HUDL Institute Anthropocentrism K
2014
Kritik – Anthropocentrism
1NC Shell 2
2NC 8
2NC Burke Impact 1/3 9
2NC – How to write an overview 13
2NC/1NR - Link – Technology/Environmentalism 14
2NC/1NR - Framework 19
2NC – Impact – Rejecting Anthropocentrism outweighs 22
2NC Impact – Extinction 24
2
HUDL Institute Anthropocentrism K
2014
1NC Shell
A. The affirmative attempts to securitize the world through “environmental protections”. The 1AC wants to protect the oceans so humans can continue to exploit them. This anthro-instrumentalization of nature relies on planetary sacrifice and destroys the intrinsic value of the world
Mitchell 14 (Audra. Jan 30. Department of Politics, University of York, UK. Only human? A worldly approach to security.)
Many authors suggest that anthropocentrism is the main obstacle to recognizing the constitutive role and ethical status of nonhumans in international relations (see e.g. Coward, 2009; Cudworth and Hobden, 2013; Eckersley, 2007). Indeed, the logics of security discussed above are premised on a radically anthropocentric belief: that only human subjects can be the subjects of security. Would it, then, be possible and desirable to reject anthropocentrism as a feature of international security? To answer this question, it is crucial to distinguish between different kinds of ‘anthropocentrism’. This term usually brings to mind what I shall call ‘anthro-instrumentalism’: an ethical orientation that reduces the value of nonhumans to their instrumental usefulness to humans. Within anthro-instrumental logic, politics is defined by a ‘Great Divide’ (Latour, 1993), in which human beings are placed on one side and all ‘nonhumans’ on the other. On the upper side of this divide, human beings are prioritized, to the extent that their non-essential needs (e.g. for luxury or entertainment) are elevated above the survival or non-suffering of nonhumans (see Derrida, 2004; Nussbaum, 2006). Moreover, the relation between the needs of humans and those of nonhumans is assumed to be zero-sum. That is, any consideration given to nonhumans is thought to detract from the attention or effort devoted to human needs (see Bennett, 2010). Anthro-instrumentalism lies at the foundations of the subject-based notions of security described above. It has reached its zenith in discourses and practices of ‘human security’, which frame the individual human subject as the ‘ultimate end’ of international politics (Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007: 13), seeking to ensure its physical integrity and health, environmental conditions, economic and political participation, rights and dignity (see Commission on Human Security, 2003; United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1994). Sustaining a ‘secured’ human requires the instrumentalization of many nonhumans: the material beings produced and traded to ensure economic security; the plants and nonhuman animals cultivated and killed to provide food security; the production of chemical compounds and the destruction of bacteria to ensure health security. Although nonhumans lend their names to various dimensions of human security, they are only indirect referent objects; that is, they are secured only insofar as they contribute to the well-being of humans, who are the real referent objects (see Buzan et al., 1999). ‘Environmental security’, for instance, is not concerned with securing the environment in and for itself. Rather, it aims to ensure natural resources for humans – that is, ‘environmental security for people ’ (Barnett, 2001: 122; emphasis added). Anthro-instrumental logics of this kind reduce the relations between humans and nonhumans to the mere satisfaction of the needs of the former, and so are utterly incompatible with the conditions of worldliness described above. However, Eugene Hargrove (1992) argues that ‘anthropocentrism’ is not a synonym for ‘instrumentality’. It simply refers to values rooted in the human experience, which can take many forms. So, a ‘weak anthropocentrist’ might value nonhumans because they meet instrumental human needs, or because doing so fits within a wider worldview – for instance, the belief that human connection with ‘nature’ is spiritually fulfilling (see Norton, 1984). Humans can also attribute ‘intrinsic’ value to nonhumans – that is, value independent of their usefulness to humans (see also O’Neill, 2003). Indeed, Hargrove identifies four kinds of value that humans might recognize in nonhumans: (a) anthropocentric instrumental value (as described above); (b) non-anthropocentric instrumental value (the instrumental value that nonhumans – animals and plants, say – have for each other); (c) non-anthropocentric intrinsic value (the value that nonhumans have, independent of human judgement); and (d) anthropocentric intrinsic value (value attributed by humans to nonhumans, regardless of the latter’s usefulness to the former). Hargrove argues that the first form of value is too narrow, and that humans cannot truly appreciate the second and third forms because we can only, at best, imagine what it is like to be another form of being. So, from this perspective, our best bet is to embrace the fourth form of value and harness the power of human reflection and agency – and indeed, imagination – to act ethically towards other kinds of beings. This argument seems to fit with a worldly approach to understanding harm and security. Accepting that humans cannot entirely transcend their own perspective, it mobilizes their capacities for reflection and agency as a means of protecting nonhumans. It acknowledges that humans are co-constituents of worlds, but does not privilege them in ontological terms or afford them an exclusive ethical status. It also offers a range of reasons for humans to protect the worlds of which they are part, and to activate their own capacities to this end. If we accept this argument, then the question is not whether a worldly approach to security can be anthropocentric, but rather whether it can fit with existing ontological and ethical categories. I shall now explore two alternative answers to this question.
B. The affirmative attempts to manage “nature” through scientific managerialists and capitalist technocrats—protecting ecosystems is a tool for global social control
Timothy W. Luke, 95, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences @ Virginia Tech(On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism, Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II, Autumn, pp. 57-81, JSTOR, Adi Sudarshan)
No longer Nature nor even ecosystem, the world under this kind of watch is truly becoming "an environment," ringed by many eco-knowledge centers dedicated to the rational eco-management of its geo-powers. Being "an environmentalist" quickly becomes a power expression of the eco-knowledge formations of environmentality in which the geo-powers of the global ecosystem can be mobilized through the disciplinary codes of green operational planning. The health of global populations as well as the survival of the planet itself allegedly necessitate that a bioeconomic spreadsheet be draped over Nature, generating an elaborate set of accounts for a terrestrial eco-economy of global reach and scope. Hovering over the world in a scientifically centered surveillance machine built out of the disciplinary grids of efficiency and waste, health and disease, poverty and wealth as well as employment and unemployment discourses, Brown, Flavin, and Postel declare "the once separate issues of environment and development are now inextricably linked" (25). Indeed, they are in the discourses of Worldwatch Institute as its organizational expertise surveys Nature-in-crisis by auditing levels of topsoil depletion, air pollution, acid rain, global warming, ozone destruction, water pollution, forest reduction, and species extinction. Environmentality, then, would govern by restructuring today's ecologically unsound society through elaborate managerial designs to realize tomorrow's environmentally sustainable economy. The shape of an environmental economy would emerge from a reengineered economy of environmentalizing shapes vetted by worldwatching codes. The individual human subject of today, and all of his or her unsustainable practices, would be reshaped through this environmentality, redirected by practices, discourses, and ensembles of administration that more efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of populations with the geo-powers of environments. Traditional codes defining human identity and difference would be reframed by systems of environmentality in new equations for making comprehensive global sustainability calculations as the bio-power of populations merges with the ecopower of environments. To police global carrying capacity, in turn, this environmentalizing logic bids each human subject to assume the much less capacious carriage of disciplinary frugality instead of affluent suburban consumerism. All of the world will come under watch, and the global watch will police its human charges to dispose of their things and arrange their ends-in reengineered spaces using new energies at new jobs and leisures-around these environing agendas. Sustainability, however, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it can articulate a rationale for preserving Nature's biotic diversity in order to maintain the sustainability of the biosphere. But, on the other hand, it also can represent an effort to reinforce the prevailing order of capitalistic development by transforming sustainability into an economic project. To the degree that modern subjectivity is a two-sided power/knowledge relation, scientific-professional declarations about sustainability essentially describe a new mode of environmentalized subjectivity. In becoming enmeshed in a worldwatched environ, the individual subject of a sustainable society could become simultaneously "subject to someone else by control and dependence," where environmentalizing global and local state agencies enforce their codes of sustainability, and police a self directed ecological subject "tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge" (Foucault, "Afterword" 12). In both manifestations, the truth regime of ecological sustainability draws up criteria for what sort of "selfness" will be privileged with political identity and social self-knowledge. Sustainability, like sexuality, becomes a discourse about exerting power over life. How power might "invest life through and through" (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 139) becomes a new challenge, once biopolitical relations are established as environmentalized systems. Moreover, sustainability more or less presumes that some level of material and cultural existence has been attained that is indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation ... as a means of social control and political subjugation" (123). The global bio-accounting systems of the Worldwatch Institute conceptually and practically exemplify the project of environmentality with their rhetorics of scientific surveillance. How Nature should be governed is not a purely administrative question turning upon the technicalities of scientific "know-how." Rather, it is essentially and inescapably political. The discourses of Worldwatching that rhetorically construct Nature also assign powers to new global governors and governments, who are granted writs of authority and made centers of organization in the Worldwatchers' environmentalized specifications of managerial "who-can" and political "how-to."
C. Thus the alternative: reject the affirmative and the technological thought within it. Rather, we should release our will to control and let things be.
Best and Nocella, 06 –associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso (Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, p. 82-84, google books)
Yet, for both Heidegger and revolutionary environmentalists, there exist possibilities for transformation despite the destructiveness of Enframing. In the midst of technological peril—indeed, precisely because the peril strikes at and thus awakens us to the bond between human and nonhuman life—there emerges a sense of solidarity of human with nonhuman beings. Looking at the well-heeled, bureaucratic discourse of “human resource management” and “personnel resources,” the challenging forth of human beings into standing reserve is fairly evident. Factory-farmed cows, pigs, and chickens obviously have it far worse than people, but in both cases the purpose is to harness resources for maximum efficiency and profit. Ultimately human and nonhuman beings are similarly enframed within one giant “gasoline station.” It is precisely the experience of this solidarity which must be constantly rearticulated—in arts, poetry, ceremony, music, and especially in socioeconomic and political action—in order to provide a historically and ontologically authentic break with the metaphysics of technical control and capitalist exploitation. Action will only be truly revolutionary if it revolves around engagement in solidarity with nature, where liberation is always seen both as human liberation from the confines of Enframing and simultaneously as liberation of animal nations and eco-regions from human technics. Anything less will always lapse back into the false and oppressive hierarchy of “man” over “nature” and “man” over animals with attendant effects of technological, disciplinary control over humans, nonhumans, and the Earth. Using a familiar title from the anarchist Crimethinc collective, revolutionary environmentalism is truly an instance of “fighting for our lives” where the pronoun refers to all life not just human life. Heidegger describes the possibility of transformation through a return of Being as a re-figured humanism. It is the possibility of suspending the will and attaining a lucid sense of the free play of Being within which all of life emerges and is sustained. A human being, like any entity, is—s/he stands forth as present. But “his distinctive feature lies in [the fact] that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being….Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being. Such experience is the clearing of a space (symbolically represented, for example, in the building of an arbor for a ceremony or in the awesome silence created by the space within a cathedral or a grove of old-growth Redwoods), and the patient readiness for Being to be brought to language. Given the appropriate bearing and evocation through language, human beings can become aware of dwelling, along with all other existent beings, within Being—the open realm within which entities are “released” into presence (Gelassenhait—or “releasement”). What comes to the fore in suspension of willed manipulation is an embrace of other beings and the enduring process of evolution within which all beings emerge and develop. By reflecting on or experiencing oneself within the dimension of freedom that is the domain through which all beings pass, human beings can repair the willed manipulation inherent in calculative thinking and realize a patient equanimity toward Life. It is only in the context of this reawakened sense of the unity of life that revolutionary action gains an authentic basis. It is the engagement with “the Other” that shows the ELF actions are truly about defense of plant and animal life, and they demonstrate genuine liberation concerns that typically are trapped within Enframing. That is to say, ELF (and similar) actions, show themselves as part of a dynamic and necessary historical evolution and transformation process, not merely a gesture of opposition and negation, because of their profound solidarity with animals and the Earth. Such guidance solidarity thus serves as a general basis for a post-Enframing, post-capitalist order, an ecological, not a capitalist society. What will change is, first, the pre-eminence of Enframing as that which animates the epoch and, correspondingly, our relationship to technology. No longer will technical solutions be sought after in realms of activity where technique is not applicable. No longer will everyday activities be pervaded by the standardization and frenzied pace of technology. No longer will nature be looked upon as a homogenous field of resources to be extracted and exploited. No longer will resource-intensive and polluting technologies be utilized simply because they serve the blind interests of corporations over the needs of the Earth. No longer will human beings take from the Earth without thought of the far-reaching consequences of such actions on all present and future forms of life. Critics would wrongly denounce this position as atavistic, primitivist, or anti-science/technology. But as the turning toward the re-emergence of Being unfolds, both through revolutionary action rooted in solidarity with nature and through new, non-exploitative modes of acting in the world, technics will not disappear; instead, the limits of technology as a mode of revealing will begin to be discerned so that new forms and uses of technology can emerge. Questions about technology will center on whether a given technology can be developed and used so that plant and animal life can appear as it is and not be reduced to standing reserve. The question, for Heidegger, is not whether technology, in the sense of a set of tools, is done away with, but whether Enframing is surmounted. It is in this sense of releasement Heidegger writes: “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth….Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free intro its own presencing. I take this as the literal equivalent of the masked ALF activist reclaiming a puppy from a research lab so that it can become a dog rather than a unit of research, or an ELF activist who stops the destruction of an aquifer or forest so that it can remain an aquifer or forest rather than become a water or wood resource. It is just this new ethos which must guide a revolutionary reconstruction of society on grounds that preserve the openness to Being and the ability of each kind of being to become what it is in its essence. For those who charge Heidegger with merely recycling, and not transcending, Western anthropocentrism, it is important to note that there are possibilities here for an emerging post-humanism—a new orientation to nature beyond egocentric forms of human agency and towards interrelation with other beings and Being itself. Heidegger’s philosophy allows for multiple modes of engagement with others and nature as equals, all of them rooted in a relationship of solidarity, respect, and concern. I call this kind of pluralistic, egalitarian, and ecological outlook ontological anarchism. It begins with the rejection of illegitimate “rule” of metaphysical constructs that have served to justify unlimited technological appropriation of the world. In place of Enframing with its subjectivist metaphysical underpinnings, ontological anarchism proclaims a multiplicity of forms of experience in which a sense of revealing comes to the fore—such as in art, music, religion, and philosophy. One such experience, a pre-dominant theme of spiritual re-awakening in the ELF communiques, is found in Native American philosophy and practice.