent political taxonomy. We also find
ecological thinkers who deliberately attempt to distance themselves for the dominant social,
political and economic representations which would somehow make uniform the culture of
modernity. Yet, it seems that most of the political solutions proposed by environmentalists
remain largely articulated within the framework delineated by the culture of modernity. Stemming
from the assertion that nation-states are increasingly challenged by ecological problems, we find, for instance, the solution of creating a global
Leviathan capable of planetary coercion on thes e matters (Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Kuehls 1996; Liftin 1998; Breitmeir, Young and
Zrn2006). We also find the idea that, while humans are not likely to comply without coercion to eco-friendly behaviours, creating a world
government is too dangerous and/or inappropriate for such challenges (Hay 2002). We also find scholars suggesting that an ecological society
can only emerge via the development of social organizations operating through decentralized, classless and direct democracies fixed at a local
level. In sum, few
original solutions for environmental politics have been recently formulated outside
the usual debates, alternatives, and solutions crystallised by the culture of modernity
Link - Nuclear War

Obsession with salvaging the earth from nuclear war is only a new
form of the methodology that seeks to control and manage and
survey the earth
Based on a perspective that regarded the Earth as an object of observation from astronautical, aeronautical,
and nautical platforms, national command-and-control authorities often had to integrate their
understanding of the world in pre-war, warring, and post-war scenarios in which human and
nonhuman life worldwide would experience rapid coupled destructive events in a thermonuclear
war (Luke, 1989b). Moving from such hypothetical strategic models to actual environmental
monitoring in a more eco-managerial mindset was not a major methodological shift. Seeing the
Earth as a composite of various thermonuclear battle spaces on a 247, 36510, or 1010 timeline
speculated about plausible environmental damage zones on daily, weekly, yearly, or decade-long time
horizons, while networks of experts tweaked their instruments of Earth surveillance to fulfill and
improve upon new missions of ecological surveillance.
ALTERNATIVE
Alternative - Relational Ontology

Our conception of subjectivity is one that denies the autonomous
individuality of the West this is critical to creating relational
agency which leads to different models of social and ecological
interaction
With respect to human freedom, which is often conceived in terms of having sovereignty over
oneself, the same relational considerations could be invoked. From a relational standpoint,
freedom is not the primary quality of a distinct object/subject in the world. Freedom is rather
a momentary crystallization of various relations understood and conceptualised by a dominant
binary logic in terms of object/subject/quality. In other words, the freedom by which we
experience a coherent and autonomous sense of self involves relationships, mutualism, empathy
and sympathy with that which is other than oneself from the start (Naess 2008). In Aristotelian
terms, no passage from potentiality to actuality could rely solely on its own; the passage to
actualization requires numerous interactions which themselves can be viewed as integral to any
state of actualisation. It follows that the whole tradition which has organized the hierarchy of
beings according to their level of autonomy from the Prime Mover as the metaphysical and
cosmological Arch, to the Polis deemed as the mature political entity by virtue of its autonomy
as a social organism, to the consecration of human consciousness as superior because of its
capacity of obeying its own moral laws would have to be critically reassessed. The vertical
and atomistic logic linking the dominant representation of God (or the first cosmological Grand
cause), the notion of political sovereignty, and the liberal representation of the individual as a
creature of free-will would have to be re-examined in light of an ontological relationalism. From
the perspective of ecological relationalists, it is thus clear that the concept of autonomy central to
Western culture from the Greeks onward is inherently flawed. In sharp contrast, a relational
conception of autonomy and agency would invite a richer understanding of our ontological
interdependency which would lead to different models of social and ecological interaction and
mediation.
The affirmative isnt to dream of a world in which humanity never
interfered with nature or created a pristine nature, rather, we must
reorient ourselves towards a world in which human has an
environmental ethic which recognizes the interconnectivity among
all beings
Bannon 11, Ph.D. Philosophy (University of Memphis) B.A. Philosophy and Honors (University
of Rhode Island) (Bryan E, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational Ontology,
Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)//ED
Another important benefit of breaking with the anthropomorphism inherent within the experiential approach is that it allows us to develop an ethic within which time
itself becomes a relevant category of ethical consideration. Considering time in this way proves especially helpful within an environmental context. If flesh relations
are always between singular bodies and these relations are spatializing and temporalizing, then within any given field there will be multiple temporal scales at work.
Usually, our ethical considerations concerning nature only take account of a human temporal
scale, but ecological systems, precisely because they are complex systems of interrelationships
between beings, are operating within, and changing along, multiple temporal scales
simultaneously. If the plurality of temporal relations is ignored, then even well-intentioned and
skillfully executed conservation projects may fail to promote wildness. If, for example, an
ecological restoration project orients itself toward reestablishing the biological conditions that
obtained at a specific point from within human history, this pursuit might neglect the ways in
which species and geography have changed in the intervening period, result in the eradication of
certain species that were not present at that historical period but could reside within the system
without damaging its integrity, or create conditions under which continual human intervention is
necessary in order to preserve the system in its restored state due to a loss of surrounding
systems that would interact with the restored system in order to maintain its stability. If efforts
were, rather, to focus as much on reestablishing conditions within which a multiplicity of
temporal orders were possible contemporaneously, the restored system could possess a novel
integrity capable of supporting myriad living forms. Rather than proceeding into the future
oriented by nostalgia for a world without humanity, Merleau-Pontys ontology gestures toward a
world in which humanity, in the idiom of Aldo Leopold, is a good citizen within the land community.
A more ethical ethos requires a reorientation for an ecological
ethical community
Bannon 11, Ph.D. Philosophy (University of Memphis) B.A. Philosophy and Honors (University
of Rhode Island) (Bryan E, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational Ontology,
Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)//ED
Even if one is willing to accept that the theoretical situation of any philosophy of nature is
inevitably anthropomorphic (which is not to say anthropocentric), we are then faced with another
more serious problem in using Merleau-Pontys ontology in order to formulate an environmental ethic: To
say that phenomenology can serve as a basis for a philosophical investigation of nature does not
clarify what kind of environmental ethic might follow from it. Toadvine puts forward a persuasive case to this
effect, arguing that no ethical principles or responsibilities are immediately derivable from MerleauPontys ontology. Beginning with Mauro
if everything belongs to the flesh, then flesh remains the condition of possibility
for every possible action, behavior, and attitude, Toadvine proceeds to point out that if an ethic is to be
possible on the basis of Merleau-Pontys ontology, it will have to be placed on a radically different
foundation from traditional moral theories. After all, those theories are formulated in terms of
conceptions of the subject, subject-object/agent-patient dualisms, and a substance-property
ontology that Merleau-Ponty contests.38 The promise of Merleau-Pontys philosophy does not, properly speaking, lie in the
prospect of formulating a new system of duties and obligations toward nature. Rather, the hope is that an ontological shift
in our perception of the world can alter our ethos by shifting our sense of what is and how we
experience and interpret our relations with things.39 Such a shift in perception, of course, is the
foundation of Abrams entire project, but Toadvine is correct to assert that our belongingness to one same
world or animate continuum does little to clarify how we ought to behave within it. For example, even if
we begin with Abrams animistic standpoint, why ought we be more mindful of and respectful to our
surrounding fellow beings? Can we not imagine someone finding in humanitys ontological
continuity with bovines or mountains a rationale by which they might then extend already
Carbones point that
exploitative human practices toward those beings to other humans as well? It is just as plausible, once
/ness has been questioned, to treat other humans in the instrumental manner in which natural
beings are treated as it is to be more respectful toward a wider range of beings. In other words, even
with the perceptual shift, there is still a need for some further ethical analysis in order to
determine how to live a good human life within the natural world so conceived. We are not yet in a
position, however, to deal with these issues and so will only rejoin these questions in the fourth section of this paper, wherein I will argue that
while Toadvine is correct to say that no
specific ethic is demanded by the ontology, it is still capable of

providing a foundation from which a different kind of ecological ethical community is possible.
ANSWERS TO ANSWERS
A2 Deep Ecology Bad

You are silly! Deep Ecology is mired in fascistic thought excludes the
ability to view the human relationship with nature.
Wood 01, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in
phenomenology, Volume 31, Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95)//ED
A friend sent me a paper in the late 70s in which he first connected Heidegger to deep ecology, and then charged ecological thinking in general
with fascistic tendencies. I do not propose to deal with the politically troubling aspects of his argument. But the central worry about ecological
thinking, especially its deep version, is worth dissecting.xiii
I want to argue that the dividing line between benign

and pernicious appropriations of the ecological perspective has to do with these liminological
issues of boundary management which ecophenomenology is in a position to address. I will draw
lightly on Arne Naess and George Sessionss Eight Points, presented as an outline of deep ecology. Deep ecology is deep in part
because of the imperatives it generates from certain claims it makes about the relations between
humans and the rest of nature, some of which are already evaluations. The fundamental claims
here are that nonhuman life has an intrinsic value independent of its value for humans, that
biological diversity promotes the quality of both human and non-human life, and that the current
human interference in nature is both contrary to the recognition of these values and
unsustainable. The fascistic implications thought to arise from these claims would include the
claim that one could justify active human population reduction to accommodate the needs of
other species, and that more broadly, the rights of individual humans are to be subordinated to
those of the species.xiv More generally still, the deep-ecology perspective is presenting itself as a
kind of meta-legislator of value, dissolving within itself every other dimension or consideration.
The plausibility of such conclusions arises from the understandable belief that if the alternative is
an irreversible destruction of nature, or an unstoppable escalation in human population growth,
i.e. some sort of catastrophe, then almost any measures might be justified in an emergency. When
the house is on fire, you dont reason with the child who wants to finish his Nintendo game; you grab the child and run. (And explain later.) But if
the house is merely smoking, or there are reports of its smoking, the situation is less clear. Deep
ecology is a crystallized vision

of the desperate state we are in. But the need for radical remedies is a reflection of the totalizing
aspects of the diagnosis. What I want to suggest, however, is that so-called deep ecology is the
product of an uncontrolled application of the methodological virtues inherent in the ecological
perspective. The central virtue is the recognition of the constitutive quality of relationality. Things are what they are by virtue of their
relations to other things. What look like external relations are, if not internal, at least constitutive. Living things eat each other, breath and drink
the elements, live in communities, while inanimate things have properties that depend on the properties of other things. Limestone cliffs would
not last long in acid rain, Everywhere, it is the interplay of relative forces that produces results, not the absolute forces themselves. What the
ecological perspective teaches us is that things with no obvious point to their existence play a role in the life-cycles of other beings. It teaches us
that the survival of a particular species may depend on the preservation of an environment with very specific features. And it teaches us that the
life, death and flourishing of things is tied up with other factors, conditions and creatures in ways for which we typically do not have a map, and
under variability tolerances we do not know. We can study these things, of course. But as much as ecology is a science, it is also a counsel of
caution, precisely because it deals with the interaction of widely disparate kinds of things.
Deep Ecology is diametrically opposed to Ecophenomenology - the

two do not occupy the same space.
Wood 01, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, (David, What is
Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31, Number 1, 2001 , pp.
78-95)//ED
The plausibility of such conclusions arises from the understandable belief that if the alternative is an irreversible
destruction of nature, or an unstoppable escalation in human population growth, i.e. some sort of catastrophe, then
almost any measures might be justified in an emergency. When the house is on fire, you dont reason with the child
who wants to finish his Nintendo game; you grab the child and run. (And explain later.) But if the house is merely
smoking, or there are reports of its smoking, the situation is less clear. Deep ecology is a crystallized vision of the
desperate state we are in. But the need for radical remedies is a reflection of the totalizing aspects of the diagnosis.
deep ecology is the product of an

uncontrolled application of the methodological virtues inherent in the
ecological perspective. The central virtue is the recognition of the
constitutive quality of relationality. Things are what they are by virtue of their
relations to other things. What look like external relations are, if not internal,
at least constitutive. Living things eat each other, breath and drink the elements, live in communities,
What I want to suggest, however, is that so-called
while inanimate things have properties that depend on the properties of other things. Limestone cliffs would not last
Everywhere, it is the interplay of relative forces that produces

results, not the absolute forces themselves. What the ecological perspective teaches us is
that things with no obvious point to their existence play a role in the life-cycles
of other beings. It teaches us that the survival of a particular species may depend
on the preservation of an environment with very specific features. And it
teaches us that the life, death and flourishing of things is tied up with other
factors, conditions and creatures in ways for which we typically do not have a
map, and under variability tolerances we do not know. We can study these things, of
long in acid rain,
course. But as much as ecology is a science, it is also a counsel of caution, precisely because it deals with the
interaction of widely disparate kinds of things. Here we need to contrast a precise science with a field science. A
precise science fundamentally idealizes its objects, and in so doing, it can develop highly sophisticated theoretical
A field science deals with the interaction of many

quite different sorts of things, allowing no consistent method of idealization,
and inhibiting complex axiological development. Ecology is just such a
science. And if we extend science more broadly, the same must be said of geography, history and
structures - most notably in mathematics.
anthropology. In between, we find physics, chemistry and biology, and all those sciences that profit from controlling
conditions in laboratories. It is a commonplace of physics that a universe in which there are only two bodies
requires much less mathematical complexity than that of a universe with three bodies. And once a fourth body is=7
added, all hell breaks loose. Real life biological environments contain not just huge numbers of bodies, but bodies of
very different sorts, each of which manages, through various different procedures, its own relation to that
environment, or to its own niche in that environment. It is curious to realize that although we could not
mathematically, or in any other way, really give adequate representation to the complete workings of such a
complex system, that nonetheless such systems do work. This is not such a mystery of course. Representation
often plays only a small part in the way of the world.xv But of course another reason why such complex systems
work is we usually do not have any precise sense of what it is for them not to work, what outcomes would be
failures. Does the outbreak of myxomytosis in Anglesey rabbits signal a failure of the system after foxes have been
eradicated, or does it mark a successful transformation of the system? Deep ecology would say that while there
may be difficult cases, there are also clear ones: that we know what a dead lake means, and that photographs from
The fundamental thrust of

phenomenology is its non-reductive orientation to phenomena. That is
what is meant by Back to the things themselves!. To the extent that deep
ecology would permit or encourage the reduction of things to the function
or role that they play in some higher organization, deep ecology would be
opposed to and opposed by phenomenology. I suspect that the ecological perspective more
space argue that the earth, itself a living being, is dying.
broadly does indeed harbor a tension between finding in relatedness a basis of a higher-order synthesis, and
recognizing that the kind of relatedness in question will constantly and awkwardly interrupt such syntheses. Take a
group of people in a room. We may listen in on their voices and say that must be the French soccer team,
recognizing them under a collective identity. We may, on the other hand, remember that each of these people has a
distinct outlook on the world, that they cannot be collectivized or serialized without an objectifying loss. When we
watch them playing on the field, we may conclude that to understand what is happening, we need a perspective in
which we move between these two viewpoints, just as the players themselves, each separately, move in and out of
various forms of collective or sub-group consciousness. (One player may be aware of what an opposing player is
doing, and have a good understanding of where his team-mate is moving up to. Another may have a sense of the
strategic opportunities created by the different styles of play of each team.) What is clear here can be seen writ
large in a living environment in which a multitude of creatures compete and cooperate, eat and feed each other,
and whose awareness of one anothers=8 presence or existence will vary and fluctuate. If every living being not
does merely have a relation to its outside, to what is other than itself, but is constantly managing that relationship
economically, (risking death for food, balancing individual advantage with collective prosperity etc.), then however
much it may be possible, for certain purposes, to treat such an environment collectively, that treatment will be
constantly open to disruption from the intransigence of its parts. Important as it is to see things in relation to one
another, and tempting as it then is to see these spaces, fields, playgrounds of life, as wholes, that wholeness is
dependent on the continuing coordination of parts that have albeit residual independent interests. At the same time
these things we call environments, niches etc. are themselves subject to what we might, after Derrida, call the law
of context. And context is an iterative and porous notion. While all meaning (every creature) is contextual (exists in
relation to a sustaining field), no context is fully saturated, closed or determinate. Context is porous for the scientist
in that his model of the environment will always be vulnerable to the incursion of other factors. But it is porous in
itself, on the ground too, in that unusual or unexpected events may always come into play. And it is porous for
living creatures in the sense that the whole way in which their embodiment anticipates the world out there may
turn out not to protect it from injury or death.
A2 Managerialism Good
1. No Link we arent a pursuit of an environment free from
human interaction. The point of the aff is that we have to
relate to other life forms through a field of flesh. This is not
incompatible with interacting with the environment. The type
of management we critique stems from the viewpoint that
nature has no intrinsic value and management is the only
possible way to relate to nature - Thats Bannon, Brook, Luke,
and Malette.
2. On balance, the benefits of environmental managerialism dont
outweigh the costs managerialism is just environmental
exploitation with a happy face. That justifies its own perpetual
expansion into new fields requiring management
(Timothy, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)//ED
So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause. The more adaptive
and collaborative dimensions of eco-managerial practice suggest its advocates truly are seeking to develop some post
extractive approach to ecosystem management that might respect the worth and value of the survival of non-human life in its
environments, and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments of eco-managerialism to sustainability
Even
rehabilitation and restoration managerialism may not be as much post extractive in their
managerial stance, as much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of
ecological exploitation. Therefore, the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick
into a new register, one in which a concern for environmental renewability or
ecological restoration just opens new domains for the eco-managerialists to operate
within. To even construct the problem in this fashion, however, nature still must be
reduced to the encirclement of space and matter in national as well as global
economies - to a system of systems, where flows of material and energy can be dismantled ,
redesigned, and assembled anew to produce resources efficiently, when and where needed, in the
maybe are not that far removed from older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial regimes.
modern marketplace. As an essentially self contained system of biophysical systems, nature seen this way is energies,
materials, in sites that are repositioned by eco-managerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly
all human beings, can realize great material goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed.
Nonetheless, eco-managerialism
fails miserably with regard to the

political. Instead, its work ensures that greater material and immaterial bads will also
be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or benefit
from the advanced national economies that basically have monopolized the use of the
world's resources. This continues because eco-managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a
handful of highly developed regional municipal and national sites. Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one dollar
or two dollars a day, not able, of course, at that rate of pay, to pay for eco-managerialism. So I'll stop there.
A2 Ontology Bad
Focus on Ontology is key to spur resistance to problematic dominant
discourses
Bleiker 03, U of Queensland (Roland Discourse and Human Agency School of Poli Sci,
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv/UQ:10672/rb_cpt_2_03.pdf)
The above-mentioned refusal
to buy milk bottled in non-reusable glass may help to clarify the

suggestion that tactical manifestations of human agency are not bound by spatial dynamics.
The consumer who changes his/her shopping habits engages in a tactical action that escapes the spatial
controlling mechanisms of established political and economic boundaries. The effect of such a tactical
action is not limited to the localized target, say, the supermarket. Over an extended period of time, and in conjunction with similar actions,
such tactical dissent may affect practices of production, trade, investment, advertisement and
the like. The manifestations that issue from such actions operate along an indeterminate trajectory insofar as they promote a slow
transformation of values whose effects transgress places and become visible and effective only by maturation over time. In the case of
tactical protest actions of environmentally sensitive consumers, it may still be too early to ascertain a definitive manifestation of human
agency. However, various indicators render such an assertion highly likely. Changing attitudes and consumption patters, including an
increasing concern for environmental issues, have produced easily recognizable marketing shifts in most parts of the industrial world. For
instance, health food sections are now a common feature in most supermarkets. And
there is empirical evidence that

suggests that consumer preferences for costly 'ethical' production technologies can lead to
increased competition between producers, which, in turn, may gradually increase the level of
adoption of such ethical technology (Noe and Rebello, 1995, 69-85). Conclusion The task of articulating a discursive
notion of human agency towered at the entrance of this essay and has never ceased to be its main puzzle, a cyclically reoccurring dilemma.
How can we understand and conceptualize the processes through which people shape social and political life. Where is this fine line
between essentialism and relativism, between suffocating in the narrow grip of totalizing knowledge claims and blindly roaming in a
nihilistic world of absences? How to make a clear break with positivist forms of representing the political without either abandoning the
concept of human agency or falling back into a new form of essentialism? Confronting the difficulties that arise with this dualistic
dilemma, I have sought to advance a positive concept of human agency that is neither grounded in a stable essence nor dependent upon a
presupposed notion of the subject. The ensuing journey has taken me, painted in very broad strokes, along the following circular trajectory
of revealing and concealing: discourses are powerful forms of domination. They frame the parameters of thinking processes. They shape
political and social interactions. Yet, discourses are not invincible. They may be thin. They may contain cracks. By
moving the
gaze from epistemological to ontological spheres, one can explore ways in which individuals
use these cracks to escape aspects of the discursive order. To recognize the potential for
human agency that opens up as a result of this process, one needs to shift foci again, this
time from concerns with Being to an inquiry into tactical behaviours. Moving between various
hyphenated identities, individuals use ensuing mobile subjectivities to engage in daily acts of dissent, which gradually transform societal
By
returning to epistemological levels, one can then conceptualize how these transformed
discursive practices engender processes of social change. I have used everyday forms of resistance to illustrate
values. Over an extended period of time, such tactical expressions of human agency gradually transform societal values.
how discourses not only frame and subjugate our thoughts and behaviour, but also offer possibilities for human agency. Needless to say,
discursive dissent is not the only practice of resistance that can exert human agency. There are many political actions that seek immediate
changes in policy or institutional structures, rather than 'mere' shifts in societal consciousness. Although some of these actions undoubtedly
achieve results, they are often not as potent as they seem. Or, rather, their enduring effect may well be primarily discursive, rather than
institutional. Nietzsche (1982b, 243) already knew that the greatest events 'are not our loudest but our stillest hours.' This is why he
stressed that the world revolves 'not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values.' And this is why, for
Foucault too, the crucial site for political investigations are not institutions, even though they are often the place where power is inscribed
and crystallized. The fundamental point of anchorage of power relations, Foucault claims, is always located outside institutions, deeply
entrenched within the social nexus. Hence, instead of looking at power from the vantage point of institutions, one must analyse institutions
from the standpoint of power relations (Foucault, 1982, 219-222). A defence of human agency through a Nietzschean approach does
inevitably leave some observers unsatisfied -- desiring a more robust account of what constitutes human actions and their influence on
political and social life. However, a more firm and detailed theory of agency is unlikely to achieve more than essentialize a particular and
necessarily subjective viewpoint on the political. Needed, instead, is what William Connolly has termed an ethos of critical responsiveness
-- that is, an openness towards the unknown, unseen, unthought and a resulting effort to accept and theorize our limits to cognition (see
Connolly, 1995, 154, and for a discussion White, 2000, 106-150). The key, then is to turn this inevitable ambiguity into a positive and
enabling force, rather than a threat that needs to be warded off or suppressed at all cost. The present essay has sought to demonstrate how
such an attitude towards human agency is possible, and indeed necessary, in both theory and practice .
In the domain of
political practice, everyday forms of resistance demonstrate that transformative potential is
hidden in the very acceptance of ambiguity. Consider the countless and continuously
spreading new social movements, pressure groups and other loose organizations that
challenge various aspects of local, national or global governance. These movements operate
in a rather chaotic way. They come and go. They are neither centrally controlled nor do they
all seek the same objective. Some operate on the right end of the political spectrum. Others
on the left. Some oppose globalization. Others hail it. Some seek more environmental
regulations. Others defend neo-liberal free trade. And, it is precisely through this lack of
coherence, control and certainty that the respective resistance movements offer a positive
contribution to the political. They are in some sense the quintessential aspect of postmodern
politics, of local resistance to metanarrative impositions (see White, 1991, 10-12; Walker,
1988). They embody what Connolly (1995, 154-155) believes is the key to cultural
democratization: a certain level of 'productive ambiguity,' that is, the commitment always to
resist 'attempts to allow one side or the other to achieve final victory.' Ensuing forms of
human agency, anarchical as they may be, thus generate regular and important public
scrutiny and discussion of how norms, values and institutions function.
FRAMEWORK STUFF
Framework is Managerial
Political and Cultural constraints create our representations of
environmental crisiss as singular issues ignoring the role of the
modern industrial system and consumption as a cause. We are
caught up in ecological modernization which only furthers these
values of destruction. We must forgo managerialist approaches like
framework and begin with a criticism of consumption and the
instrumentalist view of the environment in order to create a new
ethic for engagement with the world.
Dalby 02, Prof. of Geography and Political Economy at Carleton University, (Simon, Environmental
Security, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lOBQQcNYasC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=simon+dalby+environmental+security&ots=iZzuHMrwt0&sig=f
5WO5hbJfao5FT3HgGvcvrRYxA8#v=onepage&q=simon%20dalby%20environmental
%20security&f=false)//ED
That said, however, I have been heavily influenced by many post-structuralist writers, and although the sources, arguments, and evidence used in what follows are
much less than obviously post, the themes of space, identity, and colonization, and my overall strategy of problematicizing the taken for granted, fit with its ethos.
This book is a work of criticism, a contribution to investigations in a number of overlapping academic fields, as well as an argument with the ongoing discussions
about security in North America and Europe. As such I follow David Campbells remainder to readers of his Writing Security, regarding what Michel Foucault said
about critique: A
critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of
pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchalleneged, unconsidered
modes of thought the practices we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the
social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and
in human relations as thought. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to
change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as
self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile
gestures difficult. While I do not wish to suggest that the environmental security discourse is facile, in many ways its premises, and its assumptions about
environment in particular, are not nearly as self-evident as its many authors sometimes apparently think. And how we, of whatever fictional
community, think leads not only to how we act politically, but also to our understandings of who we
act politically, but also to our understandings of who we are, what we value, and what we are
prepared to countenance to protect our self-preferred identities. This is the very stuff of security . This
book does not engage in any detail with either the history of environmental philosophy or the specific compatibilities of various streams of environmentalist writing
and politics with international relations of security studies. Such efforts have been undertaken recently by other scholars. Neither does it revisit the major debates in
the 1970s about the limits of growth, steady states, and political alternatives that were, in some ways, precursors to the contemporary discussions. Invoking various
narratives of environment, and in particular a critique of colonizing practices, does not simply suggest that this environmental story line offers some transcendental or
objective discourse that provides the singular truth from which policy can be derived. Such themes are very much the stuff of both environmental and international
politics; nature has been invoked in numerous contexts to rationalize many political programs. Rather, the
counter-narrative that follows

aims to disrupt the conventional formulations of environment as a technical matter for expert
regulation or as a matter for global management, big science, and specifically security discussions.
In the process it will show how the politics of invoking something called environment works and
will suggest that the geographical presuppositions in the discourse are especially important. By
focusing on historical antecedents of the contemporary crisis, the terms in which we currently
understand both environment and security can be criticized and their politics investigated. This is
not a matter of disputing the claims that environmental change is or is not occurring, or challenging
the technical practices of numerous disciplines. Whatever the finer points of the specification of global ecological processes, there
are many reasons for great concern on all manner of issues and in numerous contexts from biodiversity decline to stratospheric ozone holes, and from rising childhood
What is most worrisome to anyone who

observes these matters is not any single concern- be it climate change, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals, deforestation, long-lived
asthma incidence rates to the contemporary sufferings of marginalized peasants and refugees.
radioisotopes, or any one of many other matter, but
the totality of the disruptions caused by modern industrial systems

and the consumption of their products, whose cumulative and increasing impact has reached into
all parts of the biosphere. This is, of course both the strength of the environmentalist argument and, given the diversity of its subthemes,
simultaneously its greatest political difficulty. The focus in some of what follows in this volume is on the use of fossil fuels, both because they are so integral to
contemporary modern modes of economic existence, and hence can be read as symptomatic of the larger condition, and because at a very simple level, by literally
turning rock into air, their widespread use draws attention directly to the anthropogenic alterations of basic planetary systems. What is most important for the
argument that follows is a recognition that contemporary
endangerments materialize within political and cultural

contexts that constrain, in important ways, how these matters are represented. The political and economic order
of modernity is rarely fundamentally questioned in such discussions. The commodification of nature is taken for granted as
an unavoidable necessity. In particular, despite all the ambiguities of modernity, the developmentalist assumptions that suggest that each state will
become modern along approximately similar trajectories of industrialization and modernization are implicit in most conventional analyses. Environmental
discourses occur within larger discursive economies where some identities have more value than
others, and crucially where the dominant development and security narratives are premised on
geopolitical specifications that obscure histories of ecology and resource appropriation. They also
frequently operate in discursive modes that reassert geopolitical identities by how they specify other peoples and places. Environmental politics is
very much about the politics of discourse, the presentation of problems and of who should deal
with the concerns so special. These discourses frequently turn complex political matters into
managerial and technological issues of sustainable development where strategies of ecological
modernization finesse the questions by promising technical solutions to numerous political
difficulties and, in the process, work to co-opt or marginalize fundamental challenges to the
contemporary world order. In Tim Lukes apt summation: Underneath the enchanting green patina, sustainable development is
about sustaining development as economically rationalized environment rather than the
development of a sustaining ecology. Linking such themes to security, with its practices of
specifying threats and its managerial modes for responding to dangers, suggest a broad congruency
of discourse and practice. But what ought to be secured frequently remains unexamined, as does
the precise nature of what it is that causes contemporary endangerments. Like other disciplinary endeavors, both
environmental management and security studies have their practices for the delimitation of
appropriate objects, methods, and procedures. Making these explicit and showing how they both
facilitate and simultaneously limit inquiry is an unavoidable task for any study that takes
Foucaults formulation of critique seriously. Challenging conventional wisdom is rarely easy, and disrupting geopolitical categories can
be especially unsettling. Asking unsettling questions about the identities of those who think in the conventional categories is not easy either. But it seems very
necessary now, given the limitations of both the security and the environmental discourses we have inherited from the past and the pressing need to think intelligently
about what kind of planet we are making.
Framework: Ecophenomenology First

Phenomenology is the best method for interrogating consciousness
in relation to our metaphysical assumptions about nature and
ecology. We must return to the world as we experience it as the
starting point to addressing environmental distress
If philosophy
does have a contribution to make in today's practical decision making, this contribution
steady and insightful clarification of our ethical and metaphysical assumptions
about ourselves and the world around us. These basic assumptions- about the relation between
individual and society, human nature, the nature of nature, and the nature of the Good-underlie
all of our current behavior, both individually and culturally. But the assumptions that have guided
our past behavior reveal their limitations as we think about, imagine, and live through the events
and consequences of what we call the environmental crisis. When confronted with the
consequences of our actions-mass extinctions, climate change, global pollution, dwindling
resources-we inevitably experience a moral unease over what has been done, what we have done,
to nature. We cannot help but ask about the root of this deep-seated moral reaction, and the
changes it calls for in our current practices. To answer these questions, we need the help of philosophy' The suggestion
will likely begin with
that philosophy should play a role in reorienting our relation with the natural world will no doubt come as a surprise to many. It may be even
phenomenology can play in

developing this new relation with nature, given its reputation as a highly
abstract theoretical inquiry into consciousness or being. In fact, one of the basic themes of the present
collection of essays is that phenomenology, as a contemporary method in philosophy, is particularly well
suited to working through some of the dilemmas that have faced environmental ethicists and
philosophers of nature. Originating in the work of Edmund Husserl and developed and enriched by thinkers such as Max Scheler
more surprising that the present volume is dedicated to the role
Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas, phenomenology has won a worldwide following, not only
among philosophers, but also ,among scholars in fields ranging from anthropology and architecture to geography and nursing. While there have
been methodological divergences over the course of phenomenology's first century, phenomenologists
have continued to
share the rallying cry first introduced by Husserl himself: "To the things themselves!" Phenomenology takes
its starting point in a return to the "things" or "matters" themselves, that is, the world as we
experience it. In other words, for phenomenologists, experience must be treated as the
starting point and ultimate court of appeal for all philosophical evidence.
All environmental philosophy is impossible because nature is
phenomenologically greater than consciousness.
Wood 03, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ (David, What is Eco-Phenomenology?, EcoPhenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 211-212)//ED
But perhaps the possibility of an ethical response to nature lies with the impossibility of
trimming its claws for adoption as our sibling or household pet. Perhaps, as I will suggest here,
an ethical response to nature becomes possible only when we are faced with the impossibility of
reducing it to the homogeneous, the continuous, the predictable, the perceivable, the
thematrzable. What is called for is not a new philosophy of nature, but an ethics of the
impossibility of any "philosophy" of nature. The basis for such "impossibility" is
phenomenological, but in a way that stretches this method, perhaps to the breaking point. As
resources for an "impossible phenomenology" of nature, I will draw on analyses of corporeality,
desire, and flesh in Schopenhaue4, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. What I develop here is by no
means a complete view, but has two aims: first, to suggest that the current "kinship" view is
neither satisfactory nor our only alternative in providing an ethical ground for the relation with
nature; and, second, to indicate the direction in which an alternative "phenomenology of the
impossible" could be developed.
Framework: Ontology
Altering status quo human perceptions of nature requires an
expansion of consciousness and what we allow into it
the gap between naturalism and phenomenology is in an important way

dependent on how one thinks of nature. The fundamental principle of phenomenology-that of
intentionality-specifically names consciousness as the central actor: "all consciousness is
consciousness of something." This is not just a claim about consciousness, but a claim about the kind of relation that
consciousness brings into being, which in any usual sense we could call a nonnafural relation. I may be an embodied being, and
the object of my awareness may be a tiger or a mountain. But the relation between us-seeing,
fear- ing, hoping, admiring-is not a causal relatiory not a physical relatiory but an intentional
one. When I admire the mountairy the mountain is not affected, and even if rays of light passing from the mountain to me are
We have tried so far to show that
necessary for this admiration to take place, the admiration is something of a different order. I may be dreaming, say of an imaginary golden mountain, making a causal account of the relation
And yet the absence of proximate cause does not refute causality. Think of finding a
giant rock half -way down a valley. Or seashells in a farmer's field. To understand intentionality
to be opposed to causality is important if we associate causality with determinacy, with linearity,
and with certain kind of automatism. But if the realm of causality were to be expanded in a way that overcomes these prejudices, what then? One obvious
even harder to sustain.
way of beginning to bridge the gap between intentionality and causality would be to introduce the idea of information. When I admire the mountain from my window, I add nothing to it and
take nothing away. My relation to the mountain may develop-I may decide to climb it. It might kill me through exposure or avalanche. But here at the window causality is at a minimum. What I
receive is information about the mountain, directly, from the mountain, in a way directly caused by the actual shape of the mountain. But I receive this as an information proces- so4, not as an
impact of matter on matter. Does this help us to naturalize intentionality? Only a little. When a boot makes an imprint on soft ground, we may say that there is a direct causal dimension-the
squish- ing of clay-but there is an informational dimension, reflected in the precise shape of the imprint. But information can be registered, without it "registering" with the clay. What then is
distinctive about human consciousness? The sight of the mountain is information "fo{' me. Whereas we might say that the imprint of the boot is not information "for" the clay. TWo kinds of
reasons could be given here. First that the clay has no brairy no capacity for symbolic decoding. We are tempted then to say that because the clay cannot think, cannot reflectively process
information, that even if there is something more than mere causality operating, it does not add up, say, to the impact of a footprint on a Robinson Crusoe.10 But secondly, the clay has no
interests, no relation to the world such that what happens out there could matter to it. This second deficiency, the absence of what Ricoeur would call an intentional arc, does not reduce intentionality to causality, but if we accept that this connection to practical agency is central to intentional meaning, it does locate intentionality within an interactive nexus from which causal powers
cannot be separated. If I "see" a fruit as succulently delicious, this is intrinsically connected, however many times removed, with my enjoyment of fruit, my capacity to eat, and so on. The fact
that I am now allergic to fruit, or that I cannot afford this particular item of fruit, is neither here nor there. The point is that I am the kind of being that eats sweet things, and the structure of my
desire reflects that. The same can be said of erotic intentionality and all its trans- formations and displacements. If this is so, intentionality is firmly lodged within my bodily existence, within the
natural world. It remains to ask how the relation of "ofness" or "aboutness" can be understood naturalistically. We could say this: that intentionality is naturalistically embedded, but is itself an
indirect natural relation. It is indirect because it is mediated by such functions as imagination, transformation, delay, and memory, which are often but misleadingly associatcd with interiority. The
frame within which the intentional functions is ir conrplt'x nonrc,ductive natural setting, in which humans needs, desires, fears, and hopes reflect different levels of their relation to a natural
world. What we call con-sciousness is perhaps only derivatively (but importantly) able to be broken down into consciousness of this or that. Or to put this claim another way, all specifically
directed intentional consciorsn"ss draws on the manifoldness of our sensory and cognitive capacities. Con-sciousness is a networked awareness, a with-knowing, a knowing that, even as it is
separated into different modalities, draws on those others. (Something similar could be said about the relation between individual awareness and the connection this establishes or sustains with
others. Through consciousness we not only register the significance of things for us, but also connect things together with other things.) Here I would draw attention to the fact that our being
able to focus on one particular domain or object is quite compatible with that capacity being in fact dependent on the same being having many other capacities, and there ultimately being an integrative basis for this connectedness in our embodied existence. And we must not forget our capacity for productive transformation of the intentional order-our capacity for becoming aware of
our own awareness, taking our activity as an object of a second-order awareness. I would make two comments here: First, the dependence of focused attention on other nonfocal awarenesses is
illustrated in our capacity to see objects as solid, round, and so on. These latter properties are arguably (as Berkeley and Merleau-Ponty have both argued) dependent on our capacities for tactile
manipulatiory which is imaginatively but only tacitly implicated in our vision. Secondly, I suggest that our capacity for self-consciousness rests firmly on this capacity for demarcating a bounded
field, even when that is our own awareness. We can only speculate that there is some cognitive crossover from our more primitive capacity to register and defend our own bodily boundari"s ut d
systemic integrity, op&ations that only continue in consciousness what begins at much more primitive levels of life. In this section I have tried to indicate various ways in which thinking about
consciousness would take us into thinking about our interrelated capacities to (a) understand things
within fields of relevance (horizons); (b) to bring to bear on one modality of awareness interpretative
powers drawn from other dimensions (such as the tactile in the visual); and (c) the ability to
reconstitute our awareness as the object of a second-order awareness. I have suggested that in these and other ways
consciousness is tied up with the constructiory displacement, and transformation of fields of
significance, and of significance as a field phenomenon. Mcrleau-Ponty helps us think through the connection between such phenomena
and the idea of a body schema. And I would suggest a more primitive basis for the idea of a body schema in our
fundamental need to manage body boundaries. These sorts of connections
illustrate how much a certain naturalization of consciousness would
require, at the same time, an expansion of our sense of the natural.
I am arguing, is at last illustrated by (if not grounded on) the existence of things with various
degrees of cohesive integrity, which leads, eventually, to ways of managing boundaries. These
are natural phenomena that spill over into what we normally think of as distinct questions of
meaning, identity, and value.
That,
Framework: Epistemology
Limited consciousness of the globe, the individualistic nature of
humanity, and a lack of understanding our interconnectedness are
reasons why we are divorced from understanding of our influence
on the planet
How does this relate to the question of closure and openness with which we started this section? The strength of deep ecology lies in its taking
Hegel's dictum seriously-that the truth lies in the whole. Truth here need not take the form of one comprehensive statement or vision. Even our
grasp of individual truths is sharpened when we understand their limitations, conditions, and so on. What is distinctive about deep ecology is its
sense that the earth really is a strongly interconnected whole, one in which humans play an important part, but also one in which the part they
play is not governed by an adequate SrasP of the effects of them playing their part in this way or that. We
are pissing in the

reservoir and then wondering why the water tastes funny. Deep ecologists are understandably
worried about the gap between the collective consequences of our individual actions on the rest
of the biosphere and our grasp, whether individual or collective, of the impact we are making.
Questions of totality figure in this diagnosis at many levels: 1. We each experience only a part of the earth-our own
backyard plus trips, tours, vacations, movies, traveler's tales. If my tree is dying, I notice. But the
earth dying, slowly, is not obvious, not something I can see at a glance out of my window. So
there is a gap between what I can see and what may really be happening. The glance is ripe for
education. Even the possibility of this gap may be something I am unaware of. 2. When I think
about my own impact on the earth, I think I would find it hard, even if I tried, with my friends, to do
irrecoverable harm. And to the extent that our consciousnesses of the significance of human
action are resolutely individualistic, the collective impact of humans on the earth will fall
beneath our radar screens. Perhaps something should be done, but there is little I can do. Here
there is a gap between an individualistic moral sensibility and the aggregated impact of human
activity. 3. The deep ecologist not only believes that the earth is an interconnected whole, in which everything affects everything else. He
believes that on his model of that interconnectedness, various disaster scenarios loom, and at the very least a series of uncontrollable, irreversible,
and undesired outcomes. 4. And these consequences
will occur unless very dramatic changes are made very

soon. Either masses of people will come to their senses and demand this through normal
democratic procedures. Or we need to suspend democratic institutions altogether. An ecophenomenological critique of deep ecology would attempt to open up options within its closed economy. The argument that there are
circumstances in which democratic societies might suspend democracy is not as totalitarian as it might seem. Every state has emergency powersto deal with riots, natural disasters, and threats from foreign powers. And of course, democratic institutions can operate as elected dictatorships
between elections. Emergency measures, yes/no logics, do make sense where questions of life and death are concerned. The
question of
whether the earth is a living being, however, is not a fact of nature, but inseparable from the very
questions about self-preservatiory boundary maintenance, and nutrition that lurk at the borders of
living things and other natural phenomena, and complex systems.
Phenomenology is key to broadening our consciousness to include a
better understanding of our experience of being placed in nature
Marietta 03, late ethics professor at Florida Atlantic Univ (Don E., Back to Earth with Reflection and
Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 122)//ED
Reflection on the primordial (or primal) awareness of the world shows two things important for the
development of environmental philosophy. One
is-the unity of this experience. As we describe the world

reflected upon, we see that we do not paint our picture of the world by a kind of intellectual
pointillism. We do not receive bits of unrelated sense data. Experience does not give us a "pure
sensation," an "atom of feeling." We are aware of matters in context, what Merleau-Ponty called
"the upsurge of a true and accurate world."3Our perception of whole contexts in concrete
reflection enables us to move from the particular to the general, and it provides a context for
seeing the connection between description and explanation. The horizon of the matters reflected on is flexible. It
can focus narrowly on an object in its more immediate context, or it can see the matter in a much
wider context, a context in which other similar things can be attended to. With attention to memory, this
broader context incorporates naming and grouping of things. Since we see some things as
associated with other things including seeing some as causally related to others, an element of
explanation enters our reflection. At this point, we must be careful not let pre-established schema override our attention to the
matters themselves. A critical attitude toward interpretive schema and a frequent return to the matters
themselves is an important difference between concrete reflection and abstract, intellectualizing
reflection.
Framework: Relational Ontology Good

Relational ontology better than historical ontology
Several scholars are now examining the emergence of ecology as a means for achieving tighter governmental regulations under the label of what
they call green or eco-governmentality. Adopting Michel Foucaults historical ontology, one of their critiques consists in problematizing the
notion of Nature at the core of environmental debates as a political construct modulated by the historical conditions in which it finds itself. One
implication of this is that Nature has no normative implications except the ones we collectively fantasize about. Such a critique is often
perceived as a threat by many environmentalists who are struggling to develop a global and intercultural perspective on environmental
destruction. This dissertation suggests that Foucaults
critical project should be examined from a more

thoroughly ecological standpoint, leading toward the adoption of a broader, less ethnocentric and
anthropocentric ontology. It explores the possibility of rethinking the concept of Nature at the core of
political ecology from the standpoint of a relational ontology rather than an historical ontology. It
argues that a relational ontology offers a possible alternative to historical ontology by posing our relations
to Nature not through the metaphysic of will and temporality assumed by Foucault (by which he
asserts a universal state of contingency and finitude to deploy his critical project), but through a holistic understanding of
Nature in terms of inter-constitutive relations. By being relational instead of historical, a
relational ontology contributes to the formulation of open-ended and dynamic worldviews that
do not operate against the backdrop of a homogenizing form of temporal universalism or
constructivism, but rather poses the immanent differences and processes of diversification we are
experiencing as the unifying and harmonizing principle by which we can rethink a more
thorough egalitarian and non-anthropocentric standpoint for ecological thinking. Such a
differentialyet sharedunderstanding of Nature could facilitate the development of an intercultural
and non anthropocentric perspective on environmental destruction.
Problems with traditional Foucauldian interpretationwe agree on
the thesis, just overcome the tensions
My central argument will mainly engage with the critical ethos embedded in Foucaults
notion of governmentality, and its subsequent usage in the work of green or eco
governmentality scholars. The work of Foucault is well known for its examination of the
conditions of possibility of both what we perceive as regimes of truth and our political
practices, as well as the multiple relations between the two which comprise various ethical
regimeswhich could include ecological ones. Hence Foucaults workespecially on
governmentalityoffers a powerful tool kit to investigate the rationalisations of our political
practices both beyond and below their usual templates (state, citizenship, political regimes)
which are currently under increasing pressure due to the emergence of various ecological
rationalities of government. Such a tool kit allows us to interrogate how we govern ourselves
and others from the standpoint of managing conduct, i.e. as a conduct of conduct
operative within the parameters of our freedoms and the limits of our milieu. Yet,
according to Beatrice Han, Foucaults critical project cannot overcome a
dualistic tension at its very core (Han 2002). This tension is expressed in an
oscillation between the assertion of various empirical realities and the examination of the
synthetic operations by which we have come to understand them (through various systems
of knowledge, political practices and ethical regimes). In other words, Foucaults critical
project can never overcome the dualistic tension between the transcendental and the
empirical inherited by the Kantian anthropological consecration of the modern Man,
understood as both the subject and object of his own knowledge. Such tension between
transcendentalism and empiricism is only re-inscribed within the framework of an historical
ontology through which Foucault believes he can sidestep the problem of transcendentalism
by historicizing and politicizing the conditions of possibility of human knowledge. The limit
between the empirical and transcendental at the heart of the Kantian project would be
basically subsumed under an historical ontology according to which all human experiences
and their foundational assumptionsincluding natural onesare viewed as finite and
contingent by virtue of their own historicity and political negotiations.
Commitment to the new badrelational ontology changes our
relation to politics and critique
To do so, I shall explore critically the ontological and metaphysical assumptions embedded
in Foucaults critical ethos endorsed by Green governmentality scholars. The solution I
propose revolves around the possibility of rethinking the concept of Nature at the core of
political ecology from the standpoint of a relational ontology rather than an historical
ontology. A relational ontology would offer a possible alternative to historical ontology by
rethinking our relations to Nature not through the metaphysic of temporality and will
assumed by Foucault (by which he asserts a universal state of contingency and finitude to
deploy his critical project), but through a holistic understanding of Nature in term of interconstitutive relations. Such holistic understanding of Nature would shift the focus of our
primary understanding of politics and critique from what Freya Mathews calls our relentless
commitment to the new (articulated here in term of indefinable freedom and resistance)
to a broader appreciation of our ecological relatedness and ontological interdependency in
terms of dynamic homeostasis, involving here a quest to achieve an integral respect toward
all the beings we currently perceive through our disenchanted and materialistic paradigm of
Nature and matter (Mathews 2005, p. 11).
There should be no boundaries in naturethe individual is no
autonomous/separate from the environment
Challenging the dominant conception of the self, Naess eco-philosophy opens up human intersubjectivity to ecological interrelatedness. Naess critiques our common understanding of identity
which operates through binary and anthropocentric self\other and us\them reductionism. He
invites us to go beyond this conception of a self-asserting logo-centric ego that would float in an abstract
Res extensa to discover the thickness and complexity of ecological, transversal and trans-existential
relationships. The latter participate in the construction of ourselves as selves, that is, as
humans and natural inter-actors. Naess observes that by adopting both/and rather than either/or
we can nurture cooperative and egalitarian relations, for we realize that our embedded and
interrelated modes of existence are shared with the whole world. Furthermore, if we take seriously
Naess critique of the atomistic conception of thing or self as irreducible holders of
primary qualities (the color red, freedom or sovereignty for example), the idea of the
state or the individual as this atomistic and autonomous entity becomes also problematic. In fact, the
whole concept of sovereignty framed in terms of an inclusive\exclusionary principle has to be revisited.

Ecophenomenology Critique

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Ecophenomenology Critique

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NOTES

- Radical Ecology Swagggg

1NC Ecophenomenology Critique

of justice and human rights, which a few

This ecological outlook is a violent discourse of control and

environmental concerns could be

resistance is always what de Certeau calls

historical rupture which became a condition for

All interactions between humanity and ecologies have become

The ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable development discourse are

The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the

Once this threshold was crossed, social

averted some of the imminent risks of death (ibid. 142). The

historical then began to envelop, circumscribe or

Even so, Foucault

Interspecies violence operates at the caliber of genocide,

counter-narrative that follows

What is most worrisome to anyone who

radioisotopes, or any one of many other matter, but

the totality of the disruptions caused by modern industrial systems

endangerments materialize within political and cultural

D) Reps precede policy on the environment

the entire planet was reduced through

the discourses of resource management work continuously to

The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to

E) Phenomenology comes first and is the best method

role phenomenology can play in developing this new

We also have some defense

A) the aff is a rhetorical artifact - theyve already picked their

2NC A2 Perm (Policy Aff)

principles of good scientific

Indeed, a new environmental

sciences infrastructuralize the Earth's ecologies. The Earth becomes, if only in

managerialism is one very particular articulation of ecology. This is

fundamental premises of resource managerialism

managerialism has imposed corporate

By envisioning it as an elaborate system of systems, Nature can be continually tinkered with

Regimes of renewable energy and sustainability discursively frame

The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of eco-knowledgeable,

becomes an immense engine, or the human races ecological

Link - Mapping and Managing

operations of environmental policy-making typically approach the Earth in one of three

analytical and axiological frames have underpinned the

role is to map, measure, monitor, and manage the

Link - Mind-Body Dualism

there is no outside world. There is no outside. Nor is there an inner sanctum in

are important and largely unnoticed connections between our worldviews,

Link - EcoGov Ontology Bad

such as green or eco governmentality seem natural extensions of

is also generating various political

find numerous environmental approaches mixing or borrowing

Link - Nuclear War

Alternative - Relational Ontology

specific ethic is demanded by the ontology, it is still capable of

A2 Deep Ecology Bad

I want to argue that the dividing line between benign

ecology is a crystallized vision

Deep Ecology is diametrically opposed to Ecophenomenology - the

deep ecology is the product of an

Everywhere, it is the interplay of relative forces that produces

A field science deals with the interaction of many

The fundamental thrust of

fails miserably with regard to the