Fields of flesh AFF

Fields of flesh AFF ............................................................................................................................ 1 1AC .................................................................................................................................................. 4 Inherency ....................................................................................................................................... 15 Crisis .......................................................................................................................................... 16 Advantage Links............................................................................................................................. 17 L Energy .................................................................................................................................. 18 L - Renewables ........................................................................................................................... 19 L Mapping and Managing ....................................................................................................... 21 L Mind-Body Dualism.............................................................................................................. 22 **L EcoGov Ontology Bad ...................................................................................................... 26 L - Environmentalism ................................................................................................................. 27 L Visibility (Subjects and Objects) ........................................................................................... 29 L Experts/Science .................................................................................................................... 30 L Nuclear War ......................................................................................................................... 33 L Security ................................................................................................................................ 34 L - Nominalism ........................................................................................................................... 35 Internal Links to Impacts ............................................................................................................... 36 IL Biopolitics ............................................................................................................................ 37 IL Dualisms BP .................................................................................................................... 39 IL Managing Control Populations....................................................................................... 40 Impacts .......................................................................................................................................... 42 ! BP Extinction .................................................................................................................... 43 ! - Biopower ............................................................................................................................... 44 ! - Colonialism ............................................................................................................................ 46 ! Genocide/Nukes ................................................................................................................... 47 Solvency Mechanisms ................................................................................................................... 48 Lowercase Flesh ........................................................................................................................ 49 flesh - perceptual structure ...................................................................................................... 50 Perception v. perceived ............................................................................................................. 51 Reorientation of Ethics/A2 Arendt ............................................................................................ 52 Experiential aesthetics .............................................................................................................. 53 Relational Autonomy -> flesh of the world ............................................................................... 55 Relational Ontology ................................................................................................................... 56 Solvency ......................................................................................................................................... 57 S - Continuity ............................................................................................................................. 58 S - flesh ...................................................................................................................................... 64 S - flesh->Internal relations (Anthro)......................................................................................... 67 S Flesh Politics More Ethical ................................................................................................... 68 S Flesh > Openness .............................................................................................................. 69 S - Blurring subject/object ......................................................................................................... 72 S - Ontological Continuity .......................................................................................................... 73 S - Reorientation ........................................................................................................................ 76 S - Dialogue ................................................................................................................................ 77

S Aesthetics............................................................................................................................. 78 S Aesthetics K2 V2L ................................................................................................................. 79 S: Waste Monument/Aesthetics ............................................................................................... 80 S - Anthro ................................................................................................................................... 83 A2:.................................................................................................................................................. 85 A2: Policymaking ....................................................................................................................... 86 A2: Managerialism Good ........................................................................................................... 87 A2: Instrumental Rationality ..................................................................................................... 88 A2: Predictions .......................................................................................................................... 89 A2: We have experts ................................................................................................................. 90 A2 Warming/Science ................................................................................................................. 91 A2: Realism ................................................................................................................................ 94 A2: Utilitarianism ....................................................................................................................... 95 A2: Ontology Bad ....................................................................................................................... 96 A2: Ks ........................................................................................................................................ 98 A2: Marxism............................................................................................................................... 99 A2: Capitalism .......................................................................................................................... 100 A2 Capitalism BP root ........................................................................................................... 102 A2: Heidegger .......................................................................................................................... 103 Resistance/Leftist movements fail .......................................................................................... 107 Perm Flesh Multiplicity ......................................................................................................... 109 Perm - Beings->commonality .................................................................................................. 110 Perm - History->flesh ............................................................................................................... 112 Perm flesh binding ................................................................................................................ 113 A2: Anthropomorphism........................................................................................................... 116 A2: Essentialism ....................................................................................................................... 117 A2: Biopower Inevitable .......................................................................................................... 118 Framework .................................................................................................................................. 120 Our K is First FW is managerial ............................................................................................. 121 Reps Key .................................................................................................................................. 123 Reps K2 Policymaking/Prereq.................................................................................................. 124 Turn Your FW is Managerial and a Big Asshole. ................................................................... 138 Relational Ontology Good ....................................................................................................... 139 Misc. ............................................................................................................................................ 142 Object relativism ..................................................................................................................... 143 Body as the pivot-> constitutes reality .................................................................................... 144 The world as we know it .......................................................................................................... 145 Not Animistic ........................................................................................................................... 146 Political Exclusion Anthro Card................................................................................................ 147 ------------------------------------------------------ ................................................................................... 150 NEGATIVE .................................................................................................................................... 151 Liberal Ecology Good ............................................................................................................... 152 Zizek Links ................................................................................................................................ 153 Biopolitics ................................................................................................................................ 156 Pragmatic Environmentalism .................................................................................................. 164 Ice Age turn ............................................................................................................................. 176 Anthro Good ............................................................................................................................ 177 A2: Anthro Always Bad ............................................................................................................ 182

Human/Nature Distinctions Good ........................................................................................... 183 Arendt Case Turn ..................................................................................................................... 186 Cap Links .................................................................................................................................. 192 Dualism Good .......................................................................................................................... 195 Post-Humanism Fails ............................................................................................................... 196 Political Action Key .................................................................................................................. 197 Ecological Preservation Harms 3rd World ................................................................................ 199 Luke Indict ............................................................................................................................... 200

1AC
Welcome to the meaningless earth, a place where Western scientific rationality has mechanized and controlled Nature. We no longer ask why the universe behaves in certain ways, just that it does. Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an
Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)
Many other remarks and clarifications could be added regarding what I have described as the twilight of scholastic ontology. But

if we must focus on the concept of Nature, then, we can assert that the so-called Scientific Revolution inaugurated a new approach formulated in quantified, individualizing, mechanized, and often secularized terms (Westfall 1992, p. 65). The seventeenth century Scientific Revolution helped to shape a conception of knowledge by which natural events could be measured, controlled, and predicted. The importance of such a worldview cannot be overstated. As Westfall argues, *a+lthough it has been modified greatly in its details in the intervening three centuries, it is still with us, the very foundation of the intellectual life in the West and increasingly in the whole world (1992, p. 86). Springing from such a worldview, the problem of knowing Nature shifted from the description of a metaphysical entity, an organized design, to the task of apprehending what can be analysed, measured and predicted along the criteria of what can be directly useful and controlled. From such a resolutely scientific perspective, ontology and metaphysics are no longer essential to the pursuit of knowledge: serious scientific research is reputed to have kicked the ontological ladder from under itself a long time ago. The deductive quest of knowing being qua being has been progressively replaced by combinations of empirical and mathematical enquiries focusing on how (not why) the universe behaves the way it does. New criteria of cognitive
success have been formulated in accordance with the multiplication of practical spheres perceived as being so heterogeneous and specialised that no transcendent principle or overarching authoritative source of evaluation is conceived capable of generating 140 a common vision of the world (Angus 1983, p.162). Not

only is Earth no longer viewed as the center of the Universe, and the sun as no longer the only (or most important) sun out there, but Nature itself, after Darwin, seems indifferent to the place human species occupies in the tree of Life. Nature itself, as a metaphysical entity , or worse as an agent, became a meaningless superstition, accelerating what is described by
Max Weber and

Critical Theorists

Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse

as

the disenchantment of Nature according to the supremacy of instrumental rationality

(Weber 1964, p. 117 quoted in Angus 1983, p. 145; Adorno and Horkeimer 2008; Marcuse 2008).

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. Luke 99 [Timothy W.: 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. 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.]. 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).

This environmentalism is the new form of biopolitics a discourse of control and discipline that seeks to create and monitor properly ecologically-minded subjects that internalize the operations of biopolitics.

Darier 99 [Eric Darier, Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change
at Lancaster University, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 22-25]
This concern for life (biopolitics) identified by Foucault is largely anthropocentric, in that the pr ime 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 theor ists 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 contex t (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 eco logists 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 i n 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/non-anthropocentrism) 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 dict ates 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 nat ure (social ecology)23 is possible o nly 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 th e 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 human beings and Nature have become regulated by power-knowledge regimes seeking to manage the health and longevity of the population. Environmentalizing biopolitics holds the very survival of the planet in question. Luke 99 [Timothy W.: 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. 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 142-44]
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 biopolitics (Foucault 1976: 13842). 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
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations, making the manifold disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into new sorts of productive agency as part of the transformation of human life (ibid. 145). 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 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 bio-physical 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. This dualism is hierarchal and anthropocentric, devaluing everything that is nonhuman. Hoetzer 10 [Irene: law lecturer at the Sydney International Campus of Central Queensland University. Irene is currently
completing a PhD in environmental law at Macquarie University. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice http://www.interdisciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hoetzerpaper.pdf p. 4] 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

Western culture and modernity continue to subjectify and destroy other cultures based upon its anthropocentric posturing toward the world / a reorientation of metaphysics and epistemology is critical Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
The different critiques offered by supporters of the deep ecology movement have inspired many to explore what is often described as a structural violence taking the form of exclusionary principles in relation to Nature and to the various cultures regarded as primitives for being either non-Western or non-modern (Devall 1988; Fox 1990; Mathews 1991; 2005). At a fundamental level, our

ecological predicament appears as the magnifier of what is denounced as various anthropocentric and Eurocentric posturing and modes of exploitation already denounced by numerous postcolonial studies (Fanon 1965; Said 1994; Spivak 1988). Western culture, with its firm belief that it embodies human progress, has been guilty many times over of subjecting and destroying other cultures through the actions of missionaries, traders, military forces, anthropologists, settlers, and technological experts of all sorts (Scott 2005; Pels 1997). Only this time Western cultures, and the culture of modernity in particular, are accused of destroying not only its own conditions of possibility, but also everyone elses. The gravity of the situation would thus require a broader examination of our metaphysical, epistemological, social, political and spiritual modes of representation and action, not just a technological fix or the greening of our industries and consumption patterns (Matthews 1991; Merchant 2003; Fox 1990). Politically speaking, this examination includes the ways in which the culture of modernity has drawn inclusive\exclusionary principles to rationalise and enforce its own political metaphysics. Such an examination brings us to ask how and why we came to privilege a specific understanding of politics, and how we came to accept its universal spread as something progressive. It brings us to
the critical task of unveiling the cultural structures by which such an understanding became self-coherent and self-explanatory for its main benefactors, while excluding what is perceived to be different.

Interspecies violence is inflicted in the same forms as inter-human violence: this takes the form of genocide, colonialism, and war Kochi and Ordan 2008
Tarik Kochi & Noam Ordan Queens University & Bar Ilan University An argument for the global suicide of humanity, vol 7, no 4, Borderlands, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf

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 non-human 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 advocacy is: to affirm a rethinking of our ontological relationship with Nature. We seek to adopt a relational ontology that has radical openness to fields of flesh Our advocacy seeks 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. Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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 assumptionsassumptions 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.

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 Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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.

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 my body is made out of the same flesh as the world. Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
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.

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 Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) 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.

Aesthetics go beyond the bound of our sensory perceptionit is all bound in our metaphysical understanding of environment as experience SANART 1997, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS , Arnold Berleant, October 1997, Sanart Association for the
Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod, former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)

'Perception' is a difficult term. We not only see our living world; we move with it, we act upon and in response to it. We grasp places not just through color, texture, and shape, but with the breath, by smell, with our skin, through our muscular action and skeletal position, in the sounds of wind, water, and traffic. Those major dimensions of environment--space, mass, volume, and depth--are encountered not primarily by the eye but with the body in our movements and actions. Powerful as the sensory dimension is in perception, it alone does not constitute environmental experience. Other factors than those directly sensed join to shape and bend our experience. For sensation is not just sensory and not only physiological; it fuses with cultural influences. This is, in fact, the only way a cultural organism can experience. The separation of sensation and meaning is another of those subtle divisions that actual experience does not support, for as social beings we perceive through the modalities of our culture. xi The perception of snow, of rain, of distance, of weight, of confusion and order is discriminated and identified according
to the paradigms and categories embedded in cultural practices, never by retinal or tactile stimulation, alone. The same can be said about noise level, the qualities of smell and taste, and the level of light. The

perceptual world in which we move is wide and rich. Thoroughly and inseparably sensory and cultural, it is a complex experiential environment. In addition to the sensory modalities we have been discussing, the multidimensional context of human experience includes such things as shapes and lines, the timbral and wave patterns of sound, light and shadow, pattern and texture, temperature, muscular tension, directional motion and lines of force, volume and depth. And, of course, all perception occurs within the framework of the fundamental metaphysical dimensions of space, time, and movement . xii The human environment is, in the final account, a perceptual system and, as such, an
order of experience. Grasped from an aesthetic standpoint, it has sensory richness, directness, and immediacy, together with cultural patterns and meanings that perception carries and these give environment its thick texture. Environment, then, is a

complex idea, the more so when we consider it aesthetically. We have already rejected many of its common definitions: as an entity--"the" environment; as a container within which we carry on our activities; as our physical surroundings; as the world external to our thoughts, feelings, and desires. In place of these self-congratulatory concepts we begin to understand environment as the physical-cultural realm in which people engage in all the activities and responses that compose the weave of human life in its many historical and social patterns. When the aesthetic factor is recognized, perceptual directness, with its strong focus on immediacy and presence, becomes preeminent.

Our affirmation of flesh transforms the way we engage the world around us by breaking down the dualisms between self and environment. Brook, 2005 (Isis, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy; Furness College;
Lancaster University, Can Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh Inform or even Transform Environmental Thinking? in Environmental Values 14. NG) So how might this notion of flesh transform our thinking about environmental questions? It doesnt make me into a thing like a mountain and it doesnt make a mountain into a thing like me, but it does seem to be pointing to a relationship of some sort, a sharing that breaks down a solitary self-enclosedness, both between me and other humans and between me and non-humans, and even between me and the inanimate. From a working note of December 1960 we find a statement that the relation between body and world is one of embrace (1964/1968: 271). This notion of embrace does, I think, avoid the idea of immersion, of losing oneself in the world to the point of extinction of difference. We are not one with everything in a straightforward way that makes everything the same as, or equal to, or part of ourselves. Therefore, neither is it the case that we should care for the
world because we care for ourselves or alternatively (and perhaps more in accord with the evidence) that we do not have to care for the world in the same way that we do not have to care for ourselves. Difference can

also be extinguished by taking the world to be, or the only knowable world to be, one made out of our own projections; this too is avoided; the world is not our creation. In fact, it seems from these intimations of Earth and Flesh that the germ of perceptual faith that was ours all along gives us a glimpse of that with which we are intertwined. Flesh articulates our style of engagement and shows that the world we engage when working with material substance or in contemplative wonder or in sensitive experimental investigation is the kind of world there is. At the very least it reveals the things in the world: the strata of a cliff face, the rustle of a blackbird, the gesture of an unfurling leaf in a way that does not invoke a mystery beyond their presencing, but gives them back in their full richness. Moreover, the kind of perceptual shift necessary to grasp the concept of flesh also suggests a rejection of the kind of thinking that sees the solution to environmental problems as a matter of better resource allocation, albeit one that works towards greater
global equality for humans. Such views have surely missed the point of a good deal of environmental thinking over the past forty years; we

are not just units of consumption and the world is not just a resource pool for humans. Environment is not the inanimate background object against which we as subjects can act as separate beings. The reality of our situation is being environed, being engaged in an embrace, not as an
optional extra - a lifestyle choice but just how it is. We are a part of the world that thinks, but if the best we can think is always an all or nothing dichotomy then we need help.

I think we need to resist both the intellectually indefensible notion that the world and us are an indistinguishable whole and the morally indefensible notion that the world is entirely separate from us and there for us to use, even if that use is
sustainable. The first step to avoiding those dual traps is surely to recognise the reality of our situation and it is this that MerleauPontys concept of flesh helps us to do.

Only a new understanding of the lowercase flesh allows for this experiential environmentality. Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) If, however, flesh is not properly a kind of thing or being, we need to inquire into what, exactly, is the meaning of the multiplicity, how it is formed, and what function it performs in Merleau-Pontys ontology. Along these lines, Franoise Dastur has argued that flesh is a new name for the being of every being, a new determination of the common essence of things.47 Although her account concurs with Hass that there can be no unitary concept of flesh and that the term does not, properly speaking, have any referent, she states that it is nevertheless a new name for being as a whole.48 Flesh is both the being of beings and the name for being as a whole because flesh is predominately a human perceptual

phenomenon. Dastur attributes this conflation to MerleauPontys perception-based phenomenology in general and proceeds to use it to differentiate his philosophy from Heideggers more radical thought of Weltoffenheit [openness to world]. The radicality of Heideggers view derives from showing a way out of a philosophy based in consciousness whereas the philosophy of flesh remains covertly dependent upon it.49 The thought to which
she refers is found in section 29 of Being and Time, wherein Heidegger describes Daseins openness to world in terms of an attunement. For Heidegger, Dasein always only has beings disclosed to it through how it is attuned to its surroundings through a mood, such that other beings appear to them in a particular way. In other words, beings appear to Dasein as X only because Dasein finds itself in a particular mood. For example, if Dasein were to be experiencing paranoia, actions that might otherwise be perceived as innocuous are now taken as hostile or conspiratorial. The connection between attunement and disclosure leads Heidegger to assert that certain moods (e.g., angst, boredom, or love) disclose beings in such a way that Daseins relationship to being as such become manifest. Affects are possible only on the basis of such moodedness, since Dasein feels the way it does depending on how a situation appears to it. But because mood arises from neither without (i.e., it is not objectively caused) nor within (i.e., a projection of Dasein), Heidegger can claim that moods arise out of a relationship between Daseins world meaning the horizon of significance in which Dasein finds itselfthe thing encountered, and Dasein itself.50

So

we can understand Dasturs claim to be that while Merleau-Ponty begins his philosophy with experience and the affects within it, Heidegger uncovers the structure that makes said affects possible within experience. Heidegger thereby eliminates the need to posit a subject that experiences affects because an affect is really a particular form of relationship to ones environs. The superiority of Heideggers philosophy, then, lies in conceiving of affects in terms of relations rather than as experiences of a subject. While this point will become more important in the next section, for now we must note that Dastur conceives of flesh as an experience, the experience of perceptual reflexivity. In fact, because flesh is a human, perceptual experience, that is, the experience of flesh is able to take place only on the terrain of perceptual faith, and yet flesh makes a being what it is,
she is led to claim, things are experienced as annexes or extensions of ourselves.51 Thus, in elaborating the perceptual nature of flesh, we arrive at the conclusion that beings are what they are as a result of the human experience of those beings, albeit things are given a constituting power over the individual perceiver. Therefore, if flesh as experience is the name for being as a whole, then it would seem to be the case that being itself is determined by and through human experience.

Inherency

Crisis
Crisis is coming in the status quo Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an
Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria)
Oscillating between affirmations that our global environmental crisis is triggering one of the most significant paradigm shifts in Western political thought, and allegations that the rise of environmentalism is incapable of moving beyond the culture of modernity,

one thing appears certain: the sense of an imminent crisis is palpable. The future seems to depend on an environment capable of providing for our needs at a time when the channels which once allowed deferring environmental and other resource extraction problems to some distant lands and colonies (or, more recently, the so-called Third-world countries) are shutting down at a rapid pace. A solution is indeed desperately needed in order to create a sustainable future which is lacking the infinite resources our economic models need in order to fulfill their promises of universal wealth and growth: a solution which would allow the so-called postindustrial societies to keep their level of comfort and opulence, while articulating a rationale 15 for inviting non-Western societies to embrace the modern lifestyle predominantly developed in the West (free market, mass market consumption, liberal and democratic state, and so on). The rise of an environmental movement challenging the eco-predation of the Western modern culture could not
come at a better moment, or so we think.

Advantage Links

L Energy
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. Timothy W. Luke 96 Generating Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of Environmental
Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, June 1996, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF 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

L - 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 powerful developed states renewables are merely the newest form of managerialism. Luke 97 [Timothy W. 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. 1997, Ecocritique, p. 78-80].
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 within Nature, while expanding the prerogatives of managerial authority to renew as well as conserve resources. 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, 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 Timothy W. Luke, 99 Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 146-47 The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of eco-knowledgeable, geopowered 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).

L 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. Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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]. 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-and-control 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).

L Mind-Body Dualism
Attempts to quantify the environment as a thing exercises problematic mind-body dualism. SANART 1997, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS , Arnold Berleant, October 1997, Sanart Association for the
Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod, former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)

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.

L Dualism
Contemporary environmentalism is beguiled by its own understanding of nature as distinct from humans, which is the root cause of ecological destruction. Vanderheiden 2011 [Steve, 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, Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom, Global Environmental Politics 11.1 (February 2011)] 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). He notes that the

question cannot be whether or not humans will interfere with nature (we must), but rather whether we will manage this world mindfully with a concern for ecosystem health, biological diversity, social justice, and aesthetic beauty or do so unmindfully (p. 142). Indeed, he seeks to chart a middle path between naturalism and mastery, commending an ethic of ambiguity for its pragmatic invocation of natural value and prudent engineering without committing the fallacies associated with zealous pursuit of either existing construct. For Wapner, this moderate way is
epitomized by adaptive management, precautionary politics, and other approaches that substitute curiosity for certainty and appreciation for reverence. He implores his fellow environmentalists to embrace ambiguity as an empowering ethos of hopeful engagement with practical problems, noting that if environmentalism is all doom and gloom, this makes for a sad and (often) angry vocation (p. 216).

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 Professor of philosophy @ Emporia State University and Toadvine Assistrant professor of Philosophy @ University of Oregon 2003 (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology:
Back to the Earth Itself , New Yoork University Oress, DS) 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. Brown Professor of philosophy @ Emporia State University and Toadvine Assistrant professor of Philosophy @ University of Oregon 2003 (Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology:
Back to the Earth Itself , New Yoork University Oress, DS)
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 humanity-nature 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.

**L EcoGov Ontology Bad

Need to challenge the ontological assumptions of eco gov Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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.

L - Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a form of political managerialism aimed at preserving bad forms of modernity Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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.

No, your environment approach is not the exception Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)

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

L Visibility (Subjects and Objects)

The way that technological expertise is posited through the nation state is one that seeks to make visible subjects and objects in order to manage and control them. Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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].
Today's evolution of ecomanagerialism into planetarian environmental accountancy is a somewhat different project. New expert networks aim at explicating climate change research, biocomplexity analysis, and sustainability studies as they coalign in Earth System Science as practices, or the material mobilizations of crucial positions, programs, and projects that constitute places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, and the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect (Foucault, 1991b, p. 75). Even though the Earth System Science project still has only limited traction in actual state policies or many corporate behaviors, the

technoscience work of these expertarchic networks of/for/about green governmentality discloses, as Foucault (1991b, p. 75) argues, programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of jurisdiction), and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of verdiction).
The mediated, indistinct sovereign bases of these expertarchic efforts make them politically intriguing. Of the nearly 200 allegedly sovereign territories on the planet, maybe half, or even only a third, have any sort of continuous effective enforcement of their putative monopoly of legitimate force and legal authority within their borders as jurisdictions. Almost all of these efforts at arriving at some mechanism for environmental accountability are based in richest and most powerful of that minimally effective group, like the G-8 countries, the UN Security Council's permanent members of the EU nations where the key centers of verdiction also are found. Who is accounting what, where, when, why, and for whom, therefore, is an important question. In part, it is interesting because even those with the needed scientific assets cannot be certain; they have a sound accounting for their own territories much less those of others. And, in part, it is intriguing because

all the remaining jurisdictions are under surveillance by these more verdictively mobilized nation-states, but what can this information mean for them and their peoples as it all is enfolded into Earth System Sciences? If sovereignty, as Schmitt argues, is the power to decide the exception (Schmitt, 2007), then who or what is aspiring to have this executive discretion for planetarian action, and is this aspiration ultimately unfulfillable in the current world order? Foucault's wide-ranging account of the practices behind governmentality (Foucault, 1980, 1991c) stresses the formal conceptual apparatus needed to render both objects and subjects visible in some fashion. Systems of representation are necessary to map, measure, monitor, and then manage what must be governed. The technical practices of cartography, demography, geography, geology, hydrology, and statistics along with the organized groups of trained experts, who implement their operation, assess their findings and accumulate their discoveries as less as type 1 academic knowledge and more as type 2 applied knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994) and become integral to the accountability regime responsible for documenting Nature.

L Experts/Science
Experts must bless our resource use. As long as science or experts agree that the resource should be used, they become an authority who are given the ability to infiltrate Nature its complexities always already mobilized political assets for states to use Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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]. The new empirical scientific operations of Earth System Science in action, like actually existing environmentalism, presume the expanses of Nature, more or less, are a site always at ready for continuous resourcification in global exchange by national economies and societies (Luke, 1999b). This intellectual arrangement for authority to morph into activity requires some scientific and/or technical expert(s) to shift from being professionally an authority in their disciplines to acquiring various institutional roles in authority for official, quasi-statal, or nongovernmental organizations. As such expertarchic spaces are mobilized, the Earth is reduced, typically in experts research programs and projects, to little more than a vast standing reserve, serving as a ready resource supply center and/or accessible waste reception site where natural resources for local use and global exchange are reshaped daily into the products and by-products of national resources consumption. From these patterns of activity, the engagements of environmental accountability
emerge in the multiple practices of stocktaking, service-tracking, and system-tracing. Once presented in this fashion, it

is easier to see the productive power of experts linking together concepts like sustainability, resilience, or improvement to infiltrate Nature. Earth System Science aspires to scan and appraise the most productive use of these resourcified flows of energy, information, and matter as well as the sinks, dumps, and wastelands for all the byproducts that commercial products leave behind (Virilio, 2000). Nature, therefore, with the progress of capital accumulation and the expansion of economic development is regarded as the material substratum of ecological stock, service, and system, which is more and more the product of social production (Smith, 2008, pp. 4950). And, its clustered complexities always are already mobilized as political assets by clusters of experts at work for nations, states, enterprises, and individuals (Ong, 1999; Luke, 1999d). Hence, the environment's fungibilization, liquidification, and capitalization as resources cannot occur without expert intellectual labor to prep it, produce it, and then provide it for the global marketplace (Luke, 1999b). The trick in natural
resources management and environmental affairs education is to appear conservationist, while moving, in fact, very fast to disembed, liquefy, and commodify natural resources for more thorough, rapid, and intensive utilization by the nations producing them (Durning, 1992; Schmidheiny, 1992; Cairncross, 1992; Milani, 2002; Pinchot, 1910). Many currents in today's Earth System Science mostly aim at refining their theories and methods to expand the sweep and scope of such authority-in-action.

There is no middle ground between naturalism and phenomenology. Naturalism sees phenomena of being as facts about the natural world rather than as dimensions of being. Our mobility through various dimensions through use of perception allows us to access a much more complex involvement with nature Wood, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, 2003 (David, What is EcoPhenomenology?, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 211-212) at Phenomenology was born out of resistance to the threat of naturalism. I But if phenomenology is to be able to think about Nature, it must either rescue Nature itself from naturalism, or work out a new relation- ship to what it had perceived as the danger of naturalism. Or both. The resistance to naturalism is a principled resistance, in various senses. If naturalism means that the phenomena in question are fundamentally governed by causal laws, with the possible addition of func- tional explanations, and relations of succession, conjunction, and concatenation, resistance takes the form of limiting the scope of such Phe- nomena, or showing that even in those domains in which naturalism might seem wholly appropriate-the realm of what is obviously Nature- naturalism is fatally flawed as a standpoint. For example, to the extent that perception brings us into intimate relation with the manifold things of this world, and definitively breaks through any sense of phenomenology as an otherworldly idealism, it also becomes clear that phenomenology and naturalism could not simply agree to a territorial division. A phenomenology of perception quickly discovers that it is only as spatially and temporally embodied beings that seeing takes place. Seeing (and hearing and touching) is a phenomenon of the differentiation of the world into discrete bodies, including ourselves, that occupy distinct places at particular times, bodies endowed with a mobility that reflects their needs and desires. These are not just natural facts about the world, but fundamental dimensions of the world, dimensions that structure the very possibility of factuality. And they certainly structure perception, insofar as perception is essentially perspectival, bound to surfaces of visibility, limited by obstructiory and tied powerfully to our embodiment-in our having two eyes, two ears, two hands, and muscles that give us mobility in various dimensions. And that embodi- ment appears in more complex ways, in our having various somatic and social desires that shape and direct perceptiory and in the temporal syn- theses in which it is engaged. Many of these structures of bodily finitude are invariant for any living creature and could be said to constitute per ception rather than qualify it. If something like this is true, a certain phe- nomenology, at least, is both inseparable from our involvement in the world as natural beings, and points to aspects of that involvement that do not seem to be captured by naturalism. Does this mean that we have man- aged to carve out a space for phenomenology within nature, reinforcing the divorce of intentionality from causality? The key to our position here is that there are dimensions essential to perception which reflect nonaccidental aspects of our natural existence. This means that intentionality is structured in a way that fills out what is specific about perceptual con- sciousness, rather than interrupting or contesting the intentional stance. But does this structuration reinforce the distinctness of intentionality (from naturalism), or does it offer a bridge across which a certain conver- sation could begin? One might suppose that what phenomenology points to fundamen- tally is another level of causality, one that is presupposed by the operative causality of everyday phenomena. That other level would be describable through an evolutionary naturalism, one that would explain, for example, how living creatures have acquired the functionally integrated and envi- ronmentally responsive bodies that they do indeed possess, and perhaps

explain how it is that multiple complex individual living beings devel- oped in the first place, for example, through the incorporation into a single "body" of what began as a group of simpler symbiotically related organisms.l Would such an account of a deep causality make phenome- nology redundant, or would it actually facilitate an engagement between phenomenology and naturalism? If eco-phenomenology can give us better access to nature than that represented by the naturalism phenomenology was created to resist, by supplementing intentionality structurally with non- or preintentional characteristics of nature, would not eco-phenomenology be the future of a phenomenology, one which has purged itself of its traumatic gestation in opposition to nature?

L 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 Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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]. 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.

L Security
Science and governments attempt to securitize the environment Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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]. As centers of calculation, concord, and conceptualization for Earth accountancy, many sustainability studies also are an initial positioning of liberty against security as well as security for liberty. On the one hand, global climate change studies, conferences, or accountings are modes of state intervention whose role is to assure the security of those natural phenomena, economic processes and the intrinsic processes of population: this is what becomes the basic objective of governmental rationality. Hence liberty is registered not only as the right of individuals legitimately to oppose the power, the abuses, and usurpations of the sovereign, but also now as an indispensable element of governmental rationality itself (cited in Gordon, 1991, pp. 1920). Ecological accountability sets the limits of liberty and the scope of security through the same mechanisms of continuous environmental monitoring, managing, and mapping. Like the prison, the hospital, or the asylum, the Earth System Sciences project is being positioned to operate as programmes, or sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be reorganized, spaces arranged, behaviors regulated (Foucault, 1991b, p. 80). Like Foucault, this analysis of green governmentality examines the interplay of scientific discourses and governmental initiatives within environmental accountancy. So, this discussion has tried to define how, to what extent, at what level discourses, particularly scientific discourses, can be objects of a political practice, and in what system of dependence they can exist in relation to it (Foucault, 1991a, p. 70). In a context in which considerable reserves of scarce assets, like remote sensing systems, geospatial imaging systems, meteorological monitoring systems, oceanographic measuring systems, and economic modeling systems, all can be mobilized for interdisciplinary missions, a progressive politics of responding to green governmentality must work to understand the manner in which diverse scientific discourses, in their positivity (that is to say, as practices linked to certain conditions, obedient to certain rules, susceptible to certain transformations) are part of a system of correlations with other practices (Foucault, 1991a, p. 70).

L - Nominalism
Nominalism Link Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)

Such desuetude and incapacity to go beyond what I call the paradigm of modern voluntarism along with perpetual demands for more undetermined freedom can be seen in the lingering nominalist and constructivist assumptions endorsed by green governmentality scholars to sustain their denunciation of Nature. First, in line with what has been two centuries of metaphysical and ontological bashing, green governmentality scholars often assume that Nature is meaningless unless or until particular human beings assign significance to it by interpreting some of its ambivalent signs as meaningful to them (Luke 1996). Because humans constantly look at natural patterns in different ways, it is suggested that Natures meanings will always be multiple, unfixed and constantly shifting (Luke 1996). Nature is therefore reduced to a nominal construct whose noumenal signification remains inaccessible.

Internal Links to Impacts

IL Biopolitics
Environmental policy merges ecology and biopolitics into a police state of green governmentality that employs coercive power-knowledge regimes to enforce the new normative code of ecology Luke 99 [Timothy W. 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. ,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 149-151].
Foucault is correct about the modern state. It is not an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, because it has indeed evolved as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns (Foucault 1982: 21415). Producing discourses of ecological

living, articulating designs of sustainable development, and propagating definitions of environmental literacy for contemporary individuals simply adds new twists to the very specific patterns by which the state formation constitutes a modern matrix of individualisation (ibid. 215). The regime of bio-power, in turn, operates through ethical systems of identity as much as it does in the policy machinations of governmental bureaus within any discretely bordered
territory. Ecology merely echoes the effects from one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century: namely, the emergence of population as an economic and political problem (Foucault 1976: 25).Once demography emerges as a science of statist administration, its statistical attitudes can diffuse into the numerical surveillance of nature, or Earth and its non-human inhabitants, as well as the study of culture, or society and its human members.4 Government and now, most importantly, statist ecology preoccupy themselves with the conduct of conduct. Previously, the ethical concerns of family, community and nation guided how conduct was to be conducted; but at this juncture, environment emerges as a ground for

normalizing individual behaviour. Environments are spaces under police supervision, expert management or technocratic control; hence, by taking environmentalistic agendas into the heart of state policy, one finds the ultimate meaning of the police state fulfilled. If the police, as
they bind and observe space, are empowered to watch over religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, liberal arts, trade, factories, labour supplies and the poor, then why not add ecology or the interactions of organisms and their surroundings to the police zones of the state? Here, the conduct of any persons environmental conduct becomes the initial limit on others ecological enjoyments; so too does the conduct of the social bodys conduct require that the state always be an effective environmental protection agency. The

ecological domain is the ultimate domain of being, with the most critical forms of life that states must now produce, protect and police in eliciting bio-power: it is the centre of their envirodiscipline, eco-knowledge, geo-power (Luke 1994a, 1994b). Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerated after the 1970s, along with global fast capitalism. Ecology became that formalized disciplinary mode of paying systematic attention to the processes of life.. . to invest life through and through (Foucault 1976: 139), in order to transform all living things into biological
populations, so to develop transnational commerce. The tremendous explosion of material prosperity on a global scale after 1973 would not have been possible without ecology to guide the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes (ibid. 141). An anatomo-politics of all plants and animals emerges out of ecology, through which environmentalizing resource managerialists acquire the methods of power capable of optimising forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern (ibid.). To move another step beyond Foucaults vision of human biopower, adjustment of the accumulation of environmentalized plants and animals to that of capital is necessary to check unsustainable growth. Yet, in becoming an essential sub-assembly for transnational economic development,

ecological techniques of power rationalize conjoining the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, inasmuch as

population ecology, environmental science and range management are now, in part, the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application (ibid.). Indeed, a postmodern condition is perhaps reached when the life of all species is now wagered in all of humanitys economic and political strategies. Ecology emerges out of bio-history, circulating within the space for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organising that space, methods of power and knowledge needed for enviro -disciplinary interventions as the state assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them (ibid. 101). This chapter has explored only one path through the order of things embedded in contemporary mainstream environmentalism. Ultimately, it suggests that we cannot adequately understand governmentality in

present-day regimes, like the United States of America, without seeing how many of its tactics, calculi or institutions assume environmentalized modes of operation as part and parcel of ordinary practices of governance. Strategic Environmental Initiatives are now standard operating procedures.
To preserve the political economy of high-technology production, many offices of the American state must function as environmental protection agencies, inasmuch as they continue to fuse a politics of national security with an economics of continual growth, to sustain existing industrial ecologies of mass consumption with the wise use of nature through private property rights. Conservationist ethics, resource managerialism and green

rhetorics, then, congeal as an unusually cohesive power/knowledge formation, whose actions are an integral element of this orders regime of normalization.

IL Dualisms BP
Dualisms create a world in which biopolitical managerialism controls entire populations. Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
Although sovereignty offers clear settings that many people enjoy, it appears that numerous

social, political, cultural and environmental problems override the strict delimitations of state boundaries. The artificial borders which enclose humans and non-humans alike (often reduced to state resources) do violence to the rich intercultural, biological, and the social-complexity taking place both beyond and below such political boxing. Broadening our understanding of this complexity could help us to think outside the confining logic of the state, since this configuration rests on an atomistic division of political space, supplemented by a mono-logical reduction of human identities to mutually-exclusive forms of nationalism (Magnusson 1996, p. 40). Thinking outside the box by exploring non-dualistic models of interaction based on relational and ecological approaches could thus broaden the language and the possibilities for political alternatives to the relationship between universality and particularity, principally formalised as state sovereignty (The one), residing in the pluralist setting assumed by most international relations theorists (the Many) (Walker
1993, p. 75.).

IL Managing Control Populations

Practices of ecology in the context of the modern nation-state establish new regimes of biopolitics and governmentality. By constituting both the object of government, the environment, and the means of governing, scientific rationality, eco-biopolitics develops new techniques for the management not just of the environment, but of whole populations. Rutherford 99 [Paul, professor of environmental politics in the Department of Government
and Public Administration at the University of Sydney, Australia, 1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 37-38] Modern thinking about the natural environment is characterized by the belief that nature can be managed or governed through the application of the scientific principles of ecology. This chapter considers how governing the environment in this sense involves more than the familiar political activities of the modern administrative state. Environmental governance in advanced liberal societies is far more dependent on the role played by scientific expertise in defining and managing environmental problems than the more traditional state-centric notions of politics and power would suggest. Scientific ecology has become a political resource that in important respects constitutes the objects of government and, at the same time, provides the intellectual machinery essential for the practice of such government. Foucaults ideas of biopolitics and governmentality can help provide a critical perspective on contemporary environmental problems. In this chapter I attempt to demonstrate this by developing three basic propositions: first, that the concern with ecological problems and environmental crises can be seen as a development of what Foucault called the regulatory biopolitics of the population; second, that this contemporary biopolitics has given expression to a mode of governmental rationality that is related to the institutionalization of new areas of scientific expertise, which in turn is based on a bio-economic understanding of global systems ecology; and third, that this relatively recent articulation of biopolitics gives rise to new techniques for managing the environment and the population that can be termed ecological governmentality.

Environmental managerialism constitutes entire populations as ecological subjects, molding people to fit the ends of sustainability or survival. Luke 99 [Timothy W. 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. ,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 133-35]. Geo-power in green geopolitics counters the logic of geo-economic industrialism by moving liberal welfare states on to an ecological footing, redeputizing some of their administrative personnel as bureaucratic greens. Because most consumers are willing participants in a dysfunctional geo-economic civilization not yet subject to full-blown green governance, they must be forced to be functional in accord with the regulatory goals of geoenvironmentalizing bureaucracies. Entirely new identities built around new collective ends, like survival or sustainability, can be elaborated by systems of eco-knowledge. Inasmuch as economic and governmental techniques are a central focus of political struggle today, the

complex interactions of populations with their surroundings in political economies and ecologies are forcing states to develop eco-knowledge in order to redefine what is within their competence. Eco-knowledge codes indicate that, to survive now, it is not enough for states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly sovereign territories. As new limits to growth constantly are being discovered, states are forced to guarantee their populations productivity in every environmental setting encompassed by the global political economy (e.g. Hardin 1993). Governmental discourses must methodically mobilize particular assumptions, codes and procedures to enforce specific understandings of the economy and society. Yet, as geo-powered ecological ethics about Earth in the balance will show, eco-knowledges work just fine at performing these same tasks. Indeed, they can generate new administrative truths or managerial knowledges that will denominate codes of power with significant reserves of popular legitimacy. Inasmuch as they classify, organize and legitimate larger understandings of ecological reality, such discourses can authorize or invalidate the options for constructing particular institutions, practices or concepts in society at large. They simultaneously frame the emergence of new collective subjectivities global ecologies as dynamic bio-economic systems and collections of subjects individuals as bio-economic units in such global systems to protect the environment. Still, as the Wise Use/Property Rights movement reveals, one must remember how extensively the meanings of ecological subjectivity are still being contested on the Left and the Right. Ecological subjectivity can be expressed in small-scale experiments by autonomous human beings following their own local political agendas in many bio-regional communities, or it may be retooled in vast statist programmes for interacting within Global Marshall Plans, depending upon which interpretations are empowered where (Foucault 1976: 1434). Whether traditional geo-economic or newer geopolitic discourses, articulated in the Clinton/Gore register of green engagement with transnational security threats and sustainable prosperity projects, prevail is still to be determined by the political struggles of the 1990s. None the less, sustainable development discourses remain a key form of ecoknowledge on this embattled terrain.

Impacts

! BP Extinction
This demarcation of life at the borders is based on the desire to care for all of life on the planet- this biopolitical imperative makes massacres vital and wars and extreme racism possible through the constant defining and redefining of the world of life, literally caring to death populations to preserve an outmoded form of governance Dillon 05 (Michael, professor of politics at the university of Lancaster, Cared To Death: The Biopoliticised
Time Of Your Life, Foucault Studies, Number 2, May, 2005, pg. 44)

In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life, care for all living threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio) political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does teach us how to punish and who to kill.26 Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of lifes very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous war. Here, also, is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: So you can understand the importance I almost said the vital importance of racism to such an exercise of
power.28 In racism, Foucault insists: We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work.29 But: The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power.30 In thus threatening life,

biopolitics prompts a revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance,
whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben. Emphasising care for all living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of individuals and populations elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agambe ns bare life contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death. Something also happens to the

theos as care of all living is propelled by its vocation to distribute mortality and death, newly inscribed, across the terrain of value that it remorselessly constructs for life. This re-marking of
theos nonetheless also marks a kind of threshold effect or phase change. Thriving on correction and death, albeit biopolitically transfiguring them in the process through the micro-practices of its continuously changing technologies of care, biopolitics effects some curious transformation of that vexed issue of transcendence for which the theos of onto-theology once stood. As if the exclusive emphasis on life should exclude the question of the

not life, of the other of life and of the beyond of living, biopolitics nonetheless finds itself ensnared at every level in precisely these issues. New, biopoliticised, vocabularies emerge to address them. Note, for example, the proliferation of ethics committees in relation to genetic science and the allied
recruitment of philosophy into the task of forming a new molecular clerisy for the liturgical governance of it.

! - Biopower
Biopower sets the stage for our own extinction Mitchell Dean 01, Professor, Sociology, Macquarie University, STATES OF IMAGINATION:
ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATIONS OF THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE, ed. T.B. Hansen & F. Stepputat, 2001, p. 53-54.
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled Right of Death and Power Over Life. The

initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as the right to take life or let live; the power over life as the power to foster life or disallow it. Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contract between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies by to disqualify lifethe mere existenceof those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed unworthy of life, those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136-137). In Foucaults account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing--whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers. This is not because of recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level

of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1979a: 137). Foucault
completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: massacres become vital.

Bio-politics creates ever smaller subgroups of the deviant and dangerous to justify racism and violence Mitchell Dean 00, Professor, Sociology, Macquarie University, GOVERNMENTALITY: POWER
AND RULE IN MODERN SOCIETY, London: Sage, 1999, p. 100. This field of bio-politics, and its attempt to find an accommodation between the phenomena of population and `bio-sociological' processes, will lead to complex organs of political coordination and centralization (Foucault, 1997b: 2223). It is also here that we can locate the division of populations into sub-groups that contribute to or retard the general welfare and life of the population. It is this proclivity that has led to the discovery among the population of the criminal and dangerous classes, the feeble-minded and the imbecile, the invert and the degenerate, the unemployable and the abnormal, and has led to attempts to prevent, contain or eliminate them. It is here that Foucault locates the modern form of racism as a racism of the state in which the notion of race appears as a defence of the life and welfare of the population against internal and external enemies (Stoler, 1995: 848). It is here that the analytics of government is able to deliver its most profound insights into contemporary warfare as conducted at the level of, and in defence of, entire populations.

! - Colonialism
Eco Gov badmanagerial colonialism Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
In between the production of such knowledge and the development of the skills required to exploit distant colonies emerged the multiple relations of power\knowledge that progressively shaped the ecologization of our understanding of politics (Moore 2006; Headrick 1988; Crosby 1986). Such relations can be traced not only in the European colonial annexations and the environmental innovations they induced, but also in the growing concerns that such activities stimulated toward the non-European others found in these Tropical regions against which the moderns Europeans have shaped their identity in important respects. Such relations and concerns all contributed to a global perception of natural and intercultural interconnectedness (Grove 1995, p. 476; Goodie 2006, p. 33). By

expanding Foucaults reading of governmentality to include eco-governmentality, we can therefore deepen our understanding of the modern problem of government to these in-between relations that have connected the different theatres of governmentality via a primordial environment which is increasingly colonized by various power\knowledge relations in a growing attempt to governmentalize Nature. As such, the emergence of Western environmental preoccupations appears intimately tied with what Foucault describes as this art of governing at distance by which he characterizes liberal modes of governance. The noticeable particularity is that distance here takes its literal meaning; the spreading of managerial colonialism and the shaping of various political apparatus to govern at distance, which, from the fifteenth-century onward, emerged in conjunction with mounting ecological concerns , played a key role
in the creation of this global and interconnected environment open to exploitation from which the so-called advanced neo-liberal rationalities of government would later blossom.

! Genocide/Nukes
Biopolitics enables wholesale slaughters in the name of life, culminating in genocide and nuclear war
Foucault 78 [Michel, Prof of Philosophy, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, p.136-7]
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death

that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies _and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on livinghas become the principle
that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a

If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
population.

Solvency Mechanisms

Lowercase Flesh
To view nature as a field of lowercase flesh and not uppercase Flesh we cultivate a new ontology that moves away from human perspective lived experiences projected onto nature Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
Strikingly, the two proponents of Merleau-Pontys ontology who have given us the most detailed accounts of its applicability to environmental thought, David Abram and Ted Toadvine, strongly disagree concerning the nature of said contribution. This paper will not delve into the specific nature of their dispute, since my concern with their interpretations lies in how each indentifies and falls prey to specific problems that are then addressed in section three.8 In order to see the specific issues in question, however, it is important to inquire into what each believes they have found for environmental philosophy within Merleau-Pontys ontology. Abram, finding the

seeds of a new and radical philosophy of nature within germs into a full-fledged ecological philosophy based primarily in our lived experience of the environment. 9 For Abram, flesh is a means of establishing the ontological continuity between humans and other beings that has long been the holy grail of environmental thought.10 For him, The Flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both
Merleau-Pontys work, seeks to cultivate these the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity. It is the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient, a mystery of which we have always, at least tacitly, been aware since we have never been able to affirm one of the phenomena, the perceivable world or the perceiving self, without implicitly affirming the existence of the other.11 By

capitalizing the term and using the definite article, as well as asserting that flesh possesses its own spontaneous activity, Abram leads us to believe that flesh is itself a being or substance of some sort, The Flesh. At a later point, he tempers this language, calling the Flesh an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our bodies are a part.12 Conceived as a lattice, the Flesh is a structure that supports and unifies the beings that are within it rather than being itself a being, yet it retains its sense of substrate. In either portrayal, the Flesh refers to an underlying structure or substance whose defining characteristic is its reflexivity, the intertwining of sentience and the sensible such that one cannot readily distinguish subjects and objects.13 We could summarize the two senses of flesh within Abrams account by stating that it is an animate substance or materiality to which all beings belong even as they maintain their own specificity and difference.

flesh - perceptual structure

Reconceiving flesh as a horizon rather than the horizon as the horizon of presence means we alter the structure of human Perceptuality and being Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
In his exhaustive and thought-provoking commentary on Merleau-Pontys philosophy, The Being of the Phenomenon, Barbaras concurs with Dasturs identification

of flesh with the being of beings when he defines flesh as being truly synonymous with visibility, which is the being of every being.52 Also like Dastur, he arrives at
this conclusion by means of an analysis of the inadequacies of Husserls model of act -intentionality, which lends credence to the interpretation that flesh remains

an experience situated entirely within human perception. In fact, Barbaras explicitly defines flesh in terms of a perceptual horizon. He claims that to speak of flesh is to conceive presence as a horizon rather than the horizon as the horizon of a presence,53 meaning that the traditional views, in which perception is thought to occur within a fixed field upon which we have transparent access to the beings within it, are mistaken. In reality, beings themselves are present to us as a horizon, that is, there is only so much of a being that is present to us at any given time, and there will always be aspects of the being that are just beyond the horizon of its presence. Barbaras finds that this horizonal character defines being as a whole, saying: the notion of flesh thus corresponds to the decision to conceive visibility as being or Being as visibility.54 So Barbaras too finds an equivalence between being as such and the being of beings through the medium of visibility. On his understanding, the carnality of flesh, its visibility, is what makes it the element of being; because sentient beings are always already within a sensible field, this sensible field simply is the only being to which we have access. These accounts share the idea that flesh is primarily a perceptual structure: the encroachment and overlapping of phenomena within perception lead us to the assertion that flesh is a new word for being. As a product of perceptual experience, the origin of flesh is within the perceiving body: sentient bodies become flesh through autoaffection, and nonsentient bodies become flesh through their being perceived. This idea leads Barbaras to make a claim reminiscent of Abram: T he world is just as much a self that is inchoative, sense in the state of being born.55 The difference between them is that while Barbaras finds that
the world and nature are animated within human perception, Abram situates this animism within nature in general.

Perception v. perceived
We give up the notion of the perception and the perceived object but rather solely recognize the capacity and constitution for the conditions of the experience this is the reckoning with the fields of flesh Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Despite the appeal of this resolution, Renaud Barbaras presents a conundrum for those who would be content with this mixture of lived experience and ontological investigation. He proposes that Merleau-Pontys philosophy necessarily results in an anthropomorphic position as a result of an equivocation between a perceptual and ontological methodology. In the case of the perceptual philosophy based in lived experience, the anthropomorphizing is of a transcendental nature: the perceiving subjects capacities and constitution are the conditions of the possibility for experience. The phenomenon is therefore transformed into an object for the subject, even if that subject is embodied. 28 As we have already seen, Toadvine rejects this position in favor of locating the potential for expression within nature itself. Barbaras, however, argues that this strategy results in another form of anthropomorphism: we posit the meaning of being, which in the present case is taken as nature, on the basis of the perceptual constitution of the human body.29 The result of this second anthropomorphism is that we are led to extend this mode of being [i.e., the psychophysical unity that characterizes the human body] over any reality, which means we must give up the distinction between perception and perceived object and the phenomenology of perception itself.30 Abram, of course, saw the animistic implications of mixing the phenomenology of perception and ontology quite clearly but failed to recognize the manner in which the animism and the anthropomorphic method through which it was derived are in tension.31 In short, while there is no ontological difference between our body and other beings, the meaning of this immanent being is given only in the human body. Barbaras believes this positive anthropomorphism, which he defines as a concept of the embodied subject as ontological witness32 even as it understands man *sic] as the measure of all things, more precisely, our body as the measure of reality, 33 is simply a truth with which we must reckon.

Reorientation of Ethics/A2 Arendt

A more ethical ethos requires a reorientation for an ecological ethical community Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) 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

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 MerleauPonty 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 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.
derivable from MerleauPontys ontology. Beginning with Mauro Carbones point that

Experiential aesthetics
Rather than exist in the environment, we should experience the environment through an aesthetics SANART 1997, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS , Arnold Berleant, October 1997, Sanart Association for the
Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod, former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)

Experiencing environment, therefore, is not a matter of looking at an external landscape. In fact, it is not just a matter of looking at all. Sometimes writers attempt to associate environment
with our physical surroundings and landscape with our visual perception of a scene and the ideas and attitudes through which we interpret it. v Yet considering

human beings apart from their environment is both philosophically unfounded and scientifically false, and it leads to disastrous practical consequences. Similarly, our understanding of experience has expanded greatly to involve all the bodily senses and not just the eye. We now recognize that the conscious body does not observe the world contemplatively but participates actively in the experiential process. vi This bears intimately on environmental aesthetics, for the appreciation of perceptual values inherent in environment involves physical engagement. Environmental appreciation is not just
looking approvingly at lovely scenery but it is driving down a winding country road, tramping along a hiking trail, paddling the course of a stream, and, in all such activities, being acutely attentive to the sounds, the smells, the feel of wind and sun, the nuances of color, shape, and pattern. It is found, too, in the deep awareness, so rare in the contemporary world, of living in a house and place to which we belong intimately both in living experience and in memory. And

it arises in

the kinesthetic sense of the masses and spaces that incorporate us. Incorporate is a good word here, for it means literally to bring our bodies in, and this engagement in a whole is what the aesthetic experience of environment involves . At the same time and as part
of this embodied experience, we carry our knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes with us, for these participate in the process of experience and enable us to structure and interpret it. Such influences of thought and attitude also point up a crucial fact about aesthetic experience, of both art and of environment. It is that aesthetic

valuation is not a purely personal experience, "subjective," as it is often mistakenly called, but a social one. In engaging aesthetically with environment as with art, the knowledge, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes we have are largely social, cultural, and historical in origin. These direct our attention, open
or close us to what is happening, and prepare or impede our participation. Here as elsewhere, the personal is infused with the social. We

are not pure sense perceptors, and experience is not solely sensation. Social forms and cultural patterns equip us with the means for ordering and grasping the occasions in which we are involved through myths, theories, and other explanations. In experiencing environment aesthetically, therefore, we are engaged in a social activity, not a purely personal one, and frequently on a public occasion. Our sociality is inherent in our
aesthetic experience, whether of art or of environment. Environment--and landscape with it--is, then, not just our physical surroundings, not only our perception of this setting, our environmental ideas and activities, or the order that society and culture give them, but all of these together. An

integral whole, environment is an interrelated and interdependent union of people and place, together with their reciprocal processes. Similarly, understanding environment is not merely an additive process, a matter of putting our knowledge of separate disciplines together to arrive at a general conception, like the string of disconnected stores and businesses that constitute the ubiquitous commercial strip. Rather it requires us to recognize how the various environmental disciplines interpenetrate and inform each other, resembling the way in which sciences such as systems engineering and biological ecology pursue a holistic model. But environment is more inclusive yet, which is why we cannot break it down into elements in order to

discover its aesthetic ingredient. More than any other study, the aesthetics of environment emerges as a
dimension of the entire complex of objects, people, and their activities. That is why we cannot discover the aesthetic value of a landscape from a cultural resources survey of historic buildings or from an accumulation of particular amenities, such as parks or unusual natural features. Environment

is a name for a complex, integrated whole, and its aesthetic is a dimension of that whole. What is this qualitative experience of environment? It includes more than an acute sensitivity to the delights of landscape. As noise is more insistent than music, commercial signs than paintings, or a factory than a grove of trees, the dominant environmental experience does not always assume a positive form. The aesthetics of environment must also recognize the experience of landscapes that offend us in various ways: by destroying the identity and affection of place, by disrupting architectural coherence, by imposing sounds and smells that may injure as well as repel, by making our living environment hostile and even uninhabitable. Part of this criticism is aesthetic, an offense to our perceptual sensibilities and an immediate encounter with negative value. Environmental experience and criticism are the focal point of
this book, and I shall have much to say about them as we proceed.

Relational Autonomy -> flesh of the world

Through the affirmatives analysis we can create a relational autonomy using the body as a sensible key Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
Though Merleau-Ponty himself reinforces this interpretation in the line cited by all the aforementioned authors, I

cannot posit one sole sensible without positing it as torn from my flesh, lifted off my flesh,61 there are good reasons to question the received understanding that the flesh of the body is prior to, and indeed the origin of, the flesh of the world and the flesh of things. It is at this point, then, that an intervention is necessary in order to begin reworking the notion of flesh so as to be more helpful to environmental philosophy. In the same note from which the above quotation is taken, FleshMind, from June 1960, Merleau-Ponty also describes the human body as one of the sensibles in which an inscription of all the others are made, a sensible-key, and the dimensional sensible.62 In the initial part of the quotation, our flesh is active, and the dynamism of things is derived from that activity. In the second part, however, we see the passive side of our body, the manner in which our flesh is just one of the sensibles, even though it is one with perceptual powers that allow the others to inscribe themselves in it. The other two characterizations, however, call for further development. A musical key is, very generally, a tonality established through specific chord progressions within a certain scale. We might speculate, then, that the body, as a sensible key, provides a specific means of organizing the various sensible experiences into a harmonious ensemble.63 Understanding the specific meaning of a dimensional this is more complex and will be pursued more fully in the next section. However, by reconsidering what the flesh of things or the flesh of the world might be with references to these notions and without reference to human flesh, we can establish the relational autonomy of things such that we do not understand their agency as posited by the sensing human body.

Relational Ontology
We must engage in the dialectic of concrete intersubjectivity which is the engagement and the recognition of the flesh Sally Fischer 2007 (Marleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling on the
Landscapes of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany)
Despite her critique of Merleau-Pontys indifference to gender-biases sedimented in his understanding of embodiment, Luce Irigaray shares remarkably similar views with Merleau-Ponty regarding the present task of philosophy. She, too, says

we must recommence everything, go back to experience and rearticulate all the categories by which we understand things, the world, subject-object divisions, and so forth (Irigaray 1993, 151). In the later thought of both Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty we find a call for a discursive and ontological shift, for a new horizon of understanding that, taken together, has fecund possibilities for a social ecology and for ecocommunitarian politics. Social ecology in very general terms asks us to recreate socially and ecologically sound ideologies and institutions; that is, it, too, calls on us to recommence everything. The social ecology of John Clark, for example, argues for the need to replace the egoistic, individualistic notion of selfhood with a social-ecological self; asks that we rethink the dualism of mind and body; and proposes a new ecological imaginary to replace our current economistic imaginary. But a social ecology must not, as Clark correctly asserts, give causal priority to either ideologies or to institutions; it must avoid one-sided idealism and one-sided materialism (Clark 1998, 431). Merleau-Pontys concept of flesh, particularly in regard to alterity, offers a more ecologically beneficial alternative to Cartesian dualism and to the sovereign, individualistic subject of Modernity. Moreover, with the aid of Irigarays demand for a recognition of differenced embodiment, Merleau-Pontys philosophy suggests fruitful possibilities for the understanding and practice of responsible social and ecological relations. In the final section of this paper, I make a case for a Merleau-Pontyan social ecology that begins with a general shift in the way we understand ourselves and live our lives with others, rather than for a set of ahistorical maxims. I interpret this shift politically as a kind of ecocommunitarian politics, which, in MerleauPontyan terms, must be realized through the dialectic of concrete intersubjectivity.

Solvency

S - Continuity
Instead of an affiliation with nature through animism we reorient ourselves as human continuity with the rest of nature and shared relational structures Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) It seems, then, that there are many obstacles standing in the way of advocates of a Merleau-Pontian environmental ethic. To recap, we might summarize them under two more general headings: the danger of anthropomorphism arising from basing the ontology in perceptual experience and the inability to draw normative conclusions from the ontological arguments. These theoretical hurdles, however, are far from insurmountable. In order to leap over them, so to speak, we must develop Merleau-Pontys philosophy in a somewhat different direction, as a general theory of affects rather than in terms of sentient experience. Merleau-Pontys goal in starting from a description of the body is not to understand the world in terms of the body but to resist anthropologism and discover structures of being itself.40 If this switch is possible, we will be able to establish the ontological continuity between humanity and other beings without resorting to an animism that projects subjective properties upon the natural world. The key to this understanding of Merleau-Pontys philosophy is challenging the traditional understanding of flesh, an understanding that articulates the meaning of flesh primarily in terms of the human sensing body. We will, as Carbone suggests, pursue a line of interpretation in which our body turns out to be fleshly akin to the sensible world rather than the world being akin to our bodies as discovered in experience.41 In other words, instead of discovering an animism in nature as a result of an affiliation with some sort with sentient life, human continuity with the rest of nature will be established through shared relational structures. This point will be explained in detail in the third section of this paper. The intuition behind these arguments is that when we limit our understanding of flesh to what is discovered in human perception and experience (even when we then generalize these structures), we are limiting the potential of the flesh idea. So, in order to understand better the resources Merleau-Pontys philosophy offers to the philosophy of nature, we must first attempt a richer understanding of Merleau-Pontys later ontology.

Moving away from the lived relations to its milieu we might understand through internal relations the constituation of the interconnectivity between beings Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) If an interpretation of flesh wherein the things themselves will possess a dynamism without resorting to an animistic hylozoism is possible, then it must begin, as Carbone suggested above, by showing how flesh is a common denominator between the human body and other sensible beings without, as Irigaray cautions us against, situating that commonality in the perceiver itself or a monistic substance. Such an understanding of the flesh is not unprecedented. Johnson, for example, also calls our attention to Merleau-Pontys transition from Husserls conception of personal experience to Heideggerian fundamental ontology. He argues that though flesh is most originally the flesh of our bodies, once our analysis of perceptual experience brings us before the anonymous and impersonal one that subtends our individual experience, there is a progression, a

development in the meaning of flesh in Eye and Mind from human flesh to the more general meaning of the flesh of things.64 What Johnson recommends is that we understand this more general sense of flesh in terms of a logic of internal relations65 that will lead to an understanding of flesh as event and process.66 This brief suggestion offers important insight into how we might begin to understand flesh more generally through the idea of internal relations rather than through perception. As an alternative to understanding the flesh of things in relation to a human bodys lived relation to its milieu, then, we might understand the flesh of things in terms of their constitutive internal relations. The promise of this approach is that, if successful, it provides a way out of Toadvines paradox that does not relegate us to an essentially anthropomorphizing position that Barbaras suggests is the inevitable result of any philosophy of perception.

Consciousness or sentience is not necessary for the existence for the flesh which means that any particular body is open to its own milieu meaning every body is a participant in the world fostering a true openness Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) We can make this claim more precise by attempting to understand the flesh of things in terms of the ontological sense of flesh. If flesh relations are constitutive of my body, my flesh, and what is constitutive of my body already is in every visible,77 then every visible thing, as a participant in the common, sensible world, is engaged to some degree in chiasmic relations with other bodies, regardless of whether it appears in a human perceptual field. To be clear, I am claiming that each thing, independent of human sensibility, possesses its own flesh, which is to say that a thing is a collection of relations, which are defined by how it is open to its environs . Merleau-Ponty calls the manner in which a particular body is open to its milieu a dimension, and since consciousness is for Merleau-Ponty an embodied phenomenon, these dimensions can take on an intellectual or sensual character.78 Since different bodies are open to their milieu in distinct ways, every body is a collection of various dimensions through which they can interact with a world. We can now see what MerleauPonty meant by describing the body as a dimensional this: my body is an assemblage of relations that organizes its experience in a certain manner, according to the various dimensions through which it has access to a meaningful world. In the flesh of the human body, chiasmic relations fold over and create an interior dimension that we call consciousness, due to the way we behave given the specific relations between ourselves and other beings.79 While many other beings (e.g., mountains and rivers, not apes and lizards) do not exhibit these sorts of behaviors, we would be remiss to deny a kind of interiority to things: they still exist according to dimensions.80 However, to attribute interiority does not require the attribution of consciousness or even sentience, as Barbaras or Abram suggest.81 Minimally, the interiority of a thing consists in the hiddenness of the complicity of its relations, in what Toadvine calls its aloofness82 or what Barbaras described as the things existence as horizon, although here the horizon is not only for a human perceiver. The interiority of the thing is what leads to the stochastic rather than mechanistic, deterministic function of natural systems: the system can behave in various ways, given the complicity of the things within the systems hidden internal relations.83 For this reason, Merleau-Ponty calls things field-beings or essences at the level of nature,84 but each of these determinations requires separate elucidation.

To problematize the relationality of ontology and nature is to create a new relationship between humans and the field of flesh which is nature Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) The purpose of this essay is to propose such an understanding of flesh and thereby eliminate some of the confusion that has surrounded the notion, while also providing suggestions as to how this ontological concept might be of use in axiological inquiry. The essay will be divided into four sections. The first of these analyzes Ted Toadvines and David Abrams attempts to deploy MerleauPontys ontology within the context of an environmental philosophy. What we shall find is that beyond the general consensus that Merleau-Pontys ontology offers a way to reconceive the human relationship to nature, there is little agreement as to what the form of this relationship might be or how the ontology can be extended to deal with ethical issues arising from humanitys immanence to nature. I conclude that this indeterminacy is a consequence of a reliance upon established interpretations of the notion of flesh in which it is taken to be primarily a perceptual phenomenon. Accordingly, the second section critically examines a number of these interpretations in order to suss out how understanding flesh as originating within human perceptual experience, even reconceived in the manner Merleau-Ponty prescribes, creates problems for the ontology. From this point, the third section
develops an alternative understanding of flesh that no longer takes it to originate in and belong to human perception. Rather, I

intend to shift our framework for understanding flesh from lived experience to Heideggerian fundamental ontology. In other words, I will argue that Merleau-Pontys ontology is best understood in terms of Heideggers attempt to think ontological difference, that is, the divergence between being as such and the being of beings.7 Concretely, I will argue that if flesh refers to the being of beings rather than to an aspect of lived experience, then it can be grounded no longer in human personal engagement with the world (i.e., lived, perceptual experience) but in a bodys relational engagement with its milieu (i.e., a system of affects). The intention is that in looking at flesh in
this manner, we can return to the questions and problems that arose in the first two sections and find a response to them. The fourth concluding section elaborates these possible responses.

Constant participatory within the dialectic with nature alters our relation with nature Sally Fischer 2007 (Marleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling on the
Landscapes of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany) Social ecologists often describe our relation with nature as a dialectic that refuses to either conflate or to bifurcate mind and body, and individuals from society and nature. John Clark says, for example, that a social ecology applies its holistic and dialectic approach to the nature of the self and that Part of the social ecological project of comprehending unity-in diversity is to theorize adequately this duality [of mind and body, self and nature] and the necessary experiential and ontological moments of alienation, separation and distance within a general nondualistic, holistic framework (Clark 1998, 425). Social ecologist, Joel Kovel describes our connectedness, but not fusion, with
nature in ontological terms: In the universe as a whole, there is no real separation between things; there are only, so far as the most advanced science can tell us, plasmatic quantum fields; one single, endlessly perturbed, endlessly becoming body (Clark 1998, 423). Both Clark and Kovel reveal the way we are ecological beings, not simply egological beingsand we

find the seeds of this already in MerleauPontys thought with his description of the ontological roots of our perceptual communication (VI 135) or dialogue with the worlda dialogue that becomes too easily lost or forgotten when we think of the human-other relation solely in terms of instrumental reason and of the environment as a giant supermarket, a manageable storehouse of (potential) commodities.

S Dualism
Eco-phenomenology is revolutionaryit will finally break our estrangement from the natural world by humanity envisioning itself as a natural being rather than in opposition to it. Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. Xx) at The alternative experience and account of nature to which eco- phenomenology gives us access is potentially revolutionary. The rediscovery of a natural world that is inherently and primordially meaningful and worthy of respect might help us to overcome our cultural estrange- ment from the world around us. This new vision of nature might also allow us, once freed from our nihilistic attitudes toward the natural world, to develop an appropriate philosophy of nature, a "phenomeno-logical naturalism," that circumvents intractable puzzles concerning intrinsic value and anthropocentrism. For far too long, humanity has envisioned itself as an alien presence in nature, thus steering many of the world's religions and moral codes toward a rebellion against our own nat- ural being. Having constituted ourselves in opposition to nature, we adopt values and purposes that threaten the earth itself. Only a reconceptualization of our place and role in nature can work against this tragic dis- connection from ourselves and from the wellspring of our being. To begin this task by reconnecting us with our most basic and primordial experiences of the natural world-such is the power and promise of eco- phenomenology.

We must access a new conception of rationality that divorces itself entirely from dualism and scientific objectivity and remembers the Earth Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. Xviii-xx) at
We find in Wood's chapter several points that are worth emphasizing as we consider the possible future of eco-phenomenology. The first is phenomenology's need for reconciliation with naturalism, even if this convergence reforges both-phenomenology as well as naturalism-into forms as yet unrecognizable. Although it is true that nature

cannot adequately be reduced to purely extensional categories, it is also true that phenomenology must reconsider its own dependence on the natural world. A true eco-phenomenology must become a naturalized phenomenology, although perhaps in a sense of nature that has yet to be adequately described. Perhaps we can offer several suggestions about this alternative conception of nature on the basis of the contributions included here: First, it will avoid the dualism of classical Cartesian thought, the separation of consciousness from matter that has infected
philosophy, including phenomenology, up to our present century. But the alternative, to classical dualism cannot be a homogenous monism either. Rather, an

adequate account of nature must find better ways of expressing our complex relationship with it-a relation reducible neither to the causality of meaningless matter in motion, nor to the meanings arrayed before a pure subject. It must articulate meaning's embeddedness within nature in a way that avoids positing a metaphysical discontinuity between the two, while also resisting the countertemptation of reducing either one to the other. Second, by making possible the rediscovery of our natural experiences as value laden, ecophenomenology would recognize natures axiological qualities as both inherent and ineliminable. In addition to displacing our culture's nihilistic conception of the natural world, this insight also paves the way for a new conception of rationality ; namely, of a reason that encounters and enters into dialogue with the immediately apprehended values, human and nonhuman of our experienced world. With the head and heart reunited, reason can find its place once again in

moral, social, and political discourse. True rationality, then, is found as far as possible from "instrumental" reason or scientific objectivity; it lies, rather, in the pursuit of phronesis and of the good life for humanity and the earth. But perhaps this new vision of nature sounds more than a little utopian. What
can phenomenology show us that has not already been demonstrated by other radical movements? What genuine hope can it bring for healing the rift at our culture's heart, our recoil from the nature both outside us and within us? With

other radical ecology movements, ecophenomenology shares the conviction that our cultural detachment from our natural roots rests on the very structure of our current modes of though, that we are weighted down by the ballast of tradition, by the assumptions and commitments carried forward from Platonism, Christianity, capitalism, Cartesian dualism, patriarchy, and the like. Part of the solution to our current situation
must lie in tracking down these philosophical land mines, scattered through the landscape of our cultural history, in order to diffuse them. This process is necessarily a slow one, and other radical ecology movements are playing an essential role in this endeavor. But

what is lacking in other contemporary approaches to the natural world is the positive project that must complement this critical effort; they lack a way in, an approach to nature on its own terms that nevertheless leaves our connection with our own world intact. Eco- phenomenology offers a methodological bridge between the natural world and our own, or rather the rediscovery of the bridge that we are and have always been but-thanks to our collective amnesia-have forgotten almost irretrievably. It is not enough to diagnose our forgetting; there is also a matter of remembering-remembering the earth.

We should whisper sweet nothings to the world by engaging in a nondominating and non-possessive perspective in relation to the non-human world. This is genuine ecological justice. Llewelyn, visiting philosophy professor at Loyola Univ. of Chicago, 2003
(John, Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 65-66) at As Heideggers later thinking of things in the ecology of the fourfold can help us understand, once we come to think of things as other than only objects, their being too is seen as more than only objects, their being too is seen as more than Aristotelian hoti estin ot Scholastic existentia. This does not mean that all things are now seen to exist in the manner of Dasein. It means rather that they exist in ways of their own which may be Dasein-ish or not, but are never the way only of objects over against subjects or indeed as objects over against Dasein. A thing is no longer a mere what. But its existence does have away, a mode, perhaps, good. There is an adverbial how to it, which makes it possible for us, if not for it, to ask what it would be like to exist in that way. This makes a lot of sense at least for animals, even if to ask this question of plants and the nonliving will be judged by many to- be an indulgence in pathetic fallacy. If pathetic fallacy is the projection of human or Dasein-ish capacities upon the nonhuman and non-Dasein-ish, then pathetic fallacy does not respect the differences among the many ways of being. Ecological Filgsamkeit is flouted. The challenge is to maintain respect for an ecological justice that allows for difference without dominance . The challenge is to rethink justice in the way it is thought in Plato's Republic, but in a way in which the republic extends beyond the human and beyond the vertical hierarchy of the great chain of being, in a way that would mean refiguring justice in the soul so that the purely rational and the purely sensory would be abstractions from and aspects of an irreducibly ambiguous imagination. One platform from which to launch this idea would be the imagining of an original position like that imagined by John Rawls, except that we are to imagine a state in which it is not only undecided what role in society we are to fill, but undecided also whether we are to be human or nonhuman and in what way nonhuman. The idea of metempsychosis could have a similar effect. If you are to come back into the world as a chicken or a fox, you may be strongly inclined in your
lifetime now to take out membership of the Society for Compassion in World Farming and the League Against Cruel Sports. Ecological ethics built on such a foundation would, however, be an ethics based ultimately on self-interest. This ethics would still be a transhumanly ramified prudence. If we look to Kant or Levinas for the basis of a transhuman ethics that transcends prudence we come up against the fact that both of them restrict underivative ethical responsibility to beings that speak. Levinas argues persuasively that ethics grounded solely in respect for a universal moral law is a violent masquerade of ethics because it fails to respect the other human being in its singularity. An ethics in which respect is limited to my being face to face with another would also be violent, because it is blind to the injustice it is bound to do to the third party. So respect of both kinds, for

the case and for the face, have somehow to be hybrldized if an ethics that is not glorified prudence is to be possible. In other words, a cer- tain sort of systematicity is retained by Levinas, but it is not one in which terms are defined by their internal relations, as in the structuralism that was all the rage when he was writing his major works. Levinas has more than one way of maintaining the difference between terms. My difference from another human being is established first by my restrictedly egologi- cal enjoyment within the walls of my home. This corresponds but is not equivalent to Heidegger/s saying that, for Daseiry to exist is to dwell. One reason why this is not equivalent is that according to Levinas the eksis- tentiality of Dasein as described by Heidegger is so preoccupied with what it is for that it cannot admit Dasein's enjoyment of what it lives from. My egological

when the other human being picks me out, makes me stand out as a uniquely singular one from the impersonal one of das Man, by charging me with a responsi- bility unshared by anyone else. It is only through this asymmetrical rela- tion of relations that human sociality can be ethical. Whatever one may think of the bearing
separateness and independence get "accomplished" and "produced," according to Levinas's genealogy of ethics, Levinas's phenomenology or postphenomenology has on the phenomenological ontology of Being and Time (the work of Heidegger to which he says he is attending above all), is it unthinkable, horrified though Levinas would be at the thought, that his doctrine and Heideggers doctrine of the fourfold might be adapted to each other to produce at least a prolegomenon for a future ethical ecology? Recall that the regions of things that make up the Heideggerian fourfold (though we are not committed to a fold of only four) and

This does not mean that we possess them or that they possess us, any more than that we possess our- selves (s'naoir). Possession and the belonging, zugehoren, of which Heidegger writes in "Das Ding" is for him more like a zuhoren, one thing's so-to-speak hearing the voice of another. The openhanded non possessiveness of this so-to-speak hearing and speaking is not altogether unlike that of the caress of erotic love with its accompanying sweet nothings expressed in not yet fully formed sentences, which according to Levinas
the things of those different regions belong to each other. anticipate the fully articulated ethical saying in which I am possessed by the other. For Levinas too, possession is the hearing of voices, a kind of persecution mania, ethical psychosis, madness that is the "accomplish- ment" of rational responsibility because never accomplished, always beyond limit, infinite, unfinished: never enough, because absolutely beyond sufficiency.

S flesh
Our phenomenological account of flesh breaks down the dualisms of culture/nature. Brook, 2005 (Isis, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy; Furness College;
Lancaster University, Can Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh Inform or even Transform Environmental Thinking? in Environmental Values 14. NG) The immediate suggestion that springs to mind is that Merleau-Ponty is saying that we and the world are basically made of the same stuff, but is that what he is really saying? It sounds a bit too much like
what the empiricists were saying all along, or perhaps even what the idealists were saying depending on what kind of stuff it is. As Merleau-Ponty spent a lifetime criticising those views, this

stuff, flesh, must be very different from matter as understood empirically and very different from the world being made of our concepts. The kind of conceptualisations of matter and mind that would be informing Merleau-Pontys resistance are monistic conceptualisations that derive their models of matter and mind respectively from a rejection of the other half of a dualist notion. Thus mind is unextended and has no understandable
relationship with matter; it is everything that matter is not. And likewise the view of matter inherited from dualism is the matter of lifeless physical entities. To elucidate what Merleau- Ponty does not mean by flesh, let us take the material substance of those whom he called the empiricists and the mental substance of those whom he called the intellectualists (idealists), and try them out as interpretations of flesh in order to see what possibilities remain. Merleau-Ponty

describes flesh as not like matter (1964/1968: 146) and I would elaborate this as not like matter as described by the dualist, i.e., clunky stuff. To get around this, he describes it as an element, by this he means to suggest an element like earth, fire or water. The element flesh is both me and the world a texture - and it is our ability to both see and be seen, to touch and be touched that both gives us that direct experience of the enfolded nature of flesh and presents us with an emblem of that enfolding. So here flesh is the
fabric of the world, but not matter as stripped of (what from a dualist perspective are) subjective aspects. Having that subjective side of the equation rejoined to the world opens up the second possible misunderstanding of flesh: the idealist one. Again Merleauthis; he says: When we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe the world covered over with all our own projections leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. (1964/1968: 136) What Merleau-Ponty is getting at is that I experience
Ponty is clear on

a thing and in the experiencing have to acknowledge my own thingness , my taking part in the flesh of the world; I only experience because I am part of the sensible world. However, this
does not mean that every part of the sensible world is sentient in the way in which I am sentient or even in some minimal rocky or teapotty kind of way of being sentient. To treat rocks and teapots in that way is to project my kind of expression of the flesh of the world to all of it. If I am going to do that, then I might as well stick with any kind of projections I choose, whether they be animate mountains or, conversely, dogs that cannot feel. The

point of all this talk of earth and flesh is to get to an explanation of how it is, not how I would like it to be.

The flesh analysis is critical for environmental ethics and ethical projects that seek to reorient towards nature Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) In recent years Merleau-Pontys philosophy has taken on a newfound importance within the field of environmental philosophy. Particularly since the publication of his lectures on nature at the Collge de France, there have been myriad investigations of the implications of Merleau-Pontys ontology for philosophical thinking concerning the human relationship to nature.1 While these inquiries deal with a multitude of

subjects and philosophical issues, there is a general consensus that Merleau-Pontys notion of flesh is his central contribution to environmental philosophy and ethics. Thus, Isis Brook speaks for most when she maintains that the importance of flesh lies in how it provides a distinct account of the human relation to nature, while she herself finds that Merleau-Pontys ontology legitimizes wonder as a virtue.2 Discussing nature in terms of flesh is intended to provide our idea of nature with a depth and richness, an activity of its own, that the traditional conception of it is thought to lack, and to do so without appealing to any reality beyond the sensual one in which we live.3 The idea of flesh accomplishes this reconceptualization by revealing the mutual imbrication of the subject and object within perception.4 Simon James situates the appeal of Merleau-Pontys philosophy in its de-centering of humanity, since to conceive perception as a self-reflexive relation of a single element is to picture it, not as a human act, but as something like an event, and one, moreover, that has a transpersonal and indeed trans-human dimension.5 These sorts of claims make Merleau-Pontys philosophy especially attractive in light of recent analyses such as Jane Bennetts concerning the need to rediscover sites of enchantment within the world, that is, to experience a combination of excitement and apprehension that accompanies a disruption of the everyday order of things.6 Difficulty arises, however, because despite the claims of environmentally oriented philosophers that
MerleauPontys philosophy offers a non-anthropomorphic account of sensory experience, the prevailing scholarship on Merleau-Ponty takes the opposite view, arguing that nature

and things receive their dynamism from the human perceptual field. If the ontology of flesh is to be productively used within an environmental ethic, we must embark upon an elucidation of that notion in specific in order to see how it can meet the theoretical challenges of such an ethical project.

The phenomenological paradox of lived experience is reconciled through the reflexivity of the flesh Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) To compound the problem, Toadvine has pointed out an additional obstacle to any phenomenological attempt to formulate an ethical relationship to nature based on lived experience. He calls this difficulty the inherent paradox of any phenomenology of nature: to the extent that phenomenology starts from experience, we seem constrained at the outset to reduce nature to the range of our perceptual faculties, to frame it in terms of our spatial and temporal scale, and to encounter it in perceptual terms, that is, to humanize it.20 At first glance, this paradox poses a great problem for an environmental philosophy that would ground itself in Merleau-Pontys philosophy of flesh. Clarkes observations concerning Abrams philosophy can serve as an example of the hazards a phenomenology of nature faces. Her analysis shows how the ontological continuity between human and other beings in the world is established through the projection outward of a perceptual structure found within human (though very likely all sentient) experience. But if the reflexivity of nature is found only within perceptual experience, there is a problem for Abrams animism insofar as the dynamism of nature is really just an anthropomorphic or biomorphic projection. That being the case, it is difficult to see what motivation there might be behind Abrams ethic of reciprocity once the animism is abandoned. In order to extricate Merleau-Ponty from this anthropologizing paradox, Toadvine appeals to the reflexivity of flesh, also called the chiasm, with the intention of showing that human expression is a variety of natural meaning without being reducible to it.21 If expressions humans form concerning the natural world are inspired by nature itself, then nature itself must possess some innate sense that serves as the inspiration:22 perceived meaning is ontologically basic, such that the perceived world of nature is meaningful on its own terms.23 Even humanized nature, then,

expresses something about nature and puts us into contact with nature as the mute source of our expression.24 The mistake would be taking this expressed truth to be somehow exhaustive of the possible true expressions with respect to nature. Within every expression of truth, derived from our experience of nature, there remains a mute reference to those other possible expressions. Flesh, as a third dimension in which the distinction between subjective and objective becomes problematic,25 remains, to use Merleau-Pontys phrase, a pregnancy of possibles,26 which allows a continual intercourse between mute nature and human expression.27 The initial paradox is overcome insofar as the anthropomorphizing tendencies of our experience can neither be absolutized into natures solitary meaning nor be viewed as a solely human fabrication and projection. Experience, then, can serve as a basis for our philosophical investigations of nature because the expressed humanizations of nature originate within nature itself.

Because of the existence of beings in the fields of flesh (nature) we are able to see how nature is the totality of existing beings Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Before proceeding, it is important to understand in what sense MerleauPonty is following a Heideggerian path and in what sense he departs from it. To speak very generally, Heidegger believes that the fault with metaphysics is that it fails to distinguish being as such (the ontological domain) from the being of specific beings (the ontic domain), thereby leading to a situation in which nature refers both to the totality of existing beings (nature as what is) and to what makes beings what they are (nature as causal substrate). While Merleau-Ponty does not want to acknowledge any pure difference between the ontic and the ontological,67 he does find in Heidegger the idea that there is a moving relation between being and a being, a relation that cannot be fixed.68 In other words, precisely because the transcendental conditions for the apprehension of beings as beings affects the perception of the empirical world and vice versa, there will always be a mutable relationship between them, and the being of beings can only be grasped through a specific manner of appearing within a perceptual field. Merleau-Ponty, then, can be said to accept the Heideggerian aletheic conception of truth as simultaneous disclosure-concealment. Additionally, since the flesh idea is formulated within the context of ontological difference, it will also not be synonymous with being itself even if there is an intimate relationship between the ontic and the ontological levels of analysis. In disambiguating flesh and being, we must also take care to avoid equating nature with either or using the concept to elide them.

S - flesh->Internal relations (Anthro)

Orienting away from the human bodies lived relation to its milieu and towards the internal relations we sever out of the paradox that relegates to anthropomorphism Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) If an interpretation of flesh wherein the things themselves will possess a dynamism without resorting to an animistic hylozoism is possible, then it must begin, as Carbone suggested above, by showing how flesh is a common denominator between the human body and other sensible beings without, as Irigaray cautions us against, situating that commonality in the perceiver itself or a monistic substance. Such an understanding of the flesh is not unprecedented. Johnson, for example,
also calls our attention to Merleau-Pontys transition from Husserls conception of personal experience to Heideggerian fundamental ontology. He argues that though flesh is

most originally the flesh of our bodies, once our analysis of perceptual experience brings us before the anonymous and impersonal one that subtends our individual experience, there is a progression, a development in the meaning of flesh in Eye and Mind from human flesh to the more general meaning of the flesh of things.64 What Johnson recommends is that we understand this more general sense of flesh in terms of a logic of internal relations65 that will lead to an understanding of flesh as event and process.66 This brief suggestion offers important insight into how we might begin to understand flesh more generally through the idea of internal relations rather than through perception. As an alternative to understanding the flesh of things in relation to a human bodys lived relation to its milieu, then, we might understand the flesh of things in terms of their constitutive internal relations. The promise of this approach is that, if successful, it provides a way out of Toadvines paradox that does not relegate us to an essentially anthropomorphizing position that Barbaras suggests is the inevitable result of any philosophy of perception

S Flesh Politics More Ethical

Human interactions with wildness becomes more ethical with a flesh politics approach in creating an environmental ethic Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) A first step in cultivating such an ethic would be, as many philosophers have prescribed, to turn to a place-centered approach in which specific norms of behavior are developed that are appropriate for the specific inhabited landscape. If one accepts theories of place like those of Yi-Fu Tuan or Edward S. Casey, which maintain no hard and fast distinction between nature and culture, then it is possible to cultivate a new way of thinking about what might be wild within a given place and what is valuable about that wildness. Wildness might then, as Thoreau famously suggested, serve as a more fertile ethical benchmark than a concept of wilderness that requires a nature-culture distinction. As a field of fields, a place possesses certain qualities depending upon the relations that obtain within it. The wildness of such a place can be defined in terms of the places ability to sustain and proliferate a variety of temporalities formed through the presence of diverse fleshes. Understood in this way, wildness would not preclude human presence as long as human dwelling fosters conditions under which other forms of life (and geography) can flourish and evolve within their own temporal scale. We would no longer be forced into the dualistic dilemma of choosing between the seemingly incompatible ideals of removing all traces of humanity from a place or of accepting human managerial practices in order to preserve pristine wilderness. We might even set as an aim the cultivation of wild places within our predominately human places in order to re-welcome non-human forms of life and styles of living within our own communities and thereby enrich them. While there would no longer be any pure nature, accepting the ecological vision of nature as flesh offers a different perspective upon the human presence within nature and richer possibilities for creating human lifestyles that are less speciesist and ecocidal.

S Flesh > Openness

One can only understand the body after understanding what gives the condition of possibility or what allows for the latter to exist the fields of flesh better known as nature is what gives the body coherence Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) First, to call things field-beings refers to his shift from a philosophy based upon lived experience to one based upon institution: a field is what is instituted through the openness of a body to its environment. Though Merleau-Ponty admittedly privileges the human
perceiving body as an example throughout his corpus, he is equally cautious to contextualize the claims he makes on the basis of such analyses. For example, in the note Flesh of the worldFlesh of the BodyBeing, from May 1960, Merleau-Ponty claims that the

flesh of the world is not explained by the flesh of the body the flesh of the world that in the last analysis one can understand the lived body.85 While we shall return to this note and the notion of the flesh of the world momentarily, at present what is important is the acknowledgment of an ontological continuity between all beings, since each being is its field or relations, while at the same time providing for their differences by ascribing a distinct set of chiasmic relations to each. Understanding the thing as a field of relations gives them a depth86 and also helps us to understand what it means for a thing to be an essence. Recalling that an essence is how a thing has a certain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of radiating about a wholly virtual center,87 we can say that a thing, as a essence, is the nexus of flesh relations that constitute it as an individual. We can say more about things, however, since a thing is an essence situated at the level of nature. In his course on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty explicitly defines nature as pure passage,88 meaning that nature does not exist as a thing or kind of thing but, rather, that nature exists as the processes of temporalization and spatialization that occur through the mutual relations obtaining between beings along the dimensions through which they are open to their milieu. As field beings, things are in continual interaction with those other beings around them, and in their interaction they form a field of fields, with a style and a typic, which produces non-language significations.89 Calling things essences of nature, then, is to say that things are the nodes of exchange articulated within a place, within a field of fields.
and goes on to make the even stronger claim that it is by

S Naturalism
Eco-Phenomenology as a method overcomes the short falls of status quo environmental approaches by expanding our conscious sense of the natural and departing from naturalism Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. xviii) at As we have seen above, phenomenology in general, and eco-phenomenology in particular, take their start from a critique of naturalism and the attempt to break with its reductive mode of thinking . But in our final chapte4 "What Is Eco-Phenomenology?" David Wood seeks a certain rapprochement between phenomenology and naturalism. Phenomenology has an essential role to play in describing our involvement with the natural world, Wood notes, but the traditional conception of inten- tionality fails to uncover the deeper "relationalities" of our engagement with the world. These relationalities form a "middle ground" irreducible either to simple intentionality or simple causality, and our pursuit of them must therefore take both modes of involvement into account. Offering the plexity of time and the boundaries of thinghood as examples, Wood demonstrates the integration of intentionality with embodied existence and the world. Intentionality's embodiment and essential link to our human needs and desires-and through them to the larger milieu-closes the gap between phenomenology and naturalism, leading to a "natural- ization" of consciousness as well as an "expansion of our sense of the natural ." This nonreductive eco-phenomenology offers us new resources, Wood suggests in conclusion for understanding the complex logics and boundary relations that have been a stumbling block for Deep Ecology and other environmental approaches.

Ecophenomenology does not divorce us from the causal objective parts of reality, but rather understands the intentionality can be understood alongside causality. Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18)) We have tried so far to show that 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 non-natural 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, fearing, hoping, admiring - is not a causal relation, not a physical relation, but an intentional one. When I admire the mountain, the mountain is not affected, and even if rays of light
passing from the mountain to me are 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 even harder to sustain. And yet the absence of proximate cause does not refute causality. Think of finding a giant rock half way down a valley. Or sea-shells in a farmers field. To understand intentionality to be opposed to causality is important if we associate causality with determinacy, with linearity, and with a certain kind of automatism. But if the realm of causality were to be expanded in way that overcomes these prejudices, what then? One

obvious 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 processor, 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 squishing 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 for 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 brain, 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.xi 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 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 etc. 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 transformations and displacements. If this is so, intentionality is firmly lodged within my bodily existence, within the natural world.

S - Blurring subject/object
We create a space between the subjectivist and objectivist blurring the subject/object binaries Sally Fischer 2007 (Marleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling on the
Landscapes of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany) Merleau-Pontys concept of flesh is an attempt to root his previous phenomenology in its fleshy (ontological) soil and to radicalize his critique of dualism by thinking anew the space between the subjectivist and objectivist alternatives. It is a term meant to maintain the blurring of subject and object not only in the body, which he argues in his earlier phenomenology, but in all of the Sensible. He says, If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my bodyit is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my bodys operationand which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body (S 167). Yet he is not espousing an eradication of all duality. Rather, it is through a kind of deflection or divergence in Being, an cart, that the two lips of the flesh open up in an intertwining of noncoincidence. Maintaining a reversibility of the two lips, without coincidence, MerleauPonty is able to alter the notion of subjectivity that he offered earlier in Phenomenology of Perception, without abandoning it altogether. He speaks about an anonymous visibility, a pre-reflective intercorporeality out of which reflective life and ideality arisea generality that constitutes the unity of my body and opens it to other bodies (VI 142). It is perhaps a part of our own sedimentation in the Western tradition, particularly Cartesian thought, which emphasizes the individualism of subjectivity along with its technological control and power over/against objectivity that may lead us to conclude that this new way of understanding the relation of self/other in such nonhierarchical terms, in terms of an intertwining which arises out of an anonymous flesh, would have to mean an abandonment of subjectivity altogether. But if we live as these two dimensions of a single flesh, we need not abandon, but only to rethink the I in terms of a blurring (but not fusion) of ego-boundaries between self and world. In Signs, for example, he claims that we are woven into the same intentional fabric as things and as other animalia. There is a reversibility in terms of a chiasm or crossing between the sensing-sensible (animalia) and the sensed-sensible. Perception is possible because there is a preestablished harmony with things: he says, Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship . . . (VI 133).

S - Ontological Continuity
All bodies share a common nature and the human ontological continuity to discount difference between beings is only destructive as it ignores the continuities between bodies Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Our final task is to return to the question of ontological difference in order to clarify the relationship between flesh, nature, and being so as to confirm that we have not once again conflated nature, the being of beings, and being as such. At this point I trust that it is clear in what sense flesh is the word for the being of beings: each being, as a dimensional-this, an essence at the level of nature, is what it is due to its flesh relations with other beings. As these various fleshes interact, they form a distinct horizon around each of the bodies engaging in flesh relations, a horizon of space and time that is the flesh of the world.92 I would like to stress again that this idea of the flesh of the world is not an animistic philosophy. Though all beings, both animate and inanimate, dynamically contribute to the constitution of the flesh of the world, the manner in which animate and inanimate beings are able to do this differs dramatically. Specifically, I am arguing that the Flesh does not exist, especially as an animate substance, and therefore cannot serve as basis for attributing a form of subjectivity to inanimate beings. Rather, there are myriad bodies that simply are their flesh relations and, through their relating, constitute a larger system of relations. Human ontological continuity with the rest of nature is preserved since all bodies share a common nature, i.e., they are their flesh relations, but the specificity of various modes of being in the world is also preserved insofar as different bodies are open to different affective dimensions, are susceptible to different affections, and therefore are capable of different behaviors, some of which are intelligent or sentient, others of which are not. To discount the differences between beings is, in many ways, just as destructive as ignoring their continuities.

S Relationality
Our focus on a singular moment in time destroys our complex relationality with events and the environment. Only with phenomenological understanding can we reclaim the relationality Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18)) While time is central to my sense of phenomenology as offering a heightened grasp of relationality, our experience of time, and the temporality of our experience, can function both as an obstacle to this orientation and also as its central plank. If we think of time as a series of discrete now-points, or simply live in the present, relational complexity is dead. And yet, there is
no richer dimension of relationality than time. On the basis of our experience of time and the temporality of our experience, we grasp the continuous identities of things, the coordination of their pulsing rhythms, and many virtual and imaginative ways in which even in the instant we enter a connectedness that transcends the moment. And every form of connection is put into play and contested by the powers of interruption, interference, and breakdown. Phenomenology is indeed descriptive in the sense of trying to get clear about the structures of these relations, and disruptions, but such descriptions are also edifying, in alerting us to the illusions of immediacy, and in showing us how deep temporal complexity is articulated, and how it changes the way we see. Let me say a little more about these four strands: the invisibility of time, the celebration of finitude, the coordination of rhythms, and the interruption and breakdown of temporal horizons. 1. Time as invisible. It is a commonplace to identify the eternal with the unchanging, and time with change, which would put time and eternity at odds with each other. A clue to how misleading this is can be found in the relation between the visible and the invisible.

We typically think of the relation between the visible and the invisible in, broadly speaking, spatial terms. The invisible is either hidden by the visible, or occupies some other ethereal realm. But if by the invisible we mean what does not give itself to a certain kind of immediacy then we may find the invisible curiously closer to hand than we thought. If, for example, the invisible is to be contrasted to a sense of visibility to which the mere illuminated
availability of the thing in front of us is sufficient, then we may find the invisible to be a clue not just to a secret or hidden realm, but to a more subtle grasp of visibility itself. And for this, we need to move not to another deeper or more rarefied space, but to time.

Suppose I look out the window what do I see? A tree. There it is. It is there in front of me, as visible as I could want. But what do I see when I see a tree, what does seeing it consist in? If an
ant climbs up a tree, we might argue about whether the ant could really see the tree if it could only see a part of the tree at any one time or if it did not know what a tree is. It is clear that seeing can be compromised, or at least questioned, by certain kinds of conceptual or perspectival limitations. If this is so, then seeing a tree cannot just consist in it being there, in the light, and I having my eyes open. (Intuitions without concepts are blind. as Kant put it.) But there

is a less obvious dimension in which seeing is compromised that of time. We know that we cannot hear music at an instant, but that hearing requires participation in a certain temporality. We have to undergo an experience in time. It does not take long to hear that there is music playing in the house, but to hear the music as such, for example to hear what is being played, to hear the piece itself these each require a temporal engagement. Now of course it is possible that from only three bars I could immediately identify the piece, even have an image of the score flash into mind. If this happened, I would have come to recognize the true temporal extendedness of the object in a snatch, or glimpse. The moment would capture something importantly nonmomentary. And in this, and in many cases where there is in fact no score to be found,
the temporal pattern recognized in the moment is one that is essentially repeatable, however distinctive this particular occasion may be. By analogy I am suggesting that the life of the tree, the living tree, the tree of which we glimpse only a limb here, a trunk there, or views from various angles, this temporally extended persisting, growing tree, is invisible. Sometimes we try to capture this extended visibility with the word watch, as, last night I watched the match. In watching there is the suggestion of a certain synthetic activity that addresses significantly extended features in the object. Even there, we seem to run against the grain when we try to think of something that essentially unfolds in time as visible. Something

that merely perdures is visible because time does not operate as a dimension of essential unfolding or articulation. So one moment can easily represent any other. But something that grows, develops, and transforms itself cannot as easily represent that aspect of itself in any one moment. Think of those photographs of sporting victory which capture the moment of accomplishment. The raised

arms, the open mouth, the wild eyes mark the moment at which a certain significance has arisen in the course of eventsvi. The sign here, the mark of significant accomplishment, transition, or depth, precisely attempts to mark the relation between one particular moment and the temporal horizon of its significance. The sign renders the invisible visible. But it also renders the invisible as such invisible, precisely by providing a substitute for it. It is here, for example, that we find the paradoxical success of narrative. In summary: 6 a. There is an invisible in the
heart of the visible to the extent that the essential temporal articulatedness of things is not itself obviously presented in their immediate temporary appearance. b. Furthermore, how things happen in the first place is rarely itself present, visible, available to us, whether we think of this as an eruptive event (Heidegger), or the product of a contingent conjunction of forces (Foucault). It may, or may not, have ever once been visible. The question here is what can be seen, and this does not admit of a general answer. There are many ways in which They have eyes but they do not see. What

phenomenology does is to activate and reactivate the complex articulations and relations of things, restoring through description, through dramatization, a participatory engagement (bodily, imaginative etc.) with things. A turn to the articulatedness of things, and to the event(s) of their coming into being, is a return to the conditions of human fulfillment, and connectedness, but also to the sources of renewal, transformation and resistance.

This new approach of the infinity of time in the finite of moments reinvigorates relationality, injecting true meaning in even the most banal and humble of interactions. Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18)) 2. The celebration of finitude. That time lives as the invisible in the visible opens us to a transformed relation to time. To show this, it would be hard to improve on remarks made in the course of Leishman's introduction to Rilkes Duino Elegies: The ideal of complete and undivided consciousness, where will and capability, thought and action, vision and realization are one, is the highest Man can form, and yet so impossible is it for Man to realize this ideal, to become like the Angels, that it is rather a rebuke than an inspiration. What, then, remains for Man? Perhaps, in Paters phrase, to give the highest possible significance to his moments as they pass; to be continually prepared for those moments when eternity is perceived behind the flux of time, those moments when the light of sense/ goes out, but with a flash that has revealed/ the invisible world. The consequence of the impossibility of the angelic for us humans is the transformation of the most ordinary moment into an opportunity, or as Leishman
puts it, into an obligation: *T+he price of these moments of insight is a constant attentiveness and loyalty to all things and relationships, even the humblest and least spectacular, that immediately surround us. 7 This

sense of the infinite in the finite, which is precisely not a spiritual dilution but an intensification of the concrete, can take a number of forms. Repetition, and the awareness of repetition, can be taken to the extreme of intensity that we find in Nietzsches eternal recurrence. Here connectedness between individual events generates a kind of depth to every moment through which its very singularity is heightened. Looking into my lovers eyes, for example, one can so focus on the immediacy of the present that
the passage of time itself seems suspended. Finally, we can come to experience the passage of time as such a constancy that time itself becomes the best candidate for the permanent, what does not change. If I am right, these various approaches to the infinite in the finite involve a kind of prerepresentational part/whole relation in which the parts are seen to bear within themselves the imprint of the whole, not as burden, but as an intensification. Such

a relation captures the kind of complexity with which ecophenomenology would treat time.

S - Reorientation
The reorientation of relationality fosters a different relationship with nature which is more holistic Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Though naturalness is lost as a normative criterion, I do not view this as a problem as the ontology opens up less dualistic ways of evaluating human interventions within the field of nature. More traditional environmental ethics has revolved around questions of moral considerability, that is, whether there is a metaphysical basis for extending the circle of moral concern to beings other than humans, how far that circle can be extended, whether extending the circle is even desirable for an environmental ethic, what kinds of obligations do humans have to preserve nature, etc. By removing the oppositional definition of humanity and nature and the consequent loss of nature as both a normative ground and as a being, the content of our ethical deliberations can move in different directions, namely, toward describing what it might mean to contribute positively to nature. Since human beings are inextricably part of the field of nature, the ethical debates should revolve less around how to preserve a nature without humans and more around how best to engage with nature, how to leave a non-trivial space within nature for non-human forms of life, how to live with the changing face of the Earths geology and atmosphere without attempting to master it, etc. Toadvine expresses the issue nicely in saying that reconceiving the human relationship to nature as Merleau-Ponty does can lead to an entirely different conception of ethics, one that circles less around principles of moral obligation and that instead concerns our dwelling within the world.98

The reorientation of the affirmative fosters and cultivates beauty rather than perpetuating the destruction of the flesh of fields Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
Obviously these concluding remarks require further development and elaboration, but to do so in the current context would take us too far afield from the subject of the current investigation. I hope to have shown how the proffered interpretation of Merleau-Pontys notion

of flesh might contribute to a non-anthropomorphic ontology that could support the kinds of normative claims that environmental ethicists seek to make. While I believe
that these proposals are in keeping with the spirit of Merleau-Pontys philosophy, my concern has not been to give a precise account of Merleau-Pontys philosophy such that the

interpretation contained within is beyond all textual contestation. Rather, I hope the alternative way of thinking about Merleau-Pontys ideas will increase their relevance to the problems we face today. In this light, we might ask ourselves what kind of role do we desire to play within the flesh of the world? I for one would prefer to imagine a nature in which humanity collectively cultivates beauty rather than facilitates its destruction.

S - Dialogue
The body is a site of relation to the rest of the world opening to alterity Sally Fischer 2007 (Marleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Dwelling on the
Landscapes of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany) The notion of dialogue is central to his understanding of subjectivity as an opening in the flesh. Our very existence is founded on a kind of corporeal dialogue with the world and others. In fact, even in his earlier phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty calls perception itself a sort of dialogue (PhP 320).1 He describes dialogical interpersonal relations in terms of an intercorporeality (S 168), where the body, in its power of lived expression, is the medium of communication (PhP 181). The lived body, as the site of the relation of reversibility, as the movement of touchingtouched, as a perceiving-thing is the opening to alterity. Merleau-Ponty thinks that the notion of reversibility (really only a partial reversibility) does not only apply to my body, but also overturns our idea of the thing and the world (S 166). The transition or movement of partial reversibility can also take place between my body and another, because he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality (S 168). Bodies dialogue in a kind of compresence where I perceive (prethetically) a different sensibility before I perceive a different persons thoughts.

S Aesthetics
Aesthetics are key to practical changesif you value nature, you are more likely to promote and protect it SANART 1997, (ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS , Arnold Berleant, October 1997, Sanart Association for the
Promotion of Visual Art in Turkey, Founded by Benoit Junod, former First Secretary of the Swiss Embassy, http://www.sanart.org.tr/artenvironment/Berleant_fullpaper.pdf)
The aesthetic study of a particular environment may draw from the geomorphological and historical information we have of it and from our knowledge of the cultural traditions that helped shape it, yet it is important to relate this information to perceptual experience. It

is impossible to know a landscape fully by reading accounts of a region or perusing a map. Nor can we obtain such knowledge by looking at photographs, film clips, or paintings. Grasping a landscape aesthetically through such indirect means depends on the skill of the author, the artist, and the viewer or reader, and it is always difficult and partial. One contribution that the aesthetic makes to the cognition of landscape lies in recognizing the human contribution to the experience as well as to the knowledge of it. Environment does not stand separate and apart to be studied and known impartially and objectively. A landscape is like a
suit of clothes, empty and meaningless apart from its wearer. Without a human presence, it possesses only possibilities. The human contribution to landscape produces knowledge by being, not only by thinking; it provides an understanding gained through action, not contemplation. Furthermore, apprehending

the aesthetic value of landscape in this way not only offers cognitive gratification; it also provides a means of recognizing that value in experience and may arouse an incentive to promote it. The aesthetic experience of environment, whether formalized in
traditional practices or developed into guiding principles, has profound practical import.

S Aesthetics K2 V2L
Aesthetics gives value to life Hills, MA Degree @ University of Kent, 2010 (John, Facing down Death, Existential
Analysis 21.1, January 2010, p. 133) The mysticism of the ascetic, the contemplative, the poet, the artist and the shaman all seek to penetrate the boundary between death and existence. Many different narratives and works of art celebrate the mysteries they discovered in their searches. Whether it is the passionate poetry of Sufi wisdom, the enigmatic koans of Zen masters, the ecstatic writing of Christian mystics or the Jewish poetry of the Psalms, Songs of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes: all resonate in global consciousnesses. They enthral and engage our curiosity we are like children looking through the glass screen in the therapy room to see if the team can be detected. What they discover and leave us are resources of unparallel richness and beauty helping to face down death until the time it finally faces us down. The question in the end is less about the meaning of life and more about a life of meaning. The American philosopher Henry Thoreau put this better: I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived (Thoreau, 1854).

S: Waste Monument/Aesthetics
Possible mechmaking monuments to waste challenges the lie of progress that environmentalists and leftist movements fall prey to. Rather than holding onto flawed notions of modernity and autonomy, we should reconceptualize/break through our current conceptions of time and space Stimson, Blake, 02, Conceptual Work and Conceptual Waste, Project Muse, Project Muse,
Discourse, 24.2, Spring 2002, pp. 121-151 (Article) Published by Wayne State University Press, DOI: 10.1353/dis.2003.0029
The larger gain of this recycling, however, the

real artistic part of the operation, would extend beyond the immediate interests of industrialists and artists. By making monuments to waste, artists could challenge the reigning ideological consciousness of time or the lie of progress. Industrialists, activists and conceptual artists were all holding onto outdated assumptions about modernization. All three still believed in the failed dream of autonomy. The artists Spring 2002 135 Figure 5. Robert Smithson, proposal for mine reclamation project, 1973, (c) Estate of Robert Smithson/VAGA, New York, NY new role, he proposed, would be to serve as something like a Geist advisor guided by the principle of what he called a purely negative idealism and develop monuments that would function effectively as symbolic correctives to existing impoverished common-sense philosophies of history (Ultramoderne 65). Where unenlight-ened industrialists, nave political activists and technocratic con-ceptual artists continued to struggle unsuccessfully against the ravages of time (caught in the maze of their own historico-philo-sophical delusions like B. F. Skinners rats), the artistconsultants Smithson had in mind, would be performing a kind of public serv-iceas latter-day philosophesor agents of a distinctly postmodern enlightenmentby

breaking through the delusions of progress and, instead, begin collaborating with entropy (Earth 256). The needed dialectic, the entropic corrective that artists could contribute to the misguided and impoverished assumptions about history was wrought from arts scale sense or its capacity for mental distancing. This is how he explained it in 1969: If you get far enough away from any large scale image it diminishes once you realize that the world is just a dot, *it becomes+ less threatening... theres no scale fear... that is why scale is one of the key issues in terms of art (Four Conversations 2/1/1012). Rather than situ-ating the beholder at an idealist static vantage point outside of his-tory or at a materialist position within history, Smithson attempted to put the beholders perspective of time and space in flux, span-ning from the primordial to the futuristic and from the microcos-136 Discourse 24:2
Figure 6. New Yorker cartoon mic to the macrocosmic, destabilizing the limiting epistemological premises of both materialism and idealism from the ultimate view-point available to art (Ultramoderne 64). Size determines an object, he said, but scale determines art and the scale he had in mind was circular and unending (Ultramoderne 65).2

We need an aesthetics of decay to open our awareness to the failures of modernity and challenge both materialists and progressives, who are just flip sides of the same coin Stimson, Blake, 02, Conceptual Work and Conceptual Waste, Project Muse, Project Muse,
Discourse, 24.2, Spring 2002, pp. 121-151 (Article) Published by Wayne State University Press, DOI: 10.1353/dis.2003.0029
This was the new vision that art could offer to life, the way artists could contribute as a necessary part of society and art a necessary resource. Art and the Political Whirlpool or the Politics of Dis-gust is how he titled his response to Artforums 1970 art and politics survey that raised the question of arts social and political function. Art had a particular role and a specific adversary:

Politics

is a debased demonology, a social aberration left over from the past (Disgust frame 269). Art could help to forge a new, post-indus-trial, post-political, post-avantgardein sum, postmodernist public consciousness that stepped beyond the foolish and tension-riddled oppositions between the new social movements and the Establishment, between revolution and reaction, between cul-ture and counter-culture that had seemed so pressing in the late 60s. The political system that now controls the world on every level should be denied by art, Smithson wrote. Instead of investing hopes and ambitions in a more modernized, more democratic, more enlightened future social order that would never come and, hence, would result in strife and conflict, he wanted to produce anti-monuments that would help cultivate a collective conscious-ness which he described variously as sinking into awareness of global squalor and futility, and sink*ing+ into . . . a sickly lagoon called The Slough of Decayed Language (Museum 79). Art, under the rule of Smithsons aesthetics, would no longer shore up its own technocratic domain or maintain a confused oppo-sition between aesthetics and politics, art and life. Instead, art would once again have the moral purpose and public ambition that it had not enjoyed without doubt and anxiety since the time of the fellow-traveler avant-gardes; once again artists would produce public monu-ments rich with a philosophy of history, once again they would give form to a New Vision, a philosophers picture of the social totality gov-erned by an imagined future. The monuments Smithson had in mind, however, would not be monuments to progress, to a future utopia but the reverse. They would be monuments to decay, monuments to the failure of the modernist project that had always already been inevitable , monuments to Smithsons own version of the big truth. As Carl Andre put it, progressivism assumed by both ideal-ism and materialism, by both philosopher and technocrat, Smithson summoned a heretofore-closeted primary urge: the death drive of his-tory, the second law of thermodynamics
Bob . . . detested reform but not erosion or the lux-ury of waste (102). Against the

Breaking down the artificial barrier between art and environment is good Stimson, Blake, 02, Conceptual Work and Conceptual Waste, Project Muse, Project Muse,
Discourse, 24.2, Spring 2002, pp. 121-151 (Article) Published by Wayne State University Press, DOI: 10.1353/dis.2003.0029 Such were the terms of Smithsons critique of Kosuths work as reactionary and not adequately advanced: he had a vision of the future that Kosuths late productivist practice was incapable or unwilling to follow. Smithsons ideas about art continued to turn around the Neo-avantgarde opposition between thinkers and feel-ers but he sought to carry art through to the other side of concep-tualisms intellectualization. If conceptualism sought to give local definition to art and in the process further delineate the role of the artist by granting that role more professional turf and therefore greater autonomy, Smithson sought to sully the moral boundary between art and life, to further implicate the artwork in the sordid world around it, to dissolve its distinctiveness and in so doing dis-solve the residual idealism still surviving in a post-idealist world. Art was to dissolve its own identity as a positive value and to exist inde-pendently only as the sign of, as a monument to, the dissolution of idealism and its ossification in productivism more generally. 22 Kosuth was reactionary,
from this point of view, because his critique of the institution of art was not radical enough: it remained mired in a technocratic vision of work and did not plumb the depths of modernity and effectively challenge the reigning ideology of time at its core by developing an aesthetics of waste. It could not move beyond the image of the engineer as the social alternative to the philosophe.

S - Anthro
Eco-gov strategis perpetuate anthropocentric and egocentric modes of thought; rather we should emphasize a geoeco ethics inclusion of all humans and nonhumans into the environment Rowe 3 (Stan, retired ecology teacher, prof emeritus at the U of Saskatchewan, The Trumpeter
Volume 19, Number 2, http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/Roweliving.htm) Ethical systems express human values, which is to say that only what is valued will be treated ethically, as moral objects. When only people matter, then ethical concerns are limited to the human race. Everything else is only valued if it serves humanity. As ecological awareness grows, things otherthan-human are perceived as valuable, initially because of utility. With greater sensitivity and empathy, sentient organisms are recognized as valuable in and for themselves. Then legislation may be passed, as already done in some countries, to prevent cruelty to animals or to protect rare plants. Beyond organisms, affection and ethical concern may be extended to special places, to the landscapes of home remembered from childhood, or to majestic old-growth forests, to coral reefs with their dazzling tropical fish. This sequence illustrates "ethics by extension" as the individuals moral sense grows from the egocentric to the homocentric to the biocentric to the ecocentric. The weakness of ethics-by-extension is that its starting point the person, family, society gets most attention, while its outer reaches get the least. The ethical sense, extended beyond society to the nation and humanity as a whole, "plays out" before it reaches Earths non-human organic/inorganic realities. Just as light intensity varies as the square of the distance from its source, so the ethical impulse fades outward from its human-centered beginnings. This is clearly evident in the left-leaning political platforms of Social-Democratic political parties. Their environmental concerns are no more than a greenwash on the two fundamental issues that absorb most of their ethical interests: liberty of the individual (egocentric) and a degree of communality (ethnocentric/homocentric). Given the importance of Earth and its health, a better approach is first to emphasize the intrinsic values of Earths geoecosystems, and then turn to their valuable organic and inorganic contents. This suggests an ethics-by-inclusion that initially identifies the Lifesource/support as the highest moral object . By this logic, Earth is most worthy of ethical concern, then its
geoecosystems, then their organic/inorganic constituents of which humanity is one precious species. Such an inversion of traditional ethics is ecologically realistic. Further it teaches the human race humility a virtue so far in short supply. To the charge that placing Earth first violates the meaning of "ethics" as moral behavior between sentient creatures, the answer is that ethical actions emanate from human values and the latter need not be limited to the homocentric and the biocentric. When Earth is highly appreciated, ethics will be ecocentric, home-centered, an Ecological Ethics.

Anthropocentrism can be overcome through Merleau-Pontys analysis and recalcitrant humanism that is strived to. David Abram 1988 (Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth, Environmental Ethics, Volume
10 (1988) pp.101-120 http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/20717138/802102996/name/LGB+Temp+017.pdf) Here we are left with an immense and ultimately untenable gap between the flesh of the world which is sensible and not sentient and my flesh which is selfsensing. It is MerleauPontys recalcitrant humanism that strives to maintain this distinction at the same time that

his emerging ecological realism is struggling to assert the primacy of the worlds flesh: it is by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis we can understand the lived body. But it is simply because he is neglecting to consider other animals at this juncture that Merleau-Ponty is still able to assert that the flesh of the world is not self-sensing, for clearly other animals are a part of the perceived flesh of the world, and yet they have their own senses; following Merleau-Pontys thesis of the reversibility of the sensing and the sensed, they are clearly selfsensing. As soon as we pay attention to other organisms we are forced to say that the flesh of the world is both perceived and perceiving. It is only by recognizing the senses of other animals that we can begin to fill up the mysterious gap Merleau-Ponty leaves in this quote. Or, to put it another way, only by recognizing the full presence of other animals will we find our own place within Merleau-Pontys ontology. (Plants, as well, will come to assert their place, but our concern is first with the animals because they are our link, animal that we are, to the rest of the Flesh.) In this regard, it is essential that we discern that Merleau-Pontys thought does not represent the perpetuation of an abstract anthropocentrism, but rather the slow and cautious overcoming of that arrogance. It is only by listening, in the depths of his philosophical discourse, to the gradual evocation of a densely intertwined organic reality, that we will fully understand how it is that the flesh of the world is absolutely not an object.

A2:

A2: Policymaking
Scientifically-based policymaking is green governmentality without the critical act of practicing skepticism about scientific findings that are not concrete which makes policymaking ineffectual and unethical Luke 09 [Timothy W.: 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. 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].
The prospect of seeing Earth as a coupled human and natural system, which could be plagued by a sudden deep disruption, nonlinear 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 96-hour 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.

A2: Managerialism Good

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 Luke 03 [Timothy W. 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. Spring 2003, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91].
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 maybe are not that far removed from older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial regimes. 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 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: Instrumental Rationality

Instrumental Reason bad Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
As proposed by the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse (among others), the

rise of what they describe as instrumental reason would lead to subtle modes of domination not only between human beings, but also between human beings and Nature. Adorno and Horkheimer identify the domination of what
they call the power of abstraction with the rise of such a paradigm, which they famously associate with the negative consequences of the Enlightenment and the European industrial revolution. Under

the levelling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), they suggest, and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), freedom itself becomes subjugated to the spirit of mathematization, which, in its increasing positivistic acceptance, becomes a system of detached signs devoid of any intention that would transcend the system itself (Horkheimer and Adorno 2008). As such, both Nature and the fruit of our social relationships would be increasingly captured and simplified through standardized and calculable formulas geared to increase manipulation, regulation, mastery and control not only of Nature (viewed as a mere resource to be used for the sole benefit of humans), but also of human creativity, talents, imagination and potentiality, turned here in what we could name with Heidegger mere standing-reserve (Foltz 1995). Marcuse weaves this condemnation of abstraction with this idea that the processes by which Nature (and humans) is subjugated to the violence of exploitation and the destruction of pollution is first and foremost an economic and political one. Marcuse describes as one of the fundamental functions of civilization this endeavour to change both the nature of human beings and their natural surroundings in order to civilize them (Marcuse 2008): a process which has led the Western civilization through the progressive disenchantment and demythologization of Nature (through the mathematization and historification of our apprehensions of Reality, which both endorse the fact\value distinction) toward the fabrication of humans as both subject and object of this highly mathematized societal organization, namely a market society driven by a expansionist capitalist economy in which human freedom is mainly experienced through acts of consumption commoditised through numeric values and urges for constant renewal.

A2: Predictions
DA predictive models bad Sbastien Malette 2010, Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics:
Toward an Ontological Relationality, University of Victoria By expanding Foucaults analysis of biopolitics to include eco-governmentality, we can also notice that not only the notion of population, but also the one of environment has been shaped through the emergence of statistics and inductive modes of reasoning, leading to computer sciences and predictive models, all working to make predictable, and thus controllable, the random and chaotic relations that such a concept entails (Foucault 2004e, p. 323; Hacking 2006; Rose 1999). Hence, following Foucaults insights on the political significance of statistics, we can explore the ways in which the progressive mathematization of Nature has enabled various ecological rationalities and technologies to produce a wide range of norms which refer to Nature not only to supplement the power of the sovereignty-law apparatus, but also to shape a series of truth-claims about ecological modes of conduct by which rational individuals are expected to govern
themselves and others (Desjardins 1999; Ashford and Caldart 2008).

A2: We have experts

Eco experts are determinate of the commodification of the environment Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
Deeply influenced by such ecological representations, the

nineteenth and twentieth-centuries witnessed the emergence of different rationalities of government working actively at bridging medical, social, economical, biological and environmental arguments to formulate different evolutionary patterns in which not only life, but the management of everything which includes life, becomes the overriding criterion guiding political actions (Robert 1938; Campbell 2007; Schneider 1990; Jones 1986). Such evolutionary patterns significantly contributed to shaping a modern culture that perceived itself as naturally entitled to dominate inferiors races according to an evolutionary logic in which only the well-adapted, wealthy, technologically-advanced organisms should survive (Hawkins 1997). The economic translation of this argument progressively asked that all natural resources including human populationscome to be envisioned as commodities and\or state resources that had to be monitored, protected and enhanced by a growing variety of eco-experts working for the most part in coordination with state actors (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996). Entire societies were consequently analyzed and compared through the scope of their working productivity, vitality, good behaviour, adaptability and economical powers, leading to the development of racial and eugenic practices based on class, sexual orientations, geographical locations and ethnological and technological distinctions in order to rank the evolutionary continuum of the human race (Foucault 1999, p. 229; Rose 2007; Agamben 1998; Bauman 1989

A2 Warming/Science
Even if the science of their warming claims are true, In order to overcome the plausible deniability causing status quo stasis on climate change, we must first understand our flesh as inseparable from the flesh of the world Robert Kirkman 07, 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
While Working Group I of the IPCC is charged with measuring and projecting changes in climate , Working Group II is charged with meas-uring the actual and potential impact of climate change on biological and human systems. In their 2001 report, Working Group II summarized its findings on human systems that are especially sensitive to changes in cli-mate, including water resources; agriculture (especially food security) and forestry; coastal zones and marine systems (fisheries); human settle-ments, energy and industry; insurance and other financial services; and human health (IPCC 2001a, 5). Consider one striking passage from the report: 19 The vulnerability of human societies and natural systems to cli-mate extremes is demonstrated by the damage, hardship, and death caused by events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, ava-lanches, and windstorms. While there are uncertainties attached to estimates of such changes, some extreme events are projected to increase in frequency and/or severity during the 21st century due to changes in the mean and/or variability of climate, so it can be expected that the severity of their impacts will also increase in concert with global warming. (IPCC 2001a, 6) Put simply, if the most severe projections of climate change are borne out, then many human beings would be likely to suffer as a result. Whatever

their technical merits, descriptions and projections of global climate change by scientists on the IPCC may be deceptive, in a subtle but important sense. The objective detachment of scientific lan-guage can give the impression that the threat of global climate change is precisely the same as any other threat: a falling tree, a charging bear, a loaded gun, a dose of cyanide, a cloud of smog, or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. All of these are supposed to be taken as objective threats to our objective existence as organisms. If these threats are all alike in this sense, then it follows that our reaction to any one of them should be about the same, assuming that we are being rational: we should act immediately to avert the danger. So, given that there is widespread consensus on the objective account of global climate change, why do we not act immedi-ately and unanimously to avert the threat it poses? It would not be fair to assume that the problem is simply one of irra-tionality. While evasion and denial probably contribute a great deal to the sluggishness of both the
domestic and international responses to climate change, it is nonetheless possible for intelligent and thoughtful people to disagree about both the seriousness of the threat and the scope and timing of the appropriate response. More to the point, while denial

may seem irrational from an objectivist point of view, it may be that our lived expe-rience of the threat of global climate change gives it what might be called plausible deniability . From the
point of view of everyday life in the world, all threats are not equal. The processes that drive the climate seem remote from us in time and space, and so we

go about our lives attending to what seem to us to be more immediate and pressing threats, such as a sudden spike in the price of gasoline that makes it more expensive to earn a living. 20 The objectivist approach seems also to assume that we should care about the possibility of human-induced global climate change. But why should we? At least part of the answer lies in our own vulnerability. As liv-ing organisms, we find ourselves in an inescapable
predicament. We must act in order to live, and in acting we change our environment. Our knowl-edge is necessarily limited, so we must choose how to act without being able to foresee all the consequences of our actions. As

living organisms, we are dependent on our environment for the basic services that support our civilization and our very lives. Because we are dependent on our environ-ment, any changes in our environment including those we ourselves bring aboutcould pose a direct threat to everything we value, up to and including the continued existence of our species. Here again the objectivist account of human vulnerability seems to leave something out. If we are to be motivated to avert a threat, we

must per-ceive the threat; we must feel it in our bones. But how do we experience our own vulnerability? This question sets my first task, which is to articulate our lived experience of vulnerability, especially in the face of specific threats of various kinds. As a first point of entry into this task I turn to Maurice Mer-leau-Pontys ontology of flesh as he developed it in The Visible and the Invis-ible,especially in the pivotal chapter on The Chiasm. What I find there, in short, is that to perceive the world is to be perceptible within it: I perceive the world only because the flesh of my body intertwines with the flesh of the world . This intertwining is not
always benign, however, and the overlapping or even collision of flesh on flesh can harm me even to the point of obliter-ating perception itself. Vulnerability is the price of perception.

Science is not intrinsically bad; your approach is. Science cannot be understood outside of its connection to the flesh of the world; attempts to detach science from the relational fabric fail Robert Kirkman 07, 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 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).

Science failsambiguity (climate specific) Robert Kirkman 07, 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 This ambiguity itself has several distinct sources. First, however sophisticated scientists become at plumbing the depths of the world, the natural sciences will always be overshadowed by uncertainty. A scientific theory is always only a partial glimpse of what the hidden armature of the visible world might be, subject always to dispute and sudden reversals. Even if there is a broad consensus among scientists concerning the out-lines of a theory, there might still be credible grounds for disagreement over the finer points of the theory and over the predictions that are to be derived from it. In practical terms this means that however many scientists think it is highly likely that a human-induced change in the climate is looming, no scientist can say so with absolute certainty. Then again, no scientist can say with absolute certainty that such a change is notlooming. Even if climate change is widely regarded as likely, there is bound to be

disagreement over the degree and consequences of that change. It is diffi-cult enough to agree on a fiveday weather forecast when the climate is presumed to be stable.

A2: Realism
Realisms assumptions about state sovereignty are outdated and dont take into account contemporary inter-environmental relations. Realism only appears inevitable because its advocates refuse to recognize alternatives, not because no alternatives exist Timothy W. Luke 03, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, June-July 2003, Alternatives, p. 395-96 Purists in the neorealist camp of international relations continue rehearsing their alleged truths about international anarchy and national sovereignty. Yet these principles were first propounded in early modern Europe. The worlds total population was then no greater than 500 million people. Few systemic technical formations were articulated on a regional , much less a national or global, wale, and even London, Paris, and Rome were little more than postmedieval thousand-acre villages that each held fewer than eighty thousand people. Now, in a world of more than six billion people, of whom half live in vast, urbanized settlements, sustained by systems of complex megamachineries, these precepts about enduring international anarchy and unyielding national sovereignty may not be entirely wrong, but they also are not completely right. In many ways, the market forces that are environizing the world today essentially are generating a single built environmental space, or omnipolis, on a global scale.7 What is understood as lying beyond modernity where nature is gone for good expresses itself through these urbanizing forms and processes. Of course, many quarters of this world system remain rural, and they are still wracked by chaos. Nonetheless, the rise of such environizing omnipolitan networks also is continuously deruralizing what remains, because global markets develop and exchange shared forms of material life.8 How, then, can the world truly be anarchical in the prevailing realist sense

A2: Utilitarianism
Their utilitarian impact calculus is indistinguishable from self-destruction Exploding crises speak to the incapacity of anthropocentrism to account for limitless violence against our common world Oliver 2010
*Kelly Oliver, prof phil at Vanderbilt U, Animal Ethics: Towards an Ethics of Responsivenss Research in Phenomenology 40: 267-280] Oliver 6 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, gated-communities 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 plane t. 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.20 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.

A2: Ontology Bad

Focus on Ontology is key to spur resistance to problematic dominant discourses Bleiker 3 (Roland Discourse and Human Agency School of Poli Sci U of Queensland
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 values. Over an extended period of time, such tactical expressions of human agency gradually transform societal values. 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 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.

A2: Ks
Aff is a prereq to the alt/root cause arg Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
Paradoxically, the decentralisation

and constant re-modulation of power relations according to new ideas, antinomies, movements and the latest fashionable modes of protest and social criticism constitute the political horizon that allows the dominant capitalist system of production and its adversaries to perpetuate themselves as conditions of possibility for one another. No capitalist society can exist without the competitive, dynamic, antagonistic and progressive ethos by which peoples beg to differ, beg to resist, and beg to possess forever more: this is how we came to understand the power of freedom. The mapping of the environmental movement as part of the New Social Movementswith its discontent with political centralization and authority; its boredom with long lasting struggles; its excitement with the shape shifting and irreducible aspect of cultures; its use of global media; its transversal mediums and punctual sites of mobilisation; its sense of purpose through perpetual resistance, and other agonistic practices for their own sake shows exactly this. It shows that radical environmentalism, as shaped by the New Social Movements, operates on the very same frequencies as its favourite foes: capitalism, neo-liberalism, and the global spread of a free-market and entrepreneurial society. These common elements include a shared hatred of political centralisation, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, fixity of all sorts, assimilation, exclusion, restriction and conformism. These are the spectres that have driven the modernization of environmentalism toward more of the same problems generated by that ethos. It is not the absence of resisting energy that is lacking in contemporary environmentalism, but the failure to grasp and understand the underlying structures holding the antinomies that are presented to us as genuine options. What is missing in the work of many environmentalists is knowledge of their own position and the effects they produce within open-frameworks shaped through intersecting regimes of truth, which modulate the ways in which we perceive how we should govern ourselves and others in ecologically sustainable ways. The question, I suggest, is one of governmentality, that is, the critical mapping of the ways that we perceive
ourselves as beings in need of governance, in need of resistance, in need of freedom.

A2: Marxism
Foucaults answer to Marx Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
As I have argued elsewhere, these two critiques can be dismissed by a careful reading of Foucaults work (Malette 2009). As Foucault himself emphasises, each level of analysis calls the other into consideration (Foucault 1997, p. 132). His microphysics

of power, as Foucault himself argues, is not a matter of size, but rather of depth (Foucault 2004e). To be sure, Foucaults genealogical methodology definitely puts him at odds with the dialectical\historical materialism of Marxism, which basically establishes in stone the rules of the game to play and the correct pathway toward emancipation (Darier 1999). Foucaults methodology, on the contrary, assumes that there are neither definitive rules framing the games of power we find ourselves in, nor any grand or universal narrative that can be applied to all situations of power. As Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish, our present arises as much out of these moments of critique as out of some relentless logic of regulation (Rose 1999, p. 278). And for Foucault, Marxism was exactly that: a moment of critique, which, following the Soviet experience, clearly became an allencompassing logic of regulation (Foucault 2004e, p. 94; Foucault 2001, p. 857). For Foucault, only a contextualised analysis of power possesses the advantage of tracking shifts of power in their context, thus revealing the ever-transforming effects of power where they emerge without being seduced or excessively shaped by one of its manifestations.

A2: Capitalism
Strategies of eco-governance mask and perpetuate capitalismonly risk aff solves Patrick Bond, 2012, June 18, 2012, At Rio+20: Values versus prices, Climate and Capitalism,
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/06/18/at-rio20-values-versus-prices/ Its useful to interrogate the eco-governance elites assumptions. Im here in Rio at the International Society for Ecological Economics conference (ISEE) within a critical research network the Barcelona-based Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) whose leaders, Joan Martinez-Alier and Joachim Spangenberg, issued a statement appropriately cynical about the Green Economy: The promises are striking: conserving nature, overcoming poverty, providing equity and creating jobs. But the means and philosophy behind it look all too familiar. Unfortunately, after the original 1992 Rio Earth Summit, multinational corporations increasingly dominated the emerging terrain of global environmental governance. The United Nations Environment Programme came to view the sustainability crisis as the biggest-ever market failure a dangerous distraction, according to the two political-ecologists, because Describing it this way reveals a specific kind of thinking: a market failure means that the market failed to deliver what in principle it could have delivered, and once the bug is fixed the market will solve the problem.

K links to the SQ, not the affmodernist discourse regarding the environment reduces it to a system of resources and production processes for human benefit 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) Over the past nine decades, the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not changed significantly. In fact, this code of eco-knowledge has only become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Paralleling the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts on the shop floor and professional managers in the main office, resource managerialism imposes corporate administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use in the face of excessive demand) on the supply side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature must be reduced-through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global economies-to a cybernetic system of biophysical systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce "resources" efficiently and in adequate amounts when and where needed in the modern marketplace. In turn, Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the eco-

knowledges of resource managerialism as the source of "goods" for sizable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial "bads" also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people
who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically monopolize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. Many of these ecoknowledge assumptions and geo-power commitments can be seen at work in the discourses of the Worldwatch Institute as it develops its own unique vision of environmentality for a global resource managerialism.

Status quo ecological modernization embraces capitalist managerialism this undermines environmental movements and reform David Pepper 99, Professor of Geography at Oxford Brookes University, 12/1/99,
(Ecological modernisation or the 'ideal model' of sustainable development? Questions prompted at Europe's periphery, Environmental Politics, Vol.8, No.4, Winter 1999, pp.1-34, PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON, Informa World) However, in this review I wish to argue a more sceptical line: that serious weaknesses within EM theory emerge when it becomes the basis of a policy agenda. The argument is triggered by initially reflecting on Ireland's
mainstream environmental policies and practices, which are couched within EM discourse. Here, on Europe's periphery, the problem of a proper environment-development balance is particularly sensitive.

I relate the potential pitfalls and failings of Ireland's embryonic SD policy, and its EM assumptions, to wider contradictions within the EU, and then ultimately within global capitalism. Because these well-known wider contradictions tend to be ignored in much EM discourse, the discourse itself becomes Utopian and impractical. By contrast, more unfashionable sustainability discourses within radical environmentalism - for instance the 'ideal
model' [Baker et ah, 1997] - could on re-examination ultimately offer some rational and practicable strategies for strong sustainability. I conclude by considering the case for seriously entertaining at least elements of these strategies in relation to Europe's periphery. The core features of EM discourse are outlined in Table 1. Essentially, EM

eschews earlier and/or more radical environmentalist approaches by rejecting the notion of an irreconcilable opposition between capitalism - involving constant economic growth, technological development and the spread of consumerism through global marketisation - and the goals of environmental conservation. EM theory holds that a new phase of capitalist development is taking place: ' ... marked by dissolution of the conflict between economic progress and responsible environmental management
because it will be possible to achieve both objectives simultaneously' [Cohen, 1997:109]. EM discourse sees environmental protection not as an impediment to capital accumulation but as a potential source of further accumulation; economic benefits and competitive advantage being said to accrue from preserving genetic diversity and from anticipatory environmental protection rather than paying out to clean up a mess.

In this positive-sum game, technological and managerial experts, business and industry all become key actors in fulfilling the environmental agenda, rather than its enemy. EM corresponds with neo-corporatist political arrangements because it 'presupposes a consensual and interventionist policy style', and is applied in countries which since 1945 have
stressed the competitive advantages that come from state investment in production [Mason, 1999: 93]. However, while the state legislates for the new policy principles (Table 1), in the contemporary ideological climate its role becomes contextual and steering, rather than dirigiste as in the 1970s. The more active state and supra-state environmental planning which EM could imply is circumscribed by a neoliberal Zeitgeist that insists on government at a distance and is difficult to resist [Neale, 1997]. As an approach to sustainable development, EM fits well with capitalist ideology [Hajer, 1995] Some commentators therefore see it fairly unambiguously as the theoretical foundation of a weak and reformist (rather than strong and radical) SD approach. Connelly and Smith [7999:155], for instance, say: 'Generally, advocates of strong sustainability are critical of the idea of EM, in which economic growth and environmental protection are taken to be complementary.' EM, they say, is green capitalism - modified, but its basic processes unchallenged; an interpretation 'built in to the reasoning off government, business and economists and virtually impossible to challenge at the points where it matters' [1999:114]. They see EM as justifying the status quo by subverting more radical green positions, and 'those endorsing the EM model... [as having] not fully comprehended the radical potential of demands for SD' [1999: 59]

A2 Capitalism BP root
Biopower is the root cause of capitalist expansion Michel Foucault 78, College de France, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY VOLUME I, 1978, p. 140141. This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism: the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required: it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power endured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth
century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated

in the sphere of economic processes, their development and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements,

The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.

A2: Heidegger
Heideggers diagnosis of Nature is one that posits animals as poor in the world with no perception our affirmative seeks to recognize that Nature and animals were never and are never objects, rather, they are critical to the changing world around us. Westling 10 *Louise: prof of biology at the University of Oregon Merleau-Ponty's HumanAnimality Intertwining and the Animal Question Configurations, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 161-180 Project Muse] What is thus unfurled? asks Merleau-Ponty. What is the subject that Uexk ll speaks of? The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat (p. 176). To answer this question, he reports von Uexk lls explanation that a chain of events is unfurled from the egg to the chicken and that it never becomes an object, because its internal law never becomes visible to us. We see only momentary manifestations that are always in the process of changing or even disappearing as some new shape takes over. Essentially, this is not the appearance of a new force, because the living creature works only with physicochemical
elements in a spacial and temporal field where a surging-forth of a privileged milieu causes those elements to join according to unseen relations. Once this occurs, Merleau-Ponty says, *w]e can

at this moment speak of an animal, which is like a quiet force regulating, making detours, preserving its own inertia as, for example, the planar worm does if it is cut in two, each part becoming a whole animal (p. 177). It would be difficult to find a more dramatic contrast between this sense of multiple, abundant, sentient agency and Heideggers interpretation of Uexk lls Umwelt as a self-inhibiting ring that fundamentally captivates each animal, thus withholding the possibility of the manifestness of beings. For Heidegger, this means that nonhuman creatures cannot have genuine perception; they are poor in world.29 In contrast to that negative view, recent microbiological research has supported Uexk lls understanding
of the active way that organisms shape their worlds, and information theory has extended the ideas about intrinsic meaning and the kinds of communication that Merleau-Ponty drew from him. Richard Lewontin, for example, explains that organisms

not only determine what is relevant and create a set of physical relations among the relevant aspects of the outer world, but they are in a constant process of altering their environment. As they consume, organisms and living systems also produce; they are the transformers of materials, taking in matter and energy in one form and passing it out in another that will be a resource for consumption for another species.30 Indeed, the environment is
coded in the organisms genes, since the activities of the organism construct the environment.31 From considering how animals create their Umwelten in interaction with their surroundings, Merleau-Ponty goes on to explore physical resemblances of animals, such as butterflies or preying mantises or the Arctic fox, to the environments in which they live. For him, the existence of the sense organ is similarly a kind of mystery, like the resemblance of the butterfly to its milieu, because it forms before it has anything to sense, as the butterfly forms before it knows what surroundings to adapt to; it is a physical history of relationship at the same time that it anticipates the world it will encounter.

A2: Deep Ecology

Deep Ecology is mired in fascistic thought excludes the ability to view the human relationship with nature. Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18))
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 metalegislator 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 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18)) 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 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 teammate 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 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: Performance
Phenomenology is a performanceit sings the word word Llewelyn, visiting philosophy professor at Loyola Univ. of Chicago, 2003
(John, Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 59-60) at One way of moving beyond phenomenological description or of rethinking description as performance is illustrated by the history of Heideggers move through phenomenology to thought.: If phenomenology is a move from philosophy that sets up the definition of essences or concepts as its ideal to philosophy that describes best by giving examples or exemplars, Heidegger's later thinking is a move that supplements such description with performance, the singing of song, in both a wide and a narrower sense of the word. Indeed, with the help of, although not
always in unison with, Holderlin, Goethe, George, Morike, Rilke, and the thinker- scientist-poets by whom Plato and Socrates were moved, not always suc- cessfully, to try to write sober prose, Heidegger sings the word "word" and thereby each

thing that calls to be called by a name or a proname or some other part of speech. Perhaps the philosopher and the poet and the scientist working together may alter by complicating what one may risk calling a Weltaischiuung, notwithstanding Heidegger's qualms about what goes by that name. This word may be risked because it can mean both how human beings regard the world and how the world regards human beings, how it concerns us. To think regard in this latter ethical or "ethical" sense, which may be "deeper," because presupposed and there- fore prone to be hidden by the former sense, is to rethink the sense and directionality (Sinn) of the hyphens of noesis-noema and of being-in-the- world. This is what Heidegger's thinking of the ecology of what he calls the
Fourfold (Geuiert) or Fouring (Vieren) would do, with its emphasis on the interdependence of the components, which he calls earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and his emphasis on their being each of them according to its own way of being or essencing, fiigsam seinem Wesen.

Resistance/Leftist movements fail

Resistance strategies of criticism are bad Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
By means of the same genealogical logic, however, one

can criticize Foucaults invitation to free ourselves from ourselves as a strategy profoundly engrained within the episteme of liberalism. The Foucaultian ethos of freedoman ethos of a perpetual resistance or innovation against the historical processes that make us the way we arecan be explored as the ultimate psychological consecration of advanced modes of liberalism: namely, the way in which we perceive freedom as a perpetual act of resistance (an
act of resistance which can only be actualized by turning certain premises of a regime of governance one must previously accept against themselves). It can be argued that, as

a form of subjectivity shaped by liberal governmentality, we have internalised the historical patterns that have produced advanced liberalism as a mode of governance, including the process of resisting what we perceive as being authoritarian government (Rose 1996, see also Dean and Hindess 1998). In other words, we have become subjectivities who think of ourselves as perpetually in need of resisting something in order to be free. On a psychological level, our endeavour toward resistance is translated as our ongoing desire to individualise and personalize our wa y of life (Rose 1989; 1995; 1998). Our ongoing resisting way of life would
always presuppose something to oppose, something to react to, and\or something to innovate about.

The antagonism of the alt fails/resistance strategies and movements bad Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
And yet, Foucaults analysis of liberal

governmentality also suggests that the exercise of our freedom can be equally co-opted as a pervasive mode of regulation. Foucaults studies in liberal governmentality reveal the contours of a governmental framework whose function is precisely to absorb and transform resistance as innovative and often deepening ways to secure social order and governance. It leaves nothing outside its reach. The strategy at the core of liberal governmentality is quite simple: resistance, as long as it addresses itself to government for correctives, reinforces the role of government as a caretaker. Resistance is in fact vital to liberal governmentality for it expresses the desires and discontents of civil society, to which governments can then respond by adopting various strategies as would good caretakers. Viewed from this perspective, grassroots movements, think-tanks and other resisting organizations are not so much repressed within liberal governmentality as they are encouraged to manifest themselves and speak up to authorities. Their
resisting inputs would indeed be essential for they would help shaping the next governmental rationality, which, by assimilating critiques as demands to be further and better governed both deepens the regulative grip of government while restoring a sense of public and democratic consensus. In short, liberal

governmentality relies on our critical rationalities and agonistic tendencies to perpetuate itself as this ongoing state of renewals and crisis.

Freedom/resistance movements fail Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
On the one hand, the rise of ecological rationalities can thus be seen as the logical extension of the dissemination of biopolitics and the deepening of a rationale of security which now target our relations to the environment as a source of peril for the wellbeing of populations (explaining the shift of the first radical critiques of environmentalism toward their cooption into process of governance). In the name of freedom, then, such ecologizing dissemination and deepening should be carefully monitored. Yet, on the other hand,

the dissemination and deepening of such green rationales seems to be framed by a rationality of government operating via the perpetual overturning of any limits to our freedom of

becoming otherwise than prescribed, that is an ideological tendency endorsed by Foucaults ethos of freedom\resistance which appears without any serious resource to challenge the homogenizing de-culturalization via the global spread of liberal individualism (modulated by Foucault through the prism of practices of the Self that no overarching rationality can control for too long); a devaluation of Nature as merely a social construct constantly shifting (thus forbidding any teleological or rational goal to be articulated outside the conceptual constructs we solipsistically frame ourselves with); and a decollectivization through the capitalist privatization of industries and resources (no solution on how to
govern ourselves economically has been formulated by Michel Foucaults severe critiques of the Soviet regime and socialism as governmentality), all

of which contributes to fuelling the current ecological crisis we are experiencing by strengthening the paradigm by which other possible relationships to Nature are basically denied by default.

Resistance strategies fail Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
The problem we have identified with the concept of governmentality in our last chapter remains, however, in its entirety when it comes to eco-governmentality; the multiplication of ecological rationalities appears to be used both to fuel practices of resistance against what are perceived as the fruits of reckless and rapacious capitalism and corporatism, and to deepen practices of governmentalization by which new norms are deployed to control behaviours from an ecological standpoint where there is no more externality. Hence, the danger would be the proliferation of green practices of governmentalization penetrating (thanks to our own demands to be better governed) all layers of the relational tissue which binds all and everything, which supports all living and non-living beings alike, and which makes inside\outside boundaries a secondary question. The cause evoked to do so would be the protection of Nature in all its complexity, diversity and unity, namely a global environment made of infinite localities we all share, human and non-human actors\subjects\objects alike. Now

it is clear from the various works of green governmentality that we should resist, or at least be aware, of actual or potential Green modes of domination and ecological depoliticization. Preaching resistance becomes, however, a complex issue when we understand that resistance and governmentalization collapse into one another through the framework of advanced liberal governmentality in which our resistances toward governmental authorities serve as steppingstones for deeper modes of regulation. At the core of our ecological predicaments, it appears that our very conception of freedom versus tyranny falls into desuetude when it comes to the emerging ecological paradigm.

Perm Flesh Multiplicity

No being or thing is flesh but rather the properties of flesh cant be exhaustively enumerated nor reduced to one another, as the notion of the inbetween interconnectivity between everything Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Before embarking upon the reformulation of Merleau-Pontys ontology, it is important to understand the motivations behind the shift in emphasis from the lived body to a general theory of affect and to do so by exploring the limitations of the traditional interpretations of flesh.42 There exists a wide array of views concerning how exactly we are to understand flesh, due to the cryptic descriptions found in both the manuscript and working notes to The
Visible and the Invisible and the unfinished nature of the text. Lawrence Hass offers a typology of the term wherein he categorizes Merleau-Pontys usage into three broad categories: flesh

as carnality, as reversibility, and as an element of being.43 In the first case, flesh is taken as an intentional, strategic alternative to the age-old notion of matter.44 This sense of flesh is the one to which Abram appeals when he says that all beings are of the same stuff; as carnal, fleshy beings, we are all bound together in an ecological whole. Reversibility refers to the aforementioned reflexivity of sensible experience wherein the sensing body itself is always within a sensible field. Hass explains the last sense of flesh, that of an element of being, in terms of its role as the medium of our experience.45 Hass holds that these senses of the flesh are not unified but, rather, are expressive gestures best understood as composing a Deleuzian conceptual multiplicity, meaning that since there is no being or thing that is flesh, the properties of flesh can be neither exhaustively enumerated nor reducible to one another. As a multiplicity, flesh is, rather, a complex concept that will honor rather than deform the proliferate, over-spilling life of what he now calls wild being;46 the plasticity of flesh resides in how its various characterizations can always be multiplied or enter into novel conceptual relations.

Perm - Beings->commonality
flesh as an adhesion between beings and not a being itself justifies a permutation and the combination which is already non-unique as we are all one Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) So, following Johnson, we shall seek the commonality between beings in the flesh of things and the flesh of the world thought in terms of internal relations. The first step in understanding the flesh of the world and of things in this context is to recall that flesh is a relationship and not itself a being. In a working note from December 1960, Body and Flesh ErosPhilosophy of Freudianism, Merleau-Ponty speaks of flesh as one sole and massive adhesion to Being.69 In speaking of flesh as an adhesion to Being, we already see that flesh is not Merleau-Pontys word for being, as is frequently thought. Additionally, describing flesh as adhesion indicates that flesh is a manner in which a body relates to other bodies through its immediate contact with them. To reinforce this interpretation, we can turn to a contemporaneous note, Vertical and existence, wherein we find a common Merleau-Pontian assertion that bodies within perception are individuated by means of lcart, divergence. What is novel in this case is that he goes on to explain that this divergence is filled precisely by the flesh as the place of emergence of a vision.70 We discover flesh between bodies, and vision emerges as a specific kind of relation between them. Putting these two ideas together, we can say that flesh is a relation between bodies, the connection between them that isolates each as a separate body and yet holds them all together in one world. Perception, as a relation between bodies, is but one singular instance of a more general relationality. In other words, because flesh is an open relationship of affection, vision emerges from flesh as a specific form of openness to other beings. Since all relations occur between singular bodies, each relation will have a specific affective or meaningful character dependent upon the constitution of those bodies, the history between them, etc. For this reason Toadvine and others are correct to assert that there is sense within the world not of human origin, but we must also note that there are horizons of significance for each body formed through its own relations between it and its surroundings. Thus, in a bodys encounter with the place that environs it, there is a reciprocal action between bodies, each side of which is both passive and active: on the one hand, a body articulates a field in which it finds itself (activity), but only insofar as its capacities open upon that field (passivity); on the other hand, the body is affected by its relations with the articulated beings it encounters in the field (passivity); but, insofar as it too is a part of the phenomenal field, the constitution of the field is altered through that affection (activity). To return momentarily to Dasturs attempt to differentiate Heidegger from Merleau Ponty on this point, we can now see that the two are actually closer together than previously thought. Flesh, conceived as a form of relationship, is a structure that makes possible affective relations, not an experience of a perceiving subject. The reflexive structure of flesh ends up playing an existential role similar to that of attunement within Heideggers philosophy, the difference between them being that for Heidegger the structure is an existential of Dasein rather than of corporeal beings in general. The ontological conception of flesh is an attempt to establish a radically relational ontology in which the internal relations between bodies

are constitutive of a beings identity, while, as for Heidegger, these constitutive relations are also mobile and fluid

Perm - History->flesh
Language, History and time itself is possible through the flesh as its a form of relationality Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Merleau-Ponty calls this form of relation the chiasm. I mention this point only because, in the November 1960 note Time and chiasm, Merleau-Ponty identifies the chiasmic relation with the form of reflexivity described above and immediately proceeds to conclude: and that itself is the flesh.71 If reflexive, chiasmic relations are constitutive of flesh, then, rather than hearing obscure usages of the term, when Merleau-Ponty speaks of history as flesh,72 the flesh of time,73 the flesh of language,74 flesh as expression,75 etc., we can hear these usages of flesh as describing various forms of relation that are embodied in different phenomena such as time or history. Thus, speaking of my flesh refers both to my body as the medium through which life is lived and the structural relations that organize that life, which is to say there is both a descriptive phenomenological account of flesh as I live it in relation to other things and an ontological account of flesh in terms of the assemblage or nexus of relations that constitute that body as a medium. On this account, however, the ontological conception of flesh is what makes possible the descriptive claims concerning envelopment and composition: if relations were not chiasmic, nothing like language, history, or time would be possible.

Perm flesh binding

The affirmative is the glue that holds everything together and is able to bind due to the nature of the relationality of flesh which assembles everything into a single volume Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
From the preceding analysis, one can draw the conclusion that the essence of flesh does not, properly speaking, lie in the descriptions Merleau-Ponty offers of it. Rather, those descriptions are Merleau-Pontys attempt to express that essence indirectly, to say what flesh is without naming it. In this sense, Hass is correct to call Merleau-Pontys descriptions of the flesh expressive gestures, but to do so does not prevent there being a unified sense or essence toward which Merleau-Ponty is gesturing. If

an essence is, as Merleau-Ponty claims, to be found at the joints or hinges that secretly bind the myriad variations of a phenomenon,76 then the essence of flesh must be found not in what is invariant among the manifestations of flesh but in what holds them all together. The key here is the word bind [relier]: in French, as in English, binding can refer not only to a connection between discrete individuals but also to the process in which various pages or leaves (feuillets) are assembled into a single volume. The contention, therefore, is that the essence of flesh lies in how these affective relations described above are held together in a single

A2: Anthropocentrism
Our method engages in a framework that is beyond traits of humans. Casey, distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook Univ., 2003
(Edward S., Taking a Glance at the Environment Preliminary Thoughts on a Promising Topic, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. ) at We need to make a new start to find the equivalent of the face in the envi- ronment. Instead of trying to locate this in a particular feature of that envi- ronment-its body or its mind, or in its sentience or its feeling (as in Buddhism or Whitehead)-we are better advised to look to a larger framework that does not borrow any of its basic traits from human beings . I refer to the environingworld and, more particularly, to what I like to call the place-world. It is axiomatic that every entity of the environment, human or nonhumary belongs to the natural world, and it belongs there in virtue of the particular place it inhabits. Thinking this way avoids invidious searching among species for priority in the ethical realm; it focuses on what all natural entities, including unspeciated ones, share: belongingness to the "place-world." Every entity, living or not is part of this world, and therefore the ultimate ground of ethical force in the envi- ronment belongs properly to this world as a concrete, complicated nexus of places. An imagined dilemma points to the rightness of this line of thought. Faced with the choice as to whether we would destroy a given member of a species or its habitat, we would surely prefer to save the habitat even if it meant sacrificing the animal. The value accrues not just to the larger whole but to the place-world in which certain animals flourish. Or to put the same point somer,vhat differently: whereas we value human animals primarily for what they are in each individual case (we can be face to face with only one Other at a time), we value animals not only for themselves (this we certainly do as well, as we know from the case of beloved pets) but also and ultimately for their belongingness to the place-world which they coinhabit . The source of the ethical commitment they inspire in us stems in good measure from our appreciation of the places to which they belong as coordinate members of the same habitat or territory.l6 being.

A2: Ecophenomenology = Anthropocentric

The nuanced approach of eco-phenomenology overcomes the anthropocentric tendencies of phenomenology alone Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. xiv) at In the next chapter, "Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology," John Llewelyn examines Husserl's description of transcenden- tal subjectivity and Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as potential points of departure for a phenomenological ecology. Llewelyn find_s that the eco- philosophical possibilities of both are limited by the anthropocentrism latent in their work: for Husserl, this anthropocentrism comes to the fore in his account of intersubjectivity, while it surfaces for Heidegger in his claim that the everyday world of Dasein unfolds as a totality of utilities. This worry is mitigated, for Llewelyn, by the recognition of the historical unfolding of phen-omenology's self-understanding, which bring with it increasingly rich notions of phenomenological description. Llewelyn suggests a fusion of Heideggers later thinking of the Fourfold (earth, sky, gods, and mortals) with Levinas's insight that the ethical imperative rests on the singularity of the face. This "deep" eco-phenomenological framework would replace the shallow anthropocentrism of earlier phenomenology.

A2: Anthropomorphism
Our analysis is not anthropomorphic but rather transcends the notion of human body being present for relationality to exist Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) The anthropomorphism issue is the more vexing. As Toadvines investigations show , even self-conscious attempts to overcome anthropomorphism can relapse into it surreptitiously. To recapitulate, the concern is that any theoretical inquiry into the nature of nature subjects the world to a human perceptual and conceptual constitution that frames and structures our intuitions of nature. The danger of this epistemological situation lies in making a category mistake whereby the constitution of a body within the human perceptual field is mistaken for a characteristic of the world in general. Thus, if the flesh is a perceptual relationship established through auto-affection, to take flesh as the structure or substance of reality is to project the reflexive structure of human perception onto every being. On the other hand, according to the proposed transformation of the concept, perception is but one manifestation of a general form of relation, and flesh neither requires sentience nor reduces all beings to their appearance to a sentient observer. Beings will engage in spatializing and temporalizing relations regardless of human (or any sentient beings) presence. When discussing human knowledge of the natural world, we must still be continually vigilant against our anthropomorphizing tendencies, but there is nothing inherently anthropomorphic concerning the ontological claim that a being is the nexus of relations that affect it through the dimensions of its body.97

A2: Essentialism
We are all members of the flesh of the world we acknowledge that differences exist between organisms, just as a left hand is different than the right, but they are both apart of the same body and flesh. Westling 10 *Louise: prof of biology at the University of Oregon Merleau-Ponty's HumanAnimality Intertwining and the Animal Question Configurations, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 161-180 Project Muse]
The Visible and the Invisible is unequivocal in asserting the essential wildness of Being and the intertwining or chiasmic relationships among all creatures and things in the dynamic unfolding of reality through evolutionary time. Human

beings, like all other living things, are immersed in this flesh of the world, a spatial and temporal pulp where the individuals are formed by differentiation.11 Within this flesh, species and individual organisms manifest not only formal resemblances, but also identical constituting substances namely, atoms, molecules, and microorganismsthat embody or mirror biological macrocosms. Heidegger would be horrified to think that each human or other animal body was itself a symbiotic community of many tinier bodies. Yet this new understanding would not have troubled Merleau-Ponty, who asked: Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly.12 When Alphonso Lingis describes the
hundreds of bacteria inhabiting our mouths to neutralize plant toxins or those digesting the food in our intestines,13 he is extending this point to recent discoveries about the genetic and cellular makeup of our bodies that came long after MerleauPontys death, but that show that the

symbiotic intertwinings within each organism do indeed mirror those outside them. But Merleau-Pontys concepts of cart and dehiscence account for distinctions among living creatures at the same time that there is kinship and continuism. The analogy he uses to explain this situation is that of our two hands both touching and being touched by each other, both parts of the same body though also distinct from each other. As it is with our two hands, so it is also between our conscious awareness of our body and its inaccessible inner thickness, between our movements and what we touch, and between us and other kindred creatures. This is a synergy of overlapping and fission, identity and difference.14

A2: Biopower Inevitable

Not all functions of government are bio-political Mitchell Dean 99, Professor, Sociology, Macquarie University, GOVERNMENTALITY: POWER
AND RULE IN MODERN SOCIETY, London: Sage, 1999, p. 100. Bio-politics is a fundamental dimension, or even trajectory, of government from the eighteenth century concerned with the government of and through the processes and evolution of life. It constitutes as its objects and targets such entities as the population, the species and the race. In Foucault's narrative, however, the detailed administration of life by bio-political (and, it should be added, disciplinary) practices is not coextensive with the entire field of politics and government. There are at least two other dimensions of rule that are important here: economic government, which is internal to the field of government conceived as the art of conducting individuals and populations; and the theory and practices of sovereignty. Both provide liberalism with the means of criticizing and halting the effects of the generalization of the norm of the optimization of life.

A2: Ecophenomenology = Ivory Tower

Our method is divorced from the ivory tower of academia Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. Xx-xxi) at One final point about the aims and scope of eco-phenomenology deserves mention, namely, its transcendence of disciplinary boundaries. Although phenomenology as a contemporary movement began among philosophers and has persisted within the academic discipline of philos- ophy, academic philosophers are quite probably a minority among phenomenologists today. This is simply because the insights originally developed within the context of philosophy have quickly proven them- selves adaptable to a range of concerns, theoretical and applied, across the boundaries of discipline, language, and nationality. In parallel, ecophenomenology is now coming to awareness of itself as a theoretical movement among philosophers and ecologists. But, like phenomenology before it, eco-phenomenology may also bear valuable fruit in cross-pollination with other academic disciplines and with fields outside the academy. In time, the insights of eco-phenomenology hold the promise of bringing about a dramatic shift in our current understanding of ourselves and of our place in the natural world. For us today, such an end would be an incomparably greater harvest than all of the olives of Miletus.

Framework

Our K is First FW 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 [Simon: Prof. of Geography and Political Economy at Carleton Univ., 2K2 Simon,
Environmental Security]
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 remainde r 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 assump tions 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 numer ous contexts from biodiversity decline to stratospheric ozone holes, and from rising childhood asthma incidence rates to the contemporary sufferings of marginalized

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 radioisotopes, or any one of many other matter, but the totality of the disruptions caused by modern industrial systems and the
peasants and refugees.

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

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
trajectories of industrialization and modernization are implicit in most conventional analyses. 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.

Reps Key
Nothing in nature pre-exists its representational conflict any policy action that seeks to interact with nature must investigate its representational practices. Luke 97 [Timothy W.: 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., 1997, Ecocritique, p. xi] The Environment. Silent Spring. Embattled Nature. Our Ecology. Population Explosion. Damaged Ecosystems. Mother Earth. Terms such as these have turned into anchor points for social critics, moral philosophers, and policy experts over the past three decades. Because nothing in Nature simply is given within society, such terms must be assigned significance by every social group that mobilizes them as meaningful constructs. As a result, a never-ending flow of moral arguments, cultural quarrels, and policy squabbles constantly collide with various constructions of nature, economy, and culture deployed in the political discourses of any state and society. Many styles of ecologically grounded criticism circulate in present-day American mass culture, partisan debate, consumer society, academic discourse, and electoral politics as episodes of ecocritique, contesting our politics of nature, economy, and culture in the contemporary global system of capitalist production and consumption. As these debates unfold, visions of what is the good or bad life, where right conduct or wrong action for individuals repose, how progress should or should not be realized, and why solidarity or estrangement might grip communities increasingly find many of their most compelling articulations as ecocritiques.2 Ecocritique has become a common genre of analysis mobilized for and against various projects of power and economy in the organization of our everyday existence.3

Reps K2 Policymaking/Prereq
Representations and discursive framings of the environment are the only way to base actual environmental policy without our framework you cant ever make policy. Luke 03 [Timothy W.: 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, Spring 2003, Aurora Online, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91]. So the book of 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, 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 mining, to master nature and transform its materiality into goods and services. By their lights, 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 the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure. Directed towards generating greater profit and power from the rational insertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production, 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 open-ended projects of eco-system management. 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 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.

Ecophenomenology First

Phenomenology Good
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 Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. X-xi) at If philosophy does have a contribution to make in today's practical decision making , this contribution will likely begin 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 cur- rent practices. To answer
these questions, we need the help of philosophy' The suggestion 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 more surprising that the present volume is dedicated to 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 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 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 2003 (David, What is Eco-Phenomenology?, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 230-231) SC
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.

Ontology
Altering status quo human perceptions of nature requires an expansion of consciousness and what we allow into it Wood, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, 2003
(David, What is Eco-Phenomenology?, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 221-224) at We have tried so far to show that the gap between naturalism and phe- nomenology is in an important way dependent on how one thinks of nature. The fundamental principle of phenomenology-that of intention- ality-specifically names consciousness as the central actor: "all con- sciousness 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 necessary for this admiration to take place, the admiration is something of a different order. I may be dreaming, say of an imaginary golden moun-

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
tain, making a causal account of the relation even harder to sustain. expanded in a way that overcomes these prejudices, what then? One obvious way of beginning to bridge the gap between intention- ality 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 noth- ing 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 pre- cise shape of the imprint. But information can be registered, without it "registering" with the clay. What then is distinctive about human con- sciousness? 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 intention- ality 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 natu- ralistically 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 fun ctions is ir conrplt'x nonrc,ductive natural setting, in which humans needs, desires, fears, and hopes reflect different lev els 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 con- sciousness 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 inte- grative basis for this connectedness in our embodied existence. And we must not forget our capacity for productive transformation of the inten- tional 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 cog- nitive 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

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 interpreta- tive 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 secondorder awareness. I have suggested that in these and other ways consciousness is tied up with the constructiory displacement, and trans- formation 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
various ways in which thinking about

consciousness would require, at the same time, an expansion of our sense of the natural.

That,

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.

Subjects only become real when we see it as a part of the infinite process of existence, but also within that infinite flux be able to see its distinct finiteness. Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18))
It is possible to imagine a world without things, or at least a cosmos of gaseous swirlings and passing clouds. It may be that what we imagine is not possible, that for there to be swirlings, there have to be the cosmic equivalents of coffee cups or bathtubs to contain the swirlings. Nonetheless, we seem to be able to imagine a thingless world. But it is not our world. We

could of course imagine a viewpoint on our world in which what we now experience as things would be so speeded up that these things would appear as processes. Extinct volcanoes would be momentary pauses of an ongoing activity, as when a swimmer turns round at the end of the pool. Individual animate organisms would be seen as part of a wider flux of chemical exchanges. Things as we know them would disappear. And as this speeding up would enable us to see things, to make connections, that were not previously available, who is to say that it would be a distortion? Do we have any basis
for saying that seeing things at this or that speed is more accurate? Well, perhaps we do. If we imagine everything so speeded up that it happened in an instant, it would be impossible to make distinctions at all. It is hard not to see that as an information-deficient environment. And

at the opposite extreme, we can imagine such a slow perspective that rivers did not detectably flow, and rays of light seemed to linger forever in the suns starting blocks. Such perspectives would be distorting because the phenomena of relative change and relative stability would not be available. And as these imaginative experiments are conducted with the memory of such a distinction being indispensable, it is hard not to see these other extreme views as deeply deficient. It might be said that the very slow view really does teach us something deep that nothing really changes. But that is
much less deep a conclusion from a world in which change is not apparent anyway, than from a world of which we might say that plus ca change mais tout rest la meme. All this is to encourage us to suppose that not only would it be difficult for us to make sense of a world of total flux. But that if such a view were to rest on the idea that the temporal frame from which things are viewed is up to us, the flux view is simply a mistake. To

make this point the other way round on the total flux view, there would be nothing very special about May 18 1980, the day on which Mount St. Helens erupted, compared to the day before, or the day after. On the ordinary view which we are defending, there really are events as well as processes, births, deaths and catastrophes, as well as continuities. And these concepts are of an ontological order, not just epistemological. That does not mean that we may fail to notice them, or to care much. When we crush cicadas under our feet, we may not register the crunch, and if we do, think of it as part of a wider process in which only a small percentage of these creatures survive to maturity. But we do know, and most if pressed would acknowledge, that there are individual cicadas, and that crushing them ends their lives, even as it allows that cicadas body to re-enter the food cycle by providing nutrients for nematodes. So, things may come and go. But for them to come and go, they have to be real while they are here, or else they could neither come nor go. Buses come and go, but it
would be a strange passenger that refused to get on the bus on the grounds that buses come and go. Or even more deeply, that this bus will eventually be scrapped. The

mechanic working on the bus knows that although the parts will eventually wear out, the connections between the parts is real enough that if one part fails, the bus may not run, and if it is replaced, it will. The surgeon knows the same about his patient. And the poet knows the same about the word she ponders. If she gets that word right, the poem will fly. Permanence, then, is no test for reality, and many ways in which we think about internal complexity, the part/whole relation, functional integrity would be impossible unless we admitted the existence of things.
It could be replied that these considerations are no less fictional than the original belief in things, and that, of course, once we make one error, others will follow. Of course I do not really doubt the existence of things, or worry that you need this demonstrated.

Nonetheless, good stuff happens when we try to explain why we take things seriously. References to mechanics, surgeons and poets are to people concerned with maintaining, or creating complex things, things which can break, or breakdown, or falter, or fail to be realized. Here we have distinguished between machines, organisms, and works of art. Mount St. Helens was a very large lump of rock held together by whatever forces bind crystalline structures together, and by gravity (and torn apart by pressure from molten magma). A rock is not a machine or an organism. But even a rock has a certain organized integrity. David did not throw sand in Goliaths eyes; he threw a rock at his forehead. And the rock arrived at his forehead all at the same time, causing serious damage to the skulls capacity to protect the brain, bringing about the collapse of the whole Goliath.

Before transformation of the subject can occur it is important to isolate the boundaries by which that subject has separated itself from the other. Wood 2001 (David, What is Ecophenomenology, Research in phenomenology, Volume 31,
Number 1, 2001 , pp. 78-95(18)) Permanence, then, is no test for reality, and many ways in which we think about internal complexity, the part/whole relation, functional integrity would be impossible unless we admitted the existence of things. It could be replied that these considerations are no less fictional than the original
belief in things, and that, of course, once we make one error, others will follow. Of course I do not really doubt the existence of things, or worry that you need this demonstrated. Nonetheless, good stuff happens when we try to explain why we take things seriously. References to mechanics, surgeons and poets are to people concerned with maintaining, or creating complex things, things which can break, or breakdown, or falter, or fail to be realized. Here we have distinguished between machines, organisms, and works of art. Mount St. Helens was a very large lump of rock held together by whatever forces bind crystalline structures together, and by gravity (and torn apart by pressure from molten magma). A

rock is not a machine or an organism. But even a rock has a certain organized integrity. David did not throw sand in Goliaths eyes; he threw a rock at his forehead. And the rock arrived at his forehead all at the same time, causing serious damage to the skulls capacity to protect the brain, bringing about the collapse of the whole Goliath. It might be said that nothing of much importance could be true of all these things, from giants to mountains, from buses to poems. Perhaps the differences between them will turn out to be even more interesting, but the point of identifying them all as things is to draw attention to something they share, which I have called organized integrity.viii Obviously this comes in many shapes. Rock composed by aggregation has a less
organized integrity, than rock that, under compression, has formed a large crystal, where the parts have come together in a way that reflects a pattern of organization (as in a snowflake). And

to capture the kind of integrity we find in living organisms, we need to speak of self-organization and (dynamically) of growth, selfmaintenance, self-protection and reproduction. Between rocks and rockfish, there are of course many other kinds of organized complexity such as machines, stock markets, weather-systems and plants. My point in offering here a reprise of the great chain of being, is to bring to the fore the idea that things, and the organized integrity that they manifest, comes in many forms. And that their unity depends, typically, on the relationships between their parts. Now this relationship may be as sensitive to disruption as you like, or as resistant to disruption. A watch mechanism is given a case to keep out dirt that
would disrupt its workings in a split second. Gyroscopically driven mechanical systems have the power to maintain their balance in the face of external agitation. What

we commonly take to be typical of living systems, however, and some other animal collectivizes and human creations, is that they each actively maintain some boundary with what lies outside them. Such boundaries are, in part, the products of the very processes that maintain them. Boundaries are the way stations between insides and outsides, the sites of negotiation, of transformation, of sustenance, of protection. Boundaries are real, and yet they are often recessive and ambiguous. Boundaries are not at first things, but they arise in and for certain things, and they may even turn into things. (Think of the Berlin Wall, think of the
line we must not cross in a relationship.) But for our purposes, what is especially important is that boundaries are the sites of a special kind of phenomena limina and a whole new opening for phenomenology.ix

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 Wood, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, 2003 (David, What is EcoPhenomenology?, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 230-231) at 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 ecolo- gists 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 obvi- ous, 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 eco-phenomenological 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 powers- to 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, late ethics professor at Florida Atlantic Univ, 2003 (Don E., Back to Earth
with Reflection and Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 122) at Reflection on the primordial (or primal) awareness of the world shows two things important for the development of environmental phi- losophy. 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 con- text, 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 them- selves. 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.

Before Politics (Practical Reason)

Eco-phenomenology as a strategy is viable and debate is the best forum. Only through the practice of reflecting, observing, analyzing and describing will it become conventional Embree, Professor at College of Arts and Letters Florida Atlantic Univ., 2003
(Lester, The Possibility of a Constitutive Phenomenology of the Environment, EcoPhenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 48) at Mental or encountering life can either be a matter of operations in which an I is actively or passively engaged or it can be habitual or tradi- tional, and there are belief characteristics along with intrinsic and extrin- sic values and uses that are correlative with positive and negative believing, valuing, and willing. This general scheme has been specified for the environment in similarly broad terms. All of this can be refined. Preferential valuing, for example, has not been hitherto mentioned, but can be found in many easy as well as difficult cases. Then again, single values and uses, emphasized for convenience in the above exposition, are actually rare, while structured systems of values and of uses are not. Beyond its capacity to clarify-that is, reflectively to observe, analyze, and describe valuing and willing, which can be specified for the environ- ment -constitutive phenomenology includes a theory of how reason or justification can be turned to in order to contend that one or another course of believing, valuing, or willing is right. This issue has not been addressed in the present chapter.l3 The above taxonomy of environmental encounterings is not normative, but can be made so .1a And, finally, while most constitutive phenomenologists recognize what Husserl called the "constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude," which can suffice for many philosophical purposes, most phenomenologists of this type also accept the transcendental phenomenological epoche and reduction and that procedure too can be used for purposes of ultimatejustification. But these dimensions of the constitutive phenomenology of the environment are beyond the scope of this chapter.

The status quo is sees the Earth not at all or devoid of meaning. We must internalize an awareness of the lived world to move beyond factual information as the primary representative of it Marietta, late ethics professor at Florida Atlantic Univ, 2003 (Don E., Back to Earth
with Reflection and Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 122-123) at The second important observation about our awareness of the lived world is that there is no separation of factual information from meaning and value. Merleau-Ponty describes the primordial lived world as charged with meaning. Recognition that an object has certain value for us, such as its being attractive, can come before recognition of its physical qualities. This has implications for ethics that we will indicate later. A truly individual self that is achieved through separation from other persons and the world about us is not discovered in reflection on our primal experience of world, the world experience that some existential phenomenologists refer to as the pre-thic, the awareness before conscious reflection has separated matters into various kinds and categories. We find this separated self when we engage in what Merleau-Ponty called intellectualist analysis.: This is the sort of thinking that is at home in a

Cartesian world, the world of separated subjects and objects. Within this mode of reflection we make qualities of which we are aware in concrete reflection on our most primal experience into mere elements of consciousness; whereas, Merleau-Ponty says, a quality so discovered is not an element of consciousness but "an object for consciousness." Intellectualist analysis draws us away from reflection on the world as it is given to us, "and we construct perception instead of revealing its distinctive working; we miss . . . the basic operation which infuses significance into the sensible." Thus we make the mistake of attributing to "judgment" what is actually in experience.

Before Science
Finding our roots in the experience of nature is the best method for moving away from scientific naturalist notions that limit our conceptions of nature. Phenomenology uniquely opens a space for an examination of every aspect of our relation to nature outside of all limits so as to garner the entire spectrum and complexities of our natural experiences. Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. Xii-xiii) at Although phenomenologists do not all agree on the best manner of characterizing or describing experience, or on the nature of the subject that experiences, this general tendency to start from experiencehere taking this term in a broad sensealready demonstrates a basic convergence of the phenomenological method with the concerns of contemporary environmental thought. Our conviction that nature has value, that it deserves or demands a certain proper treatment from us, must have its roots in an experience of nature. As Neil Everden has argued, those approaches to nature that strip it of all experience qualities leave us with an unrecognizable abstraction, and certainly not with any version of nature that could have inspired our initial appreciation. From the beginning, phenomenologists have taken an interest in this process of abstraction by which the world as we experience it is gradually transformed into the naturalistic conception of the world taken for granted by contemporary science. One point of agreement among phenomenologists is their criticism and rejection of the tendency of scientific naturalism to forget its own roots in experience. This consequence of this forgetting is that our experienced reality is supplanted by an abstract model of realitya model that, for all of its usefulness, cannot claim epistemological or metaphysical priority over the world as experienced. The return to things themselves and the critique of scientific naturalism both point in the direction of much contemporary environmental thought. Throughout its development, phenomenology has seemed to promise a methodological route toward the disclosure of an alternative conception of nature one that would avoid the reductionism of scientific naturalism as well as the excesses of speculative metaphysics. It should not surprise us, then, that today's environmentalists see promise in the methods of phenomenology. Phenomenology is set apart from other theoretical methods by its unique capacity for bringing to expression, rather than silencing, our relation with nature and the experience of value rooted in this relation. For environmental philosophers, phenomenology suggests alternatives to many of the ingrained tendencies that limit our inherited perspectives: our myopic obsession with objectivity, our anthropocentric conceptions of value, and other legacies of Cartesian dualism. Phenomenology opens a space for the interdisciplinary examination of our relation with nature, for a scrutiny of the historical and institutional construction of the "natural," and even of the role this concept plays in the formation of our cultural and self-identities. From its starting point in experience, phenomenology provides an open horizon for the exploration of all facets of our relation with nature outside of narrowly prescribed disciplinary boundaries. By doing so, phenomenology makes it possible, perhaps for the first time, for philosophical thinking to express and respond to the full range of our natural experiences .

There is a symbiotic dependency among species especially relative to the fabric of time. Nature is more than what humans decide to include in it. Wood, distinguished professor at Vanderbilt Univ, 2003
(David, What is Eco-Phenomenology?, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 220-221) at We have arrived at this point, the threshold of a new/old continent, by highlighting the reality of things, over against continuous flux, and their possession of a certain organized integrity. We moved on to claim that it is an initially distinctive feature of living things that they maintain this integrity by creating boundaries, which are sites of management of inside-outside relations. This story we are telling is not a biological story. Indeed, to repeat some of the Husserlian hubris, it is engaged in what I would call tentative legislation for any subsequent science. The hubris derives from the thought that there are categories and concepts importantly at work in any science that are not its distinctive property, but also that sciences themselves operate as boundary-generating systems. If so, individual sciences are not in the best position to talk about science as such. At these, part of the role traditionally played by metaphysics is here played by eco-phenomenologys concern with the fabric of time and with the events that occur at boundariesphonomena that are not the proper purview of any one science. Such a liminology deals not only with the maintenance of boundaries within individual organisms but the ways in which the shape and location of boundaries is transformed during growth, adaptation, and the struggle to survive, in which the breaching of these boundaries is coordinated in the interest of higher groupings (see families, organizations, sex, war), which deals with symbiotic and pro- ductive relations of dependency between species, and which deals with the psychic formations necessary both for the maintenance, mobilization and transformation of such boundaries. All this is not the subject matter of one science, but thinking through these liminological events is some- thing that an ecophenomenology could protect and encourage. What would liminology concern itself with? The imperative of boundary maintenance leads to such issues as dependency, cooperatiory symbiosis, and synergy. But also rupture, catastrophe, and transforma- tion. All of these are, in an important sense, natural phenomena, phe- nomena that appear at many different levels in nature. But equally they also suggest something of a concrete logic for nature. And not just what we usually include in "nature."

Impossible Ethics
Eco-phenomenology solves: the phenomenology of humanitys relationship to nature reveals an impossible and incomplete ethics able to respond to the value-ladenness of the environment. Brown, editor, and Toadvine, philosophy professor at Univ. of Oregon, 2003
(Charles and Ted, Eco-Phenomenology, 2003, pgs. xiv) at The preceding chapters have explored the ecological potential of fig- ures in the phenomenological tradition, and despite the differences in their points of departure, each aims for a similar destination: the devel- opment of a phenomenological mode of access to a valueladen domain of experience, an experience that can help us understand and justify alternative, eco-friendly conceptions of rationality and ethical action. In the next group of chapters, the concern with the method and interpreta- tion of classic phenomenological philosophers recedes while the phe- nomenological descriptions themselves take center stage. This gradual turn away from methodological issues and toward concrete descriptions reflects the traditional practice of phenomenological philosophy itself. In fact, the lifeblood of phenomenology lies in its concrete descriptions, the "return to the things themselves." By following the description of experi- ence wherever it may lead, phenomenology discovers new horizons for exploration. But it is also forced to constantly reexamine its own methodological presuppositions , and this possibility for methodological revitalizationis at the heart of its longevity as a vibrant philosophical method. The following chapters push the descriptive powers of phenomenology to new levels, while at the same time renewing the methodological self- examination that our exploration of the tradition has already begun. In "The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences," Ted Toadvine argues that the recent tendency of environmental thinkers to stress the "kinship" between humanity and nature runs the risk of col- lapsing humanity and nature into a predictable, continuous, and homog- enous unity. Our idiosyncratic experience of nature, Toadvine suggests, is not reducible to this predictable unity, and an ethical response to nature requires our recognition of its unpredictable, nonhomogenous, and non- continuous character. Drawing on analyses of corporeality, desire, and flesh in Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, Toadvine explores how such an idiosyncratic experience of nature might be approached without lapsing into noumenality. He concludes by suggesting that the radical exteriority of nature requires an "impossible" phenomenology-that is, an opening onto the unnameable opacity or resistance to perception and thought that nature discloses. According to Toadvine, the ultimate ground of an ethical response to nature lies in the im-possible experience of this opacity and resistance.

Turn Your FW is Managerial and a Big Asshole.

Domination is perpetuated by the ability of those in power to define the discursive framing of the field of contestation. Neither corporate managerialism nor traditional environmental activism has any hope of securing lasting change in contemporary environmental debates literally the ONLY hope for change is a representational strategy like ours. Luke 03 [Timothy W. 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, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, June-July 2003, Alternatives, p. 413-14] These new modes of existence present us with an opportunity. A world where one asks, What are world politics? and then fundamentally doubts all the answers about what the political world is taken to be gives both individuals and groups the opportunity to transform their spaces for effective action. Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their advantage by defining how the world is known. Unless they also face resistance, questioning, and challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will remain the dominant forces. Looked at by itself, the neat division of the world into the realms of international relations and environmental affairs remains somewhat colorless. Such terms continuously remediate our most common modes of interpretation, as they now prevail in the world. Indeed, this language spins particular wordsglobalization, sustainability, developmentinto either important choke points or major rights-of-way in the flows of political discourse. The connections between international relations and the environment assume considerable importance in the 2000s because much of the worlds ecology has deteriorated so rapidly during the past ten, thirty, or fifty years. This omnipolitanizing deterioration, in fact, has spread so quickly that neither green fundamentalist preservationism nor corporate capitalist conservationism can do much to solve the pressing ecological problems of the present. Now, after the industrial revolution, nowhere in the world holds out against machines; high technology is everywhere. After two world wars, few places anywhere in the world hold onto traditional formulas of authority; liberal democracy is spreading everywhere. After the Cold War, nowhere seriously holds forth as a real alternative to the market; corporate capitalism is everywhere. So only a truly critical approach to international relations and the environment can unravel why these forces interact, and maybe correct how they create ecological destruction. Improving the understanding of international relations as a scholarly discipline is one possible response to this new context. Strangely enough, the dysfunction of markets and states is a key constituent component of the contemporary world systems environmental crisis.

Relational Ontology Good

Relational ontology better than historical ontology Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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 shared understanding 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 Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)
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 reinscribed 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 Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)

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 inter-constitutive 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 Sbastien Malette 2010, (Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics: Toward an Ontological
Relationality, University of Victoria)

Challenging the dominant conception of the self, Naess eco-philosophy opens up human inter-subjectivity 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.

Misc.

Object relativism
The very being of nature and language are inextricably linked neither can be seen as positive or apart from one another, nature is relative to perception and movement and in this sense is relative to an embodied subject Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University)
The impact these arguments have upon Toadvines proposed solution to the paradox is worth noting directly. Even if we follow Toadvines reasoning concerning a

phenomenological philosophy of nature and thereby preserve lived experience as a legitimate form of inquiry, we still seem to be stuck within a subjective position, insofar as the sense of nature is still accessible and meaningful to human beings alone.34 Even if that position has become more open to, and is in dialogue with, the surrounding world, if the sense of nature is discovered by projecting the perceptual structure of the general perceiving body outward as the meaning of all beings, then the sense of nature that is uncovered is still only a sense in relation to the perceiving subject. Barbaras holds that the only way to avoid this difficulty, inherent in a philosophy of lived experience, is to take the organic body in general, life, as the basis for ontological inquiry rather than human experience, a fact that Toadvine acknowledges and endorses.35 As Galen Johnson points out, it would be hasty to replace flesh with an abstract conception such as life due to fleshs presumed anthropomorphism, because flesh, if conceived in terms of time and genesis rather than the human perceptual body, can help us to understand better phenomena like life and death as manifested within nature itself.36 Additionally, if the very being of nature and language are inextricably intertwined, that is, neither can be defined in positive terms and apart from the essential movement underway by which each crosses into the other,37 then this natural sense that is to serve as the foundation for human expression is, at least partially, dependent upon human perception and language. Thus, a positive anthropomorphism or a biomorphism fails to extricate the theory from the inherent paradox of phenomenology. They merely circumscribe the paradox within a different realm: rather than focusing on the generativity of nature itself qua nature, sense remains relative to vital perception and movement. In other words, regardless of the origins of the sense immanent to nature, this sense is relative to an embodied subject.

Body as the pivot-> constitutes reality

The body constitutes itself through the perceptual field because the body is necessary for agency Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) While bodies ought always to be the starting point for any analysis of Merleau-Pontys philosophy, I would like to call into question the basic assertion that flesh is fundamentally a perceptual structure originating from a sentient bodys lived-perception. This point more than any other is what I believe lies at the heart of criticisms of the notion of flesh such as the one Luce Irigaray offers. Indeed, if flesh originates in an individuals perception and others recei ve their autonomy and dynamism in virtue of a seer having given birth to it, are we not trapped within a kind of incestuous prenatal situation with the whole?56 As we have shown, the belief that leads Irigaray to this conclusion, namely, that flesh is primarily a perceptual phenomenon originating within a human perceiver, is widespread. John Sallis gives the thought its most succinct expression when he says, I make things fleshI let them be revealed as fleshby incorporating them to my own flesh.57 If this is the case,
it is easy to see why Irigaray would be concerned that Merleau-Pontys philosophy is, at its heart, another attempt to deny differences. On this interpretation, others and the

world are made flesh in virtue of their being present for the perceiver. In this light, claims like Sallis that our bodily relationship to the world is essentially erotic and that, in interacting with others in the world, we attempt to overcome the onesidedness of my bodily being by union with the body of the other58 seem to encourage the appropriative attitudes toward otherness Irigaray fears. The birth of the other is a result of asexual reproduction, a scission without an encounter with alterity. Even Barbaras seems to succumb to this conception of flesh when he says that *the body+ unfolds the dimensions in which things can constitute themselves and that the world is made of flesh, of these dimensions, of these axes of which my body is the pivot.59 If the body is the pivot of the worlds dimensions, the central point through which the world and the beings within it constitute themselves as things, then regardless of the capacity of things within our perceptual field to constitute themselves, they are still dependent upon the perceiving body for their agency.60

The world as we know it

Nature as an autoproduction of senses which gives the body coherence due to its spatial nature as the overarching all-encompassing field of flesh Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) With this understanding of flesh in hand, we can now turn to MerleauPontys recommendation that nature be reconceived in terms of flesh rather than as a cybernetic or fixed system of ahistorical laws.93 Nature is a process comprised of various fields of fields, but consequently the term has its scope limited: when we speak of nature, we no longer refer to everything that exists, all physical reality, or even a beings causal substrate. For this reason, nature no longer plays the role Heidegger
ascribes to it within the philosophical tradition, namely, the concept that conflates the being of beings with being as such.

Nature is simply the largest field of flesh that provides the living spatiotemporal context of our existence and in which we actively participate. In calling nature a field of flesh, however, it is important to maintain the distinction between the two concepts: nature neither is constitutive of a beings essence (i.e., it is not flesh proper) nor is nature a specific means of relating to beings (i.e., it is not, like language or history, a particular form of flesh). Nature appears as the non-instituted, a field of presencing independent of human perception, a field that does not depend upon the various institutions through which humans relate to their worlds, a field that nevertheless is an autoproduction of sense as a result of the interactions between the various constituents of the field.94

Not Animistic
The Reference that we are making is not essentially animistic rather we are careful to make that interference Bryan E. Bannon 2011 (Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Pontys Relational
Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 327-357, Wesleyan University) Abrams ethic grounds itself upon the notion that all material beings possess the reflexivity of the Flesh. Since all beings are of the same stuff [i.e., flesh+, we find ourselves compelled to make an animistic inference, I find myself forced to acknowledge that any visible, tangible form that meets my gaze may also be an experiencing subject, sensitive and responsive to the beings around it, and to me.14 If we act on the assumption that all beings are themselves alive, we are required to act such that the lives of these beings not be violated carelessly .15 Abram is careful to distinguish his ethic of reciprocity from an ethic of do no harm, however, since in order to live one must engage in some form of killing. Rather than inspiring shame, recognizing our involvement in the larger cycles of life and death that constitute an ecological system should call us to act in place-specific ways that strengthen or support that system.16 We thereby develop responsibilities on the basis of both our belongingness to the Flesh and our distinct manner of being within the Flesh. In either case, the recognition of this belongingness to the larger animate fabric of nature arises out of our lived experience of the world.17 While the ethic itself may seem appealing, its animistic foundation is questionable. Merleau-Ponty himself is clear in his rejection of animism, claiming that his philosophy of flesh is not hylozoism, which is a false thematization, in the order of the explicative-Entity, of our experience of carnal presence.18 In other words, Merleau-Ponty cautions us against precisely the sort of inference that Abram makes, namely, allowing the dynamism of our perceptual field to lead us into an ontological animism. However, given that Abram is attempting a creative reading of Merleau-Pontys philosophy,
these objections may not trouble him. Of greater concern is Melissa Clarkes persuasive argument against our ab ility to make the animistic inference. She calls our attention to the fact that the reflexive relationship to which Abram appeals is not wholly

an intrinsic asymmetry or imminence within the reversibility Merleau-Ponty describes.19 I would add that since this asymmetry is extremely important to Merleau-Pontys philosophy without it the resistance and alterity of the world and others is in principle surmountable in a totalizing knowledgeabandoning it is not an option without further consequences. Clarke then proceeds to argue that if reversibility is a sensual experience and that experience is inherently asymmetrical, there is no reason to accept that the reflexivity of the perceptual field is transferable to the inanimate world in the manner Abram describes. Therefore, the rest of the world does not have the ability to sense apart from embodied, perceiving beings (who are admittedly still part of the world), or in other words, any animism perceived in the world is derivative from sentient experience and cannot be found outside of that experience.
reversible; there remains

Political Exclusion Anthro Card

This binary between animality and humanity is the foundational basis for biopolitics and violence within the world *gender paraphrased Dinesh Wadiwel 2008 ( Adj researcher at Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy
Research Group Three Fragments from a Biopolitical History of Animals: Questions of Body, Soul, and the Body Politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 6.1 www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_8/Wadiwel17_31.pdf)
Not only does Agamben identify closely the relation between biology and the political sphere, but he also identifies this process as constitutive of the human / animal divide. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben states: In

our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to
say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics. (Agamben, 2004: 80). I should be clear here that is not controversial in itself that Agamben should consider animal life within his understanding of biopolitics. After all, Foucault himself was aware of the

long philosophical connection between human life and that of animals that gave shape to biopower: thus Foucault states *the+ modern *hu+man is an animal whose politics places his [their] existence as a living being in question (Foucault, 1998: 143). But what is interesting in relation to Agambens understanding is that the contestation between human and animal should figure as defining of biopolitics itself, rather than a mere feature.
Biopower (or politics in the West) is, before any thing else, a question of determining the distinction between human and animal. What interests me in Agambens pronouncements if we hold them as true - is the possibility not merely of telling a history of biopolitics as the history of politics in the West, but tracing

the genealogy of the relationship between the human, the animal and thus the biopolitical. There is an opportunity to revisit the primal scenes of Western public politics in order to draw attention to the curious recurrence of the animal within the development of the human political subject, and highlighting the fact that this subject is mapped by threshold points which although operate to formally exclude animal life, also intersect, and are grounded in, the animal. It is after all no coincidence, as I shall discuss, that Aristotle describes *the hu+man as the political animal; that entity that finds its home within the polis; an animal that is at once an animal, yet is also beyond other animals due to its natural residence within political community. This construction of the human political subject illustrates the necessary biopolitical connection of the human to its animal bare existence its biological soul if you like that speaks and yet does not speak at the same time as the fully formed human subject. The animal arrives as a necessary burden to the human political subject, the connection to biological life it cannot seem to shake, and in many respects, the destiny that it inescapably returns to. Below, I provide three fragments on the animal from the classical age. These fragments are not intended to provide definitive
statements on the positions of these thinkers on animals. Rather they intend to highlight the curious positioning of the animal with respect to the human, and the implication of this co-deportment for politics in the Western tradition. Thus, the fragments I look at are in many respects taken for what they are; the question I pose throughout is why they are positioned in the way that they are, and in what way do they illustrate something about the intersection of animal and human life, and its relationship to politics. i

These intertwinings are significant, as they indicate the historical existence of an active process of dividing between the human and the animal, a process that simultaneously defines the frontiers of the civil political space. And the flow on from this intersection, as I shall discuss in the conclusion to this paper, are the inherent limitation of engaging with the civil political space when this same sphere maintains as a principle of its operation a primary exclusion of non human animal life. If we are right to assume that the political sphere in the Western tradition is founded upon the exclusion of the animal, then it becomes clearer why the freedom of animals,
who are otherwise formally excluded from the political sphere, should be at issue in Socrates deliberations on the nature of a political system ostensibly designed for humans. These apparently humorous deliberations reflect a somewhat deeper concern: an

anxiety in relation to the borders between the human and the animal, and their close relationship to the political space. After all, the civility of the political space depends upon the absolute exclusi on of non human animals from formal participation. This is a primary exclusion that shapes who it is

within this space that is granted political agency, and who is by the same process violently alienated from political power. In this sense, moral consideration of species value occurs at the same moment as the political is
enacted. As opposed to a liberal political view of power, where moral consideration precedes the construction of the civil political space and shapes the terms of inclusion, we might argue that politics

emerges through a primary exclusion that simultaneously declares the moral decision. If politics, following Agamben, describes the biopolitical struggle between human and animal, then democracy, properly understood, describes the process, successful or otherwise, of admitting the animal into the political sphere. Democracy is the political process of struggle over the terms of moral consideration. If this speculation is accurate, it is then no accident that we should find threshold points that mark the struggle over the definition of the human, or even the fully formed human subject, which curiously resonate with unresolved democratic struggles over the last two hundred years: for example slaves, women, savages, queers and children. Democracy is the active process of negotiating admittance; a process that is both massively transformative, but is also at the very same
moment immensely dangerous. It is for this reason that I believe that the political challenge before us to think about a radical democratisation, since surely it is true that only an expanded concept of democracy could break the forms of exclusion that are inherent to politics, and thus transform the meaning of politics itself. We might imagine some concrete ways forward in this area. For example, thinking about the way in which political change is possible through readmitting animals within urbanized spaces, as suggested by Jennifer Wolch (1998). Close cohabitation with non-human animal life beyond the limited involvement of non-human animals as domesticated companion animals and a genuine attempt to negotiate public spaces with non human entities, would affect a change in how we understand the civil political sphere. This means, invariably, tempering human activity with respect to other entities, and actively building inclusive rather than excusive forms of political engagement. Similarly we could imagine political networks that implicitly include non-human entities, such as described in Bruno Latours Parliament of Things (1993). If we accept the fact that our political networks invariably intertwine with both non human sentient beings, and non sentient entities, it is possible to re-imagine a political space which formally recognise that political decisions must be made and enacted not merely by human actors, but by all constituent entities. Yet I note that

we encounter here the constitutive problem that faces democracy in this project of admitting the animal: namely the fact that the civil political space is based on the exclusion of the animal, and thus, democracy must work, whether through rights or through welfare, by inducting newly formed humans rather than admitting animals per se. This democratic and expansive process of induction, which is revolutionary in so far as it promises to stretch the borders of the human, also is contemptibly conservative, in that it resolutely maintains the constitutive status quo: namely, that the political sphere is founded on the continual and violent exclusion of the animal. If biopolitics and Western politics are the same, then we will continue to have more of the same. Namely a political sphere that by definition operates through continuing economy of souls--a primal form of segregation, inherent to the human/animal machine. And the machine will continue to produce violent effects incarceration, torture, death for those who fall outside the sphere of humanity, whether they are anatomically human or animal. In other words, and this is the message that weaves its way through the fragments in this paper, the fates of both the human and animal are intertwined through the construction of the political sphere, in body, in voice, in democracy. The human belongs to the political in so far as it can divorce itself from the animal, and the animal is understood, conversely, as that entity that is constituted at the moment of its exclusion. I end therefore with a question: How do we unthink this process and bring the animal (both that which is within
us and the non-human varieties that inhabit the Earth with us) into the sphere of politics?

FYI Being Needs Beings

These descriptions and narratives of ecology develop a new type of relation between the human and non-human others. It is a perspective of understanding that we individually are one object fallen amongst many othersonly through this type of relation can we hope to have the world given back to itself Llewelyn, visiting philosophy professor at Loyola Univ. of Chicago, 2003
(John, Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology, Eco-Phenomenology, edited by Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine 2003, pgs. 59-60) at If it might have been made by God, it is made to His Greater Glory only if God makes it for itself and us for ourselves. So a sustainable human economy would be sustained justly, fugsam, only if it cooperates with a sustainable economy for nonhuman beings, with an environmentalism that is not unidirectional, but a synergic ecology. An opening is made for this thought when Heidegger reminds us and himself that being needs beings, and when in saying this it is not only human or Dasein-ish being that he means. No more can be claimed here than that an opening is made for this thought. Heidegger's phenomenology and the "other thinking" he declined to call phenomenology does not entail this other thinking of the nonhuman other. It only enables it. It enables it precisely by softening the hardness of the logical must, by passing from phenomenological method- ology to hodology, to a being underway-tao, he is ready to say15-on a path that this other thinking suggests we could follow if we could learn again to think deponently, depositionally, to speak in something like the middle voice, poised between the putting of a question and being put into question in the pause of the open question on the way to language, in the moment of the question savoir for which savoir is no longer an avoir and least of all a s'avoir, a self-possession.l6 At the end of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl writes: The Delphic motto, "Know thyself!" has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epoche, in order to regain it by universal selfexamination. Noli foras ire, says Augustine, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.17 Heidegger's phenomenology of inauthentic everyday being-in-the-world and of falling into entanglement in it echoes Husserl's words. Following away toward which Husserl's words point, therefore, in the pause of phe- nomenological suspension, which is a losing of the world of objects and of the self as having fallen among them, he finds the world given back. It is given back not just to oneself, but to itself. Acceptance of the invitation to enter into yourself, in te redi,leads to an in te redditus, a gift of the world that is a foras ire, an exiting from interiority through the world's being accepted as a gift, and therefore as a ground for gratitude.

------------------------------------------------------

NEGATIVE

Liberal Ecology Good

Liberal world views are adaptable and compatible towards non-anthropocentric ontologies Wissenburg 6 (Marcel, http://www.wissenburg.org/pdf/ecochallenge.pdf, Liberalism)
Two conclusions can be drawn at this point. First, classical liberalism cannot meet the ecological challenge, however that challenge is defined, simply by insisting on negative liberty (and particularly on the free market) as the answer to all ecological problems. To ensure that those problems will be addressed, it has to accept limits to neutrality and rid itself of its anthropocentric bias. This requires at least a form of institutional representation and protection of non-human and non- present-human interests, and means and methods for accounting for the formation of individual preferences. The inevitable result is that negative liberty

can no longer be seen as the supreme criterion of a good society. Second, both a classical liberalism thus transformed (perhaps beyond recognition), and a social liberalism amended with ecological limits to neutrality and an ecological expansion of its original anthropocentrism, can be green, at least in theory. There is no fundamental contradiction between affirming human dignity through individual emancipation, and protecting nature as much as is humanly possible indeed, the two may well mutually reinforce one another. There is room within liberalism for protecting the ecology rather than the environment and (behind that) for conceptions of natures value that perhaps do not eliminate but at least pacify the conflict over intrinsic value. There is also room for appreciating animals as more than resources, for limits to neutrality and limits to the use of property rights on
ecological grounds, and so on. There are and will at least for a long time be differences of opinion between liberal and ecologist political thinkers, yet most of these are no longer fundamental challenges they no longer force us to ask whether but only to what degree liberalism can be green. The ball is back in the ecologist court: it is up to ecologism to indicate what kind of society can no longer count as ecologically sane.

Zizek/Lacanian K Links
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology confuses human limitations with access to a real "relational gestalt." Hewitson 10 [owner of Lacan.com website publishing readings of Lacan; client strategist at
Digital Window] (Owen, Seminar II - The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954 1955, Chapter VII The Circuit, http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/05/readingseminar-ii-chapter-vii-the-circuit, All quotations refer to The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 -1955, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester, WW Norton: 1991) This chapter opens with Lacans remarks on Maurice Merleau-Pontys lecture the previous evening to the SFP entitled Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Merleau-Ponty, Lacan tells us, is a humanist, but as Lacan has already told us in the previous chapter, psychoanalysis is not a humanism. In his brief critique of Merleau-Pontys presentation, Lacan accuses Merleau-Ponty of always looking for the kind of totality or unitary form that is found in the gestalt. A drop of water, for instance, might well be circular in form but it is physically circular; and this is the reason we perceive it as circular, rather than because we have a tendency to see gestalts everywhere and to impose a circular form on the image of the raindrop. We may very well impose some form or totality onto images, but Lacan warns us to be wary of confusing physics with phenomenology just because we feel we need to suppose a unitary image, form or functioning to work with.

We should reject the notion of nature thats the only way take seriously the threat of ecological collapse Zizek 9 (Slavoj, Excursions with contemporary thinkers, edited by Astra Taylor)
So I think what

we should do to confront properly the threat of Ecological catastrophe is not this New Age stuff of breaking through from this technologically manipulative mood to find our roots in na- ture, but, on the contrary, to cut off even more our roots in nature. I claim that it is our roots in our natural environment that prevent us from taking seriously things that we already know: that all this normal life we see around us can disappear. We can imagine it, but we do not really believe it- I mean we don't effectively act upon it. So again my paradoxical formula is: ecology is the greatest threat, but to confront it properly, we need to get rid of the very notion of nature, meaning nature in its ideological investment, nature as some kind of a normative model of balance and harmonious develop- ment. We should become more artificial.

Embrace of nature as an aesthetic object fails we must separate ourselves from nature and appreciate the beauty in technology to be truly subversive Zizek 9 (Slavoj, Excursions with contemporary thinkers, edited by Astra Taylor)
ZIZEK: There is more and more of this trash, and I think maybe even the

greatest challenge is to discover trash as

an aesthetic object. What do I mean by this?I am not trying to have any of these pseudo-avant- garde, masochistic ideas
of"shit is art" or whatever, but something much more elementary. Whenever we are engaged with the world we use objects. It is, for me, always a mysterious moment when you see an object that originally was a functional object, part of our system of needs, as no longer of any use and changed into trash. At that point you should accept it. Which is why, for me, the most metaphysical experience that I can imagine in my dreams is to visit the Mojave Desert intheUnitedStates where there is the big cemetery of planes. So you have a couple of hundred planes doing nothing over there- and there is something so shocking in all those objects that have

true ecologist should not admire pure nature, trees and so on, which are there before we use them and that can still be part of our technological exploitative uni- verse. The true spiritual change is to develop, if you want, a kind of emotional attachment to, or to find meaning in, useless objects. Here we should follow Romantics, I claim. I am against Romanbecome, all of a sudden, trash, useless. I think that a ticism as such, but something great in Romanticism is that Roman- tics discovered ruins, remainders, useless objects as potentially aesthetic objects. In Romanticism they were building houses so that they already looked like ruins. I think there is something deep about this. To

come to terms with life around you would mean, precisely, to step out of this eternal active engagement and to accept objects in their uselessness. And this doesn't mean escaping technology. It means something else, using technology in different ways. What do I mean by this? The conservative critics of modernity claim we should not get too involved with technology. Instead we should rediscover simple pleasures ofwalkingin the forest, sitting at a table, just drinking water,whatever,that is still part of a technological universe for me. The really subversive thing is something that was going on some ten years ago and is still going on: using technol- ogy to produce objects that are functional but ridiculous on account of their very excessive functionality.It is a whole
movement in Japan to build objects that meet two conditions. First, they must be feasible and really function but be so ridiculous as to be commercially unvi- able. For example, glasses with windshield wipers so you can walk in the rain, or an inverted umbrella so that you walk in the rain and the water is collected so you can drink fresh water, or butter in lipstick tubes so that you can apply butter just like that- this

ridiculous use of technology, which still is technological but kind of suspends the sen ousness.

Radical ecologists are tainted by ideology their social movements fail Zizek 9 (Slavoj, Excursions with contemporary thinkers, edited by Astra Taylor)
Now I am not idealizing state intervention here. I am not saying that the traditional form, the one we have, ofstate intervention will do. But I want to emphasize one thing: many

ecologists are distrust- ful of politics. One of the commonplaces of the standard form of colog~ is the emphasis on corrupt politics, playing this naive antipolitical stance. But I think that politics with regard to ecology is the same as democracy. You know Winston Churchill's famous quip, " Democracy is the worst imaginable possible system the only problem is that there is none which is better"? Yes, politicians are the worst imaginable, corrupt, demagogic, inefficient, and so on, but nothing else works. Who will do it? The deep ecologists lesson would have been we all should do it. We should all change our daily lives. OK, OK, but somebody has to direct it, to organize it.
Who? Experts? Scientists? They are too naive. They are too intelligent, and for that very reason too naive. They think in too simplified, rational terms. You shouldn't trust scientists making big social decisions. Who else? Radical New Agers, and so on? Even worse: they are

ecologists, priests, too full of ideologies. So I think that we need politics more than ever in order to cope properly with ecological threats. But we do ur- gently need a new breed, a new
kind of politician. I know that this sounds utopian, it is maybe utopian, but it's an even greater utopia to think that either the existing type of politicians or anybody else can do it. Ecology must be approached as a political problem.

Attempting to isolate a core meaning of the environment or cause of ecological harm becomes an empty signifier which is coopted Zizek 96 (Slavoj, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, 1996,
pg. 131)
Let us return to our example of ecology:

every attempt to define a substantial core of ecology, the minimal necessarily doomed to fail, since this very core shifts in the struggle for ideological hegemony. For a socialist, the ultimate cause of the ecological crisis is to be found in the profit-orientated capitalist mode of production, which is why anti-capitalism is for him the very core of a true ecological attitude; for a conservative, the ecological crisis is rooted in mans false pride and will to dominate the
content with which every ecologist has to agree, is universe, so that humble respect for tradition forms the very core of a true ecological attitude; for a feminist, the ecological crisis results from male domination; and so forth. What

is at stake in the ideologico-political struggle, of course, is the very positive content which will fill out the empty signifier ecology: what will it mean to be an ecologist (or a democrat, or to belong to a nation . . .)? And our point is that the emergence of subject is strictly correlative to the positing of this central signifier as empty: I become a subject when the universal signifier to which I refer (ecology, in our case) is no longer connected by an
umbilical cord to some particular content, but is experienced as an empty space to be filled out by the particular (feminist, conservative, state, pro-market, socialist ... ) content. This

empty signifier whose positive content is the stake of the ideologico-political struggle represents the subject for the other signifiers, for the signifiers which stand for its positive content.

Biopolitics

Biopower Good - Democracy

Biopower is key to democracy Dickinson 4 (Edward Ross Dickinson, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, 2004
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148) In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were the central element of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the
goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing basic social rights the substantive or positive freedom of all citizens was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that sense, the

democratic welfare state was and is democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but because of it. The contrast with the Nazi state is
clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of social and population policy founded on the concept of individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by organizations that could implant that power at every level of their lives in political and associational life, in the family, in the workplace, and in leisure activities. In

the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an institutional framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood
themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by eradicating by finding a final solution to social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that stubborn cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the

difference between a strategy of social management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a semantic one; such differences had very profound political implications, and established quite different constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the
cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.

Biopower Good - Violence

Biopower is a logic of care that prevents violence Ojakangas 5 (Mika Ojakangas, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland, May 2005,
Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 20-21)
According to Foucault, it is that transformation which constitutes the background of what he calls governmentality, that is to say, bio-political rationality within the modern state.78 It explains why political power that is at work within the modern state as a legal framework of unity is, from the beginning of a states existence, accompanied by a power that can be called pastoral.

Its

role is not to threaten lives but to ensure, sustain, and improve them, the lives of each and every one.79 Its means are not law and violence but care, the care for individual life.80 It is precisely care, the Christian
power of love (agape), as the opposite of all violence that is at issue in bio-power. This is not to say, however, that bio-power would be nothing but love and care. Bio-power is love and care only to the same extent that the law, according to Benjamin, is violence,

as Foucault writes, even massacres have become vital.82 This is the case, however, because violence is hidden in the foundation of bio-politics, as Agamben believes. Although the twentieth century thanatopolitics is the reverse of biopolitics,83 it should not be understood, according to Foucault, as the effect, the result, or the logical consequence of bio-political rationality.84 Rather, it should be understood, as he suggests, as an outcome of the demonic combination of the sovereign power and bio-power, of the citynamely, by its origin.81 Admittedly, in the era of bio-politics, citizen game and the shepherd-flock game85 or as I would like to put it, of patria potestas (fathers unconditional power of life

Although massacres can be carried out in the name of care, they do not follow from the logic of bio-power for which death is the object of taboo.86 They follow from the logic of sovereign power, which
and death over his son) and cura materna (mothers unconditional duty to take care of her children). legitimates killing by whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life.

Rejecting biopower results in violence Deranty 4 (Philosophy Prof. @ Macquarie University(Jean-Phillipe, Borderlands Vol. 3 # 1
Agambens Challenge to normative theories p. online)
48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The

power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one
that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is

on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. 49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction of the overcoming of
the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegels modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegels claim that the

impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute

contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt
Baumans theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one

Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account
heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights

should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance. 52. By
questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics

that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.

We can use the tools of biopower to challenge its worst manifestationsrejecting these tools leads to horrid violence Deranty 4 [Jean-Phillipe, Philosophy Professor Macquarie University, 2004 Borderlands Vol. 3
# 1 Agambens Challenge to normative theories p. online BC+
48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The

power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one
that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion.

It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. 49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction of the overcoming of
the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegels modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegels claim that the

impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute

contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt
Baumans theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity

is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights . We can see now how this account
needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights

should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance. 52. By
questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics

that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.

No Impact
Biopolitical modes of governance are no longer a threat to anyone the crisis of the sovereign state has caused violent biopolitics to be abandoned entirely Short 5 (Jonathan Short, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social & Political
Thought, York University, 2005, Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on Governmentality and Sovereignty, Journal for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1)
Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it corresponds to a similar crisis at the level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that despite

the new forms of biopolitical control in operation today, Rose believes that bio-politics has become generally less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last century. At that time, biopolitics was linked to the project of the expanding national state in his opinion. In disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social selection of those characteristics thought useful to the nationalist project. Hence, according to Rose, "once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives
have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics sets itself the task of eliminating "differences coded as defects", and in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is more optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced liberal' societies, it is because this

notion of 'national fitness', in terms of bio- political competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a viable political project
(ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that the

territorial state, the primary institution of enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a number of lines. National culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many
of them transcending the national territory on which they take place, while the same pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5). Under these conditions, Rose argues, the bio-political

programmes of the molar enclosure known as the nation-state have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned.

No impact to biopower democracy checks Dickinson 4 (Edward Ross Dickinson, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, 2004
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148 BC) In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary
society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But

that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive
regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there

are political and policy

potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization.
Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are

characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering.

Biopower Inevitable
Biopower is inevitable and inescapable the aff can never solve Dula 1 (Peter, Historic Peace Churches Consultation, Bienenberg, Switzerland,
http://www.peacetheology.org/papers/dula.html KNP) Global capital operates on all registers of the social order. It is the pinnacle of biopower, where social life is not just regulated but also produced. Understood in these terms, the web of power seems inescapable. There is no outside to this power, as Hardt and Negri repeatedly insist. There is no non-cooptable space from which to mount a critique, no proletariat (or church) to function as a locus of purity. And since this power takes the form of a constantly shifting web or network it is difficult, if not impossible, to pin-point an enemy (56-58). Negri goes so far as to say that the proletariat is everywhere, just as the boss is. In other words, everyone is now both oppressor and oppressed. In light of all this it becomes easy to read
Hardt and Negri as utterly hopeless and also as absurdly abstract. One wants to respond with Emersons retort to Tocqueville: I hate the builders of dungeons in the air. Or with Stuart Halls insistence that the argument that global capitalism is the final triumph of the West, the

final moment of a global post-modern where it now gets hold of everybody, of everything, where there is no difference which it cannot contain, no otherness it cannot speak, no
marginality which it cannot take pleasure out of. *is+ the form of post-modernism I dont buy. It is what happens to ex-Marxist French intellectuals when they head for the desert. On the ground, say in Prague or Capetown not so many years ago, the line between oppressor and oppressed comes into focus in a way it cant from the heights of Deleuzian metaphysics. Civil

society

becomes more elusive than Hardt and Negris condemnation (or Falks approval) suggests.

Pragmatic Environmentalism

Pragmatism Good
Ecological utopianism prevents us from forming practical coalitions and risks distopian extremes Lewis 92 (Martin, Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University 1992, Martin,
GREEN DELSIONS, p. 250)
But for all of its attractions, utopia remains, and will always remain, no place. Although the vision is easy to conjure, the reality is elusive. In fact, those

political regimes that have struggled hardest to realize utopian plans have created some of the worlds most dystopian realities. Unfortunately, American as a people seem uniquely
drawn to such fantasies, and a right-wing variant of utopianism has even guided our recent national administrations; as Robert Kuttner (1991:5, 157) shows, laissez-faire itself is an ideologically driven utopian scheme that has dire consequences for the earths economy and ecology. As Michael Pollan (1991:188) eloquently demonstrates, eco-radicalism and right wing economic theory are more closely allied than one might suspect: Indeed, the

wilderness ethic and laissez-faire economics, as antithetical as they might first appear, are really mirror images of one another, each proposes a quasi-divine force Nature, the Market that, left to its own devices, somehow knows whats best for a place, Nature and the Market are both self-regulating, guided by an invisible hand. Worshippers of either share a deep, Puritan distrust of man, taking it on faith that human tinkering with the natural or economic order can only pervert it. So political extremists of all stripes offer utopian visions, which credulous idealists find remarkably attractive, but considering he disparity of the vision offered the perfect market of laissez-faire, the perfect society of socialism, or the perfectly harmonious environment of eco-radicalism it is not surprising that the utopians in the end only increases our social and intellectual rifts, steadily diminishing our chances of avoiding an ecological holocaust.

Abstract philosophy cannot save the environmenthuman-centered justifications can motivate people to support pragmatic protections Light 2 (Associate professor of philosophy and environmental policy, and director of the Center
for Global Ethics at George Mason University. Contemporary Environmental Ethics From Metaethics to Public Philosophy, Metaphilosophy Andrew July 33.4, Ebsco)
Even with the ample development in the field of various theories designed to answer these questions, I believe that

environmental ethics is, for the most part, not succeeding as an area of applied philosophy. For while the dominant goal of most work in the field, to find a philosophically sound basis for the direct moral consideration of nature, is commendable, it has tended to engender two unfortunate results: (1) debates about the value of nature as such have largely excluded discussion of the beneficial ways in which arguments for environmental protection can be based on human interests, and relatedly (2) the focus on somewhat abstract concepts of value theory has pushed environmental ethics away from discussion of which arguments morally motivate people to embrace more supportive environmental views. As a consequence, those agents of change who will effect efforts at environmental protection namely, humans have oddly been left out of discussions about the moral value of nature. As a result, environmental ethics has been less able to contribute to cross-disciplinary discussions with other environmental professionals (such as environmen- tal sociologists or lawyers) on the resolution of environmental problems, especially those professionals who also have an interest in
issues concern- ing human welfare in relation to the equal distribution of environmental goods. But can environmental philosophy afford to be quiescent about the public reception of ethical arguments over the value of nature? The original motivations for environmental philosophers to turn their philosophical insights to the environment belie such a position. Environmental

philosophy evolved out of a concern about the state of the growing environmental crisis and a conviction that a philosophical contribution could be made to the resolution of this crisis. If environmental philosophers spend most of their time debating non-human-centered forms of value theory, they will arguably never be able to make such a contribution.

Environmental pragmatism is the only way to prevent ecological catastrophe Light and Katz 96 (Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at the New
Jersey Institute of Technology, teaches environmental philosophy, engineering ethics and the philosophy of technology, and a research fellow in the Environmental Health Program and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. Environmental Pragmatism, p. 12, Andrew and Eric, Google Books) The problematic situation of environmental ethics greatly troubles us, both as philosophers and as citizens. We are deeply concerned about the precarious state of the natural world, the environmental hazards that threaten humans, and the maintenance of long-term sustainable life on this planet. The environmental crisis that surrounds us is a fact of experience. It is thus imperative that environmental philosophy, as a discipline, address this crisis its meaning, its causes and its possible resolution. Can philosophers contribute anything to an
investigation of environmental problems? Do the traditions, history and skills of philosophical thought have any relevance to the development of environmental policy? We believe that the answer is yes. Despite ineffectual)

the problematic (and, heretofore, status of environmental ethics as a practical discipline, the field has much to offer. But the fruits of this philosophical enterprise must be directed towards the practical resolution of environmental problems environmental ethics cannot remain mired in longrunning theoretical debates in an attempt to achieve philosophical certainty. As Mark Sagoff has written: [W]e have to get along with certainty; we have to solve practical, not theoretical, problems; and we must adjust the ends we pursue to the means available to accomplish them. Otherwise, method becomes an obstacle to morality, dogma the foe of deliberation, and the ideal society we aspire to in theory will become a formidable enemy of the good society we can achieve in fact. In short, environmental ethics must develop for itself a methodology of environmental pragmatism fueled by a recognition that theoretical debates are problematic for the development of environmental policy. This collection is
an attempt to bring together in one place the broad range of positions encompassed by calls for an environmental pragmatism. For us, environmental pragmatism is the open-ended inquiry into the specific real-life problems of humanitys relationship with the environment. The new position ranges from arguments for an environmental philosophy informed by the legacy of classical American pragmatist philosophy, to the formulation of a new basis for the reassessment of our practice through a more general pragmatist methodology.

Radical environmental movements fuel counter-movements that destroy solvency Lewis 94 (Martin Lecturer in history and director of the International Relations program at
Stanford. Green Delusions, p. 6-7, Google Books)
The most direct way in which eco-extremists

threaten the environment is simply by fueling the antienvironmental countermovement. When green radicals like Christopher Manes (1990) call for the total destruction of civilization, many begin to listen to the voices of reaction. Indeed, the mere linking of environmental initiatives to radical groups such as Earth First! often severely dampens what would otherwise be widespread public support (see Gabriel 1990:64). As radicalism depends within the environmental movement, the oppositional anti-ecological forces accordingly gain strength.
The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a think tank for the so-called wise use movement, has, for example, recently published a manifesto calling for such outrages as the opening of all national parks to mineral production, the logging of all oldgrowth forests, and the gutting of the endangered species act. This groups ideologues contend that certain environmental

philosophies represent nothing less than mental illnesses, a theory anonymously propounded in the intellectual ammunition department of their Wise Use Memo (Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise 1990:2). Even more worrisome is the fact that a former high-ranking CIA agent is now spreading rumors that environmental scientists are presently attempting to concoct a virus that could destroy humankind (See Tale of a Plot to Rid Earth of Humankind, San Francisco Examiner, April 14, 1991: A-2). My fear is that if

green extremism captures the environmental movements upper hand, the public would be much less likely to recognize such a claim as paranoid fantasy; while a handful of ecoradicals would be happy to destroy humanity, such individuals also reject science and thus would never be able to act on such convictions.

The political backdrop is the most important deciding factor in which environmental approach you adopt Barry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 41) Rather than develop an ethic in isolation from the political context in which it will be applied and its effects felt, as given by specific environmental policies or altered socio-economic practices for example, sensitivity to the political context is central to the ethical position developed in this chapter. This political dimension can be partly explained by the centrality of human interests to the ethical position being defended, which stresses the way in which human interests can and ought to frame human-nature relations. Here, however, the political dimension has to do with the more practical fact that green arguments seek to persuade citizens, governments and other political actors of the normative rightness of these arguments, and to ensure popular support for whatever environmental policies or practices are consistent with these moral principles. Thus attention to the 'political environment' has to do with both the securing of normative agreement for green claims and also the practical impact of green policies on the non-human world as the 'measure' to judge the success of green politics.

National Action Good

National-level coordination is key to solve environmental problems Carter 7 (Neil, Senior Lecturer in Politics @ University of York. The Politics of the
Environment, p. 59-60) Another difficulty with decentralization is that many environmental problems are best dealt with at the national or international level. Global commons problems do not respect the political boundaries between existing nation states, let alone small bioregions. Problems such as climate change and ozone depletion require coordinated action across communities and nations, which implies international cooperation between centralized nation states (see Chapter 9). The green slogan 'Think global, act local' may therefore provide an inadequate strategy for dealing with problems of the global commons. Relying on local communities alone to protect the environment assumes that the local community has full knowledge about the causes, impact and solutions to a particular problem; even then, it 'makes sense only when the locals possess an appropriate social and ecological consciousness' (Eckersley 1992: 173).

Modernity Good
Complete rejection of modernity is unnecessary mainstream environmentalism makes good progress that doesnt fall into the trap of modernity Barry 99 ( lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, 1999
[John, Rethinking Green Politics, p. 250-251)
Against this view, I have sought to show that green

political theory is premised on the redefinition of progress, understood as an immanent critique of modernity, not a politics seeking to return to either a romanticised pre-modern social order or a post-modern rejection of the present. While rightly highlighting the costs associated with the industrial revolution and its legacy, to reject all its fruits as 'false' would be churlish, not to say foolish. Thus while accepting the democratic
claims of green theory, 1 have also sought to deepen the immanence (and thereby the practical relevance) of the green critique by seeking to present it as a critique of modernity's legacy of human progress in both the political and the social spheres. Thus, I have argued that consumption,

materialism, science and a market economy (as opposed to the present global capitalist one) can, and ought, to have a place within green political theory. Particularly in respect to science, green political theory cannot consistently reject modernity since modern sciences from ecology and conservation biology to thermodynamics have played, and continue to play, a central role in its evolution and development. Indeed, part of the novelty of the green political perspective lies in it being the first political outlook so informed by and grounded in modern science. While one is keen to stress the scientific credentials of green politics and to accept that green politics can be seen as part of the 'progressive' narrative of humanity, in the sense of the improvement of our lot as a result of our increasing knowledge of the non-human world, this is balanced by an acceptance of the moral and epistemic limits of this process. Green political theory explicitly recognizes the
limits of human knowledge, and accepts that in principle we can never know everything about the world. In that sense, the world will always remain opaque to us; its workings and our relationship to it will never be fully transparent.' Alongside

this epistemic limit to knowledge of the world is the moral argument that knowledge and the pursuit of truth are not the only or often the most pressing or important social or moral goals.
The pursuit of truth is one amongst other values, and it does not enjoy a principled a priori pre-eminence, as O'Neill (1993) rightly points out. Therefore the pursuit of knowledge requires moral constraints to be placed on it. And since knowledge is power, with power comes moral responsibility. The tremendous power humans have to affect the natural world demands that moral concern and deliberation characterize its use, lest this knowledge become another ecological vice if divorced from such moral considerations. A final qualifier to the scientific character of green politics is the acceptance of certain 'givens' of the human condition, which implies that scientific knowledge and its fruits are to help cope with rather than eliminate these aspects of the human condition. These 'givens', as discussed in Chapter 3, include the inevitability of death, the central foundational importance of birth, reproduction and collective subsistence, human vulnerability and dependence (all of which we share with other animals), human plurality, human culture, and above all else the dynamic and uncertain character of our dealings with the natural world. The

explicit recognition of our epistemic limits and the awareness of our ignorance are of course ecological virtues to help us avoid the ecological vice of an arrogant anthropocentrism, and an
exaggerated sense that technology can 'solve' every social-environmental (and social) problem.

Some forms of modernity are good democratic and environmental progress Barry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, 1999, John,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 249-250) The whole tenor of early and ideological accounts of green politics resonates with a perception that the costs of modernity outweigh the benefits, which are themselves suggested to be of questionable quality. From

this position two equally unappealing understandings of green politics can be advanced. On the one hand, green politics constitutes a rejection of modernity's legacy of progress in both the socio-economic and political spheres, that is, green politics is both anti-industrial and anti-democratic (which is close to the 'romantic-conservative' reaction to modernity). On the other, green politics implies a rejection of industrial progress but the acceptance and indeed radicalization of 'democratic progress'.
This more popular view of green politics sees it as anti-industrial, but pro-democracy. Now while the latter has obviously more to commend it than the former, I have suggested that

the anti-industrial tenor of green politics, within which is subsumed the common rejection of consumerism, materialism, science, technology and the market economy that marks much green writing, needs to be questioned. Finally, rethinking green politics as an 'immanent critique' of modernity avoids it being viewed as either premodern or post-modern.

Management Good
Managing the environment is key to diversity their objections link to managerial abuse, not use Barry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, Rethinking Green
Politics, p. 132-133) Another reason for some degree of conscious planning and management comes from the idea that the standard green reading of ecology which sees ecosystems as self-regulating and harmonious is a disputed claim within ecological science. As Brennan points out: the whole issue of whether
ecosystems are generally self-maintaining diverse systems or simply fortuitous groupings of populations that at least for a time are not lethal for one another is very much undecided in ecology. It is striking, and unfortunate, that many conservationists operate with ideas of balance and diversity in nature that were more prevalent in the nineteenth century than among contemporary ecologists. (1992: 16-17) As indicated in the last section, maintaining

ecological diversity within social-environmental relations requires active social intervention. Added to this is the controversy over the whole idea that diversity and ecosystem complexity are positively related to ecosystem stability. According to Clark, and contrary
to popular perception, 'The highest diversity of species tends to occur not in the most stable systems, but in those subject to constant disturbance, e.g. rainforests subject to destruction by storm, and rocky intertidal regions buffeted by heavy surf' (1992: 42). One implication of this is that if biodiversity is a desired value this may imply human intervention in ecosystems to maintain high degrees of biodiversity, perhaps by disturbing ecosystems in the requisite manner." Of

the many conclusions one can draw from this perhaps the most important is that a 'hands-off' approach may not guarantee the types of ecosystems that many deep greens desire. Ecosystems characterized by diversity, balance and complexity may have to be actively created and managed. The normative standpoint from which to view social impacts on the environment is not a 'hands-off' position which frames the issue of the relation between society and environment in terms of 'use' and 'non-use', but rather that proposed in the last chapter as the 'ethics of use' which attempts to distinguish 'use' from 'abuse'. Once this ethical issue has been settled, ecological science can then be used to help distinguish 'good' from 'bad' ecological management, i.e. sustainability from unsustainability . The type of
social regulation implied by collective ecological management involves the normative constraining of permissible policy options. We could imagine this as the democratic character of collective ecological management. It is not that each social-environmental issue is to be dealt with by all citizens taking a vote on the issue; rather it is that citizens (as opposed to bureaucrats and experts) can participate in what Jacobs (1996: 13) calls 'decision-recommending' rather than decision-making institutions. That is, such forms of popular democratic participation lay out the parameters of 'use' and 'abuse' in particular cases, that is, the normative bounds of environmental management which can then be carried out through state institutions.

Science Good
Dichotomizing science and nature destroys our ontological relationship to the environment Reid 3 (Professor of Political Science and Director of the Appalachian Center at the University
of Kentucky, Lexington and Taylor, Director of the Common Knowledge Network of the University of Kentuckys Appalachian Center, Herbert and Betsy, Ethics & the Environment, Spring, p. 81-82)
In Deweys Experience and Nature (1925), he says art

is the complete culmination of nature and . . . science is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue (290). The smashing of the integral vision of art and science is one and the same as the ontological destruction of the life-world and its institutional dismemberment in the slaughterhouse of the technocratic university. (Academic folklore awaits its Kurt Vonnegut, although Jane Smileys Moo is suggestive.) As Dewey went on to say, the separation of science from art, and the division of arts into those concerned with mere means and those concerned with ends in themselves, is a mask for lack of conjunction between power and the goals of life (311). In his last twenty-five years, Dewey devoted much
energy and imagination to dismantling the sacrificial altars to the market machine- god that are being rebuilt today, under neoliberal auspices, on some of our campuses (and not only in economics departments).

Science and technology are essential to the success of their ecological project Barrry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 202-203) The imputed anti-scientific outlook of green political theory which is often used as evidence of its regressive, anti-modern stance is thus more apparent than real. While greens may be suspicious of an exclusive reliance on scientific knowledge on the basis that such forms of decision-making can lead to non-democratic results, a positive appreciation of science and technology is essential to the green position. Just as there are democratic reasons which can be advanced for the green critique of economic growth, likewise there are democratic considerations in the green critique of science and technology. The question to be addressed is the place of science within a democratic society and the place of science as part of the democratic political process of collective ecological management. Whereas technooptimistic arguments are largely prefaced on the assumption that experts will find solutions to ecological problems with little or no input from the non-expert population, the incorporation of science within green politics assumes that the application of science is within rather than beyond democratic regulation. This has to do with the fact that scientific knowledge and its technological application can have effects on individuals and that those affected ought to have some say in how science is used. On this account the green democratic argument is for people to have more say in more and more areas of their lives. Within the context of contemporary societies Beck (1992) uses the revealing metaphor of the 'experimental society' to
describe how an unregulated, unaccountable technological and scientific establishment turns society into a laboratory without the consent of, and often unbeknown to, the individuals its 'experiments' affect.' 5

Rejecting science undermines the primary basis for environmental movements and protection Barrry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 29-30)

Norton in his plea for unity among environmentalists demonstrates the significance of science within green politics. According to him: 'Environmentalists' emerging consensus, it will turn out, is based more on scientific principles than on shared metaphysical and moral axioms' (1991: 92). He then goes on to point out that: The

attack on human arrogance, which was mounted as a response to anthropocentrism, was well motivated but badly directed. One need not posit interests contrary to human ones in order to recognize our finitude. If the target is arrogance, a scientifically informed contextualism that sees us as one animal species existing derivatively, even parasitically, as part of a larger, awesomely wonderful whole should cut us down to size. (1991: 237) Within contemporary Western society it is more likely that a non-spiritualized scientific understanding of the world and our species' place in it can provide basic metaphysical agreement. Scientific knowledge can reform anthropocentrism, by lessening its tendencies to hubris and pride. That is, it can help avoid the ecological vices of the latter. It can also demonstrate our dependence upon the environment, which as will be argued later is vital for underpinning the virtues of ecological stewardship. It is also obvious, as O'Neill points out, that 'Scientific theory and evidence are a necessary condition for a rational ecological policy' (1993: 145). By this he means that scientific verification of ecological problems will be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for social recognition that there are problems. At the same time agreement on the scientific nature of ecological problems can be useful in forging a politically workable normative agreement on social-environmental issues. The place of scientific knowledge within green moral and political
theory will be further developed in the next chapter and Chapters 5 and 7. All I wish to note here is that a possible metaphysical basis for green political theory can be found within a secular scientific naturalism.

Turn Science is key to create ecological sympathy which spurs environmental protection Barrry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 68-69)
This division of the ecological virtues pertaining to moral character along traditional lines reinforces the central moral importance of adopting a discriminating attitude to the natural world. Ecological character can be viewed as an integrative and integrating mode of acting and thinking in which other modes (such as citizen, consumer, parent, producer) are combined. Depending on which part of that world is under consideration, either, or in some cases both, sets of virtues will be called for. For example, it is perhaps with those non-human animals closest to us, both in terms of familiarity and/or proximity and especially in their social nature, that the virtues of character will be strongest, as indicated earlier. In these cases, 'reason' or moral reasoning does not need to inform us that such creatures and their suffering are proper objects of our sympathy. It is simply the case that with such animals as domesticated cats, dogs, cattle and horses, and non-domesticated animals such as apes, dolphins, whales and elephants, their social nature makes their lives intelligible, however dimly, to us and their sufferings more recognizable, such that it is usually quite easy to sympathize with them. Such extended empathy becomes progressively more difficult to sustain as we move to other living creatures such as slugs, insects or rats, to plants and finally to the inanimate world of rivers, seas, mountains, rocks, ecosystems and bioregions. Although we should not discount the possibility of empathy with the inanimate world (for example, there are those who attempt to follow Leopold's advice and 'think like a mountain': Seed et al., 1988), it is more likely that as we move through the various categories of nature the virtues that inform appropriate treatment will emphasize those pertaining to the intellect.17 Thus, a

lack of sympathy with the inanimate world is not an insuperable obstacle in terms of cultivating a proper regard towards it. It may not be felt as intensely as moral sentiments in respect to fellow social mammals, but ecological science as a component of intellectual ecological virtue can extend our moral interests (if not our sympathy) beyond the animal boundary. Science can thus inform us of new and proper objects of moral sympathy and concern and thus of new moral relationships with wider and more distant parts of the natural world. For example, ecological science can inform us that
what on first sight looks like a 'barren' wasteland is in fact a rich and thriving ecosystem (O'Neill, 1993). Indeed, to see it as 'barren' is to look at it purely from a particularly narrow perspective. Scientific knowledge can thus expand and refine our perspective and, perhaps, our interests in the world. That is, scientific

knowledge can be a corrective (a virtue) to the vice of seeing nature from an unduly narrow and uninformed viewpoint, while also acting as a corrective to potentially harmful sentimental, ignorant or naive views of the non-human world.

Progress Good
Absolute rejection of progress is political suicide for the green movement vote aff to keep it alive Barrry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University,
Rethinking Green Politics, p. 254-255) Rethinking green politics leads to rethinking progress. On the one hand, following Beck (1992), 'progress' needs
to mean more than just annual increases in gross national product; it needs to take on a new character and include the democratization of more and more areas of people's lives as being at the heart of a new conception of progress. On the other,

progress needs to be separated from the idea that it necessarily requires the domination and exploitation of the non-human world, and an acceptance that our productive relations with the latter are to be judged by normative as well as technical/instrumental criteria. The classical
modern view of progress born in the last century needs to be radically rethought. A good example of this ecologically unenlightened conception of progress is T.H. Huxley's view that so far from man finding salvation by uncovering the cosmic processes and collaborating with them, it is clear to me that these cosmic forces are hostile and immoral, and it is only by combating them, by man imposing his own moral order on the tiger-rights of a brutal nature that we shall progress. (in Brome, 1963: 1I 12) This old,

anthropocentric, arrogant Enlightenment view of progress needs to be critically interrogated,

and a new conception of progress in which the aim is to realize human and non-human interests as far as possible is needed.

However, having said all that, it would be foolish, not to say politically suicidal, for the green articulation of progress to neglect that even 'orthodox' progress has meant better health, greater life expectancy, and an improvement in people's quality of life. Thus, green politics ought to see itself not as 'anti-progress' but as a politics centrally concerned with extending and redefining progress, which builds upon, while also being critical of, older and now problematic understandings and practices of progress. One model of progress does not fit all.
Indeed, the global reach of the Western model of progress (contained in 'development' and 'modernization' theories and practices), sometimes called 'globalization', is the single most responsible cause of much present, past and, if not prevented, future global environmental degradation.

Ice Age turn

Managing the environment is good its the only way to stop the coming Ice Age Jaworowski 4 (Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., Chairman of the Scientific Council of
the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw. In the winter of 1957-1958, he meas- ured the concentration of CO2 in the atmospheric air at Spitsbergen. During 1972 to 1991, he investigated the history of the pollution of the global atmosphere, measuring the dust preserved in 17 glaciersin the Tatra Mountains in Poland, in the Arctic, Antarctic, Alaska, Norway, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda, and the Peruvian Andes. He has published about 20 papers on climate, most of them concerning the CO2 measurements in ice cores. Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine Climate, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf p. 64) The approaching new Ice Age poses a real challenge for mankind, much greater than all the other
challenges in history. Before it comeslets enjoy the warming, this benign gift from nature, and lets vigorously investigate the physics of clouds. F. Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe58 stated recently that without some artificial means of giving positive feedback to the climate . . . an eventual drift into Ice Age conditions appears inevitable. These conditions would render a large fraction of the worlds major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population. According to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, those who have engaged in uncritical scaremongering over an enhanced greenhouse effect raising the Earths temperature by a degree or two should be seen as both misguided and danger- ous, for the problem of the present is of a drift back into an Ice Age, not away from an Ice Age. Will

mankind be able to protect the biosphere against the next returning Ice Age? It depends on how much time we still have. I
do not think that in the next 50 years we would acquire the knowledge and resources sufficient for governing climate on a global scale. Surely we shall not stop climate cooling by increasing industrial CO2 emissions. Even with the doubling of CO2 atmospheric levels, the increase in global surface air tem- perature would be trifling. However, it is unlikely that perma- nent doubling of the atmospheric CO2, even using all our car- bon resources, is attainable by human activities.29 (See also Kondratyev, Reference 59.) Also, it does not seem possible that we will ever gain influ- ence over the Suns activity. However, I

think that in the next centuries we shall learn to control sea currents and clouds, and this could be sufficient to govern the climate of our planet . The following thought experiment illustrates how valuable our civilization, and
the very existence of mans intellect, is for the terrestrial biosphere. Mikhail Budyko, the leading Russian climatologist (now deceased), predicted in 1982 a future drastic CO2 deficit in the atmosphere, and claimed that one of the

next Ice Age periods could result in a freezing of the entire surface of the Earth, including the oceans. The only
niches of life, he said, would survive on the active volcano edges.60 Budykos hypothesis is still controversial, but 10 years later it was discovered that 700 million years ago, the Earth already underwent such a disaster, changing into Snowball Earth, covered in white from Pole to Pole, with an average tempera- ture of minus 40C.15 However lets and that everything, to the very ocean bottom, will

assume that Budyko has been right be frozen. Will mankind survive this? I think yes, it would. The present tech- nology of nuclear power, based on the nuclear fission of ura- nium and thorium, would secure heat and electricity supplies for 5 billion people for about 10,000 years. At the same time, the stock of hydrogen in the ocean for future fusion-based reactors would suffice for 6 billion years. Our cities, industrial plants, food-producing greenhouses, our livestock, and also zoos and botanical gardens turned into greenhouses, could be heated virtually forever, and we could survive, together with many other organisms, on a planet that had turned into a gigantic glacier. I think, however, that such a passive solu- tion would not fit the genius of our future descendants, and they would learn
how to restore a warm climate for ourselves and for everything that lives on Earth.

Anthro Good
Anthropocentrism is critical to protect the environmentit gets the public on board Watson 7 (Professor at the Department of Psychology in the University of Iowa. "Conservative
anthropocentrism provides the best basis and framework for an environmental ethic," David, http://philosophy.cnu.edu/thesis_papers/DavidWatsonSpring07HTML.htm) Opponents of a conservative anthropocentric environmental ethic will object to the priority of human survival in an environmental ethic. Those who oppose any anthropocentric ethic would look to the concept
of value to support their argument. They would claim that other members of the biosphere possess intrinsic value and that their value cannot be considered less than that of a human. Thus, other members of the biosphere cannot be sacrificed for the betterment of humanity. According to such arguments, the intrinsic value of these other members prohibits any anthropocentric environmental ethic. Emotionally the arguments of the non-anthropocentrists have great appeal. Philosophically justified, moral and ethical theorists often gravitate to non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. However, there are several problems with the concepts they assert. Non-anthropocentrists claim that other members of the biosphere have intrinsic value, and this prohibits any anthropocentric environmental ethic. Compelling examples along these lines are often cited to justify nonanthropocentrism. The slaughtering of animals such as cows, deer, or chickens for human use is wrong because the chickens and cows possess as much value as humans. However, whether

or not these arguments are valid and justified is not the only consideration necessary. The discussions of philosophers and intellectuals are not the end of environmental ethics. The people of Western societies, as consumers of vast amounts of resources, must realize the importance of the other members of the biosphere if this issue is to be addressed. Humans are part of nature, or the biosphere, as are all other living and non-living entities on the earth. Though
humanity often seems separate and distinct from nature, humans emerged from the already thriving biosphere. This earth has been the only home to humanity. Without the earth and its parts, the necessary conditions for the existence and survival of humanity are lacking. Environmental anthropocentrism does not necessitate an adversarial relationship between humans and the rest of nature, contrary to popular opinion. In fact, humanity has a great interest in the welfare of the biosphere: There is very good reason for thinking ecologically, and for encouraging human beings to act in such a way as to preserve a rich and balanced planetary ecology: human

survival depends on it. (Massanari 45) Environmental ethics need to embrace anthropocentrism and the insights of conservation ethics. Human self-interest, regardless of its moral status, is present in human nature and culturally around the world. However, this selfinterest and the direct relation it should have with the welfare of the biotic community is often overlooked. Instead of continuing the debate of whether to champion all members of the biosphere or to promote the advancement of humanity, we need to embrace all members of the biosphere in order to promote the advancement of humanity. There are many different factors that allow for life on earth, particularly
human life. The resources, as they are often called, necessary for the survival of humanity are limited. If the finite resources necessary for human life are gone, then the existence of humanity will no longer be viable on Earth. The recent trend of human attitude toward and interaction with the environment is frighteningly shortsighted. Only a sector of the scientific community attempts to address the potential environmental problems facing humanity in the near and distant future. Those that do, however, often express what seems like helpless concern: A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated. (Warning to Humanity 783) Looking only as far as twenty-five to fifty years into the future of the environment is commonly considered long-term thinking. More than likely, this will only be an intermediate point in the environmental change humans have caused. The future viability of life on the planet is necessary for human survival, and humanity can yet have a say in this future. Humans came about among a preexisting world of living and non-living agents. We are just one of many species that have inhabited, or do inhabit the earth. These various species serve different functions in the biosphere and are interdependent upon one another for the survival of themselves and the biosphere.

Anthropocentrism key to survivalunderstanding the importance of ecosystems to future generations solves environmental destruction Hwan 3 (Kyung-sig, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University.
Apology for Environmental Anthropocentrism, Asian Bioethics in the 21st Century, http://eubios.info/ABC4/abc4304.htm.)
While our ability to affect the future is immense, our ability to foresee the results of our environmental interventions is not. I think that our moral responsibility grows with foresight. And yet, paradoxically in some cases grave moral responsibility is entailed by the fact of one's ignorance. If the planetary life-support system appears to be complex and mysterious, humble ignorance should indicate respect and restraint. However, as many life scientists have complained, these virtues have not been apparent in these generations. Instead they point out, we have boldly marched ahead, shredding delicate ecosystems and obliterating countless species, and with them the unique genetic codes that evolved through millions of years; we have altered the climate and even the chemistry of the atmosphere, and as a result of all this-what?[18] A few results are immediately to our benefit; more energy, more mineral resources, more cropland, convenient waste disposal. Indeed, these short-term payoffs motivated us to alter our natural environment. But by far the larger and more significant results, the permanent results, are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Nature, says poet, Nancy Newhall, "holds answers to more questions than we know how to ask." And we have scarcely bothered to ask.[19] Year and year, the natural habitants diminish and the species disappear, and thus our planetary ecosystem (our household)

It is awareness of ecological crisis that has led to the now common claim that we need transvaluation of value, new values, a new ethic, and an ethic that is essentially and not simply contingently new and ecological. Closer inspection usually reveals that the writer who states this does not really mean to advance such a radical thesis, that all he is arguing for is the application of old, recognized, ethical values of the kind noted under the characterization of respect for persons, justice, honesty, promotion of good, where pleasure and happiness are seen as goods. Thus, although W. T. Blackstone
is forever impoverished. writes; "we do not need the kind of transvaluation that Nietzsche wanted, but we do need that for which ecologists are calling, that is, basic changes in man's attitude toward nature and man's place in nature, toward population growth, toward the use of technology, and toward the production and distribution of goods and services." We need to develop what I call the ecological attitude. The transvaluation of values, which is needed, will require fundamental changes in the social, legal, political and economic institutions that embody our values. He concludes his article by explicitly noting that he does not really demand a new ethic, or a transvaluation of values.

A human being is a hierarchical system and a component of superindividual, hierarchical system of sets. What is needed is not the denial of anthropocentrism,
the placing of the highest value on humans and their ends and the conceiving of the rest of the nature as an instrument for those ends. Rather

what is needed is the explicit recognition of these hierarchical systems and an ecological approach to science and the accumulation of scientific knowledge in which the myriad casual relationships between different hierarchical systems are recognized and put to the use of humanity. The freedom to use the environment must be restricted to rational and human use. If there is irrational use pollution, overpopulation, crowding, a growth in poverty, and so on - people may wipe out hierarchies of life related to their own survival and to the quality of their own lives. This sort of anthropocentrism is essential even to human survival and a radical biotic egalitarianism would undermine conditions for that survival.[20] Rational anthropocentrism, one that recognizes the value of human life "transcends our individual life" and one in which we form a collective bond of identity with the future generations is essential is the process of human evolution.

Anthropocentrism is good it aligns with what is a more productive orientation for environmental ethics Light 9 (Andrew, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society Publication
details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20 Are All Anthropocentrists Against Nature? Andrew Light Version of record first published: 05 Jan 2009)

I will not here provide a full explanation of why Vogels positions will put him in the back of the line at International Society for Environmental Ethics day hikes. But I will here pull apart Vogels commitment to anthropocentrism in order to try to situ- ate his work in relation to others in the field, and identify the probable points of fa- vorable intersection and disagreement with which his views will be met. However, my goal here is a bit more ambitious than simply pigeonholing Vogel into one or another camp in environmental philosophy. I also want to try to discern the practical impact of the robust environmental philosophy emerging from Against Nature. In fact, it is my concern with this practical issue that is the third reason my views do not represent a strong challenge

I am strongly committed to a framework in which the point of environmental philosophy is to try to make a philosophical con- tribution to the resolution of environmental problems, and more specifically to the normative grounding and moral motivation of support for better environmental poli- cies. If environmental ethicists cannot make this kind of contribution, then it is un- clear to me why we are engaged in this kind of work at all. After all, the
to Vogels. philosophical problems of identifying duties, obligations, or rights relevant to nature are incred- ibly murky and notoriously impenetrable to precise analysis. The policy orientation of environmental ethics is in fact a burden that anyone entering the field must under- take. Though I will not make the argument here, I think that the human impacts alone of environmental policies place a distinct moral responsibility on any environmental professional. As it turns out, Vogel seems to agree with a policy orientation for en- vironmental philosophy. In general, his form of anthropocentrism

reflects simply the point that the environmental impacts most important for environmental philosophy are those generated by humans which will be decided by humans. Vogel clarifies his anthropocentrism as referring to the centrality of discursive participants in deter- mining value, not to the centrality of humans as bearers of value (1996, 166). In the end, politically, no matter what value we attribute to (or even discover in) nature, Vogel reminds us that the reasons for making any decision with respect to the envi- ronment must be accepted as good reasons by us humans. There is no one else around to accept or reject them (166). Stemming from a concern similar to Vogels Habermasian point that the reasons for decisions must be
accepted by us, I have come to adopt a form of strategic pluralism and methodological pragmatism that sees the first principal task of environmental philosophy to involve the generation of as many arguments as possible to convince the broader public to support the policies broadly agreed on by the environmental movement. And because I

think that it is empirically true that anthropocentric argu- ments and extensions of environmental discourse to questions of built space best serve what we know are the goals of the movement so far, I do not really care that the reasons Vogel embraces both of these positions might be different from mine. For ex- ample, one might argue that the more reasons to embrace anthropocentrism in envi- ronmental philosophy (inside the parameters of democratic decisionmaking), the better, especially given the highly intuitive claim that anthropocentric arguments are most likely to be morally motivating for agents who commonly think in anthropo- centric terms. So even thought I might disagree with the Habermasian motivation behind Vogels anthropocentic turn, I am not inclined to spend much time voicing that disagreement. For many people, the reasons offered by Vogel for these posi- tions will be persuasive in a way that other arguments will not be. What I am more concerned with, however, is how Vogels work impacts what I take to be the second project of environmental ethics: philosophically weighing in on one side or another of those policy issues on which the environmental movement does not seem to agree. On those issues, we cannot engage in the pluralist project of generating as many persuasive arguments as possible for the public as of yet, but must first go back to something akin to environmental first philosophy. In some cases, philosophers have to help the environmental community figure out which policies they want the public to adopt. But this is not a turn back to an asociable metaphysics, but more an attempt to help create a convergence of ends for environmentalists by contributing moral and political arguments about what the ends of environmental policy should be. Here the question becomes whether Vogels theories for extending anthropocentrism will be convincing to a particular community- namely, the environmental community. Space does not permit taking up the question of Vogels urbanism. But since any appeal to extend environmental ethics to cover human environments begs the question whether environmental ethics should speak only to issues of the value of pure nature, nonanthropocentrically conceived (which most environmental ethicists today seem to believe), it is appropriate to focus instead on Vogels revival of anthropocentrism as a precursor tojustifying his urbanism. Ironically, while I find Vogels position on anthropocentrism philosophically worrisome, it may be less contentious for many environmental philosophers.

Anthropocentrism is good key to survival Watson 7 (David, Professor at the Department of Psychology in the University of Iowa.
"Conservative anthropocentrism provides the best basis and framework for an environmental ethic," http://philosophy.cnu.edu/thesis_papers/DavidWatsonSpring07HTML.htm) The most important consideration in an environmental ethic should be the survival of humanity. Survival is the most important function of humans instinctively and biologically . G.G.
Simpson held this view and stated it concisely: .even if he were the lowest animal, the anthropocentric point of view would still be manifestly the only one to adopt for consideration of his place in the scheme of things and when seeking a guide on which to base

his actions and evaluations of them. (Norton 144) Science considers self-interest to be a driving force in nature. Simpson explains that humans

can only evaluate their actions as they relate to themselves, and that anthropocentrism is natural. G.H. Murdy simplifies the concept by saying, it is proper for men to be anthropocentric and for spiders to be arachnocentric (Norton 144). All living things are physiologically constructed for survival and procreation. All issues related to environmental ethics cannot be discussed without consideration of humans. There is one common trait held by all living things, and that is reproduction. All living things have the ability to procreate. Scientists believe that individual survival is not the only goal of living things, but also the reproduction of their DNA. This importance placed on the future of the DNA is analogous to the importance of
the future of humanity. As much as individuals function to ensure their survival, they also function to ensure the chances of survival of their species. Likewise, an environmental ethic should function to ensure survival in the present, as well as functioning to increase the chances for future survival and humanitys longevity. The theory of natural selection revolutionized biological discussions. This theory holds that the members of each species must and should act to increase the survival chances of their species (Norton 145). Similar to other species included in this theory, humans

should act to increase the chances of the survival of their species. According to the laws of nature we should and must act to increase the chances of present human survival as well
as the future of humanity. One of the main issues of environmental treatment is that of the earths condition when inherited by future generations. Gillespie asserts: .there

is the ethical argument that the future is barely represented in most contemporary decision making. Yet, by the time future generations are living with the environmental
problems that this generation has left them, this generation will have gone, having taken the benefits of such decisions, but leaving the costs behind. (Gillespie 111-112) Making

decisions that are fair to future generations of humanity may require sacrifice. Such sacrifice might be significant, but would pale in comparison to the misery future generations may face on an exhausted and devastated earth. Though acting in the interests of the present may be easier, humanity as a whole should act to increase the chances for future humans. One of the most basic needs of future generations is to have a healthy biosphere in which to live, and this must be addressed before time runs out.

Solving environmental issues must be done through an anthropocentric viewonly humans have the ability to catalyze solutions Parker 96 (Kelly, Professor of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University, Environmental Pragmatism Ed. Light and Katz, p.3233) I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as centrally important. Pragmatism (or better, "anthropometric")24 in

is "anthropocentric" one respect: the human organism is inevitably the one that discusses value. This is so because human experience, the human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans. Many other entities indeed have experience and do value things. Again, this is not to say that human whim is the measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must
be a factor in all our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should speak on the others' behalf when appropriate, but we cannot speak from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices, but we

cannot speak in their

voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively human bodies. In this sense, the human yardstick of experience becomes, by
default, the measure of all things. Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not inappropriate after all, the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world.

Wolves, spotted owls, and old-growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far better that they should speak for themselves! Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons and these spokespersons, their advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in anthropic value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.

Anthropocentric ethics are superior only rational under which the public and policymakers will accept enviornment saving measures and more philsophically sound McShane 7 (Katie, Dept. of Philosophy and Religion North Carolina State University, Environmental Values 16 (2007): 169-185
0 2007 The White Horse Press)
Furthermore, anthropocentrists claim,

anthropocentric approaches have a number of advantages are worries about whether nonanthropocentric ethics can be made philosophically viable. Though I won't rehearse these debates here, the most well known versions of nonanthropocentrism have
overnonanthropocentric approaches. First, there been charged with metaphysical, epistemological, and/or normative inadequacy. 11 Anthropocentric ethics seems to have a better track record in this regard. Second, most

traditional ethical theories are roughly anthropocentric in nature, so adopting anthropocentrism makes available a wide variety of theoretical resources that have been developed to explain, defend, and apply these theories. This is not true for nonanthropocentrism. Third, as Bryan Norton has pointed out, most policymakers and social scientists are anthropocentrists, and anthropocentric assumptions underlie most of the work that they do. By granting their assumption of anthropocentrism, environmental ethicists open the door for more productive collaborative relationships with people who have a significant impact on shaping environmental policies 12 And finally, anthropocentrism might offer hope as a strategy for rejecting the people vs. nature' formulation that so many environmentalists find frustrating. If what's good in nature is ultimately a matter of what's good for people, then (we might think) there can't really be any deep conflict here. From the point of view of the anthropocentrist, then, our theory choice looks like this: We have on the one hand nonanthropocentrism, which recommends environmentally responsible behaviours, but is fairly radical, unpopular, and theoretically problematic. On the other hand we have anthropocentrism, which recommends the same environmentally responsible behaviours, but requires only minor changes in ethical beliefs that are already widely accepted, and is theoretically well worked out. If this is what we're deciding between, the choice looks obvious only a fool would
choose the nonanthropocentric route.

A2: Anthro Always Bad

Anthropocentrism is not inherently destructive toward the environment theyve simply defined it that way Barry 99 (John, lecturer in the Department of Politics at Keele University, Rethinking Green
Politics, p. 24-25) Sensitivity to the various gradations within anthropocentrism is blunted by the definition of anthropocentrism used by deep ecologists. Eckersley defines it as the belief that there is a clear and morally relevant dividing line between humankind and the rest of nature, that humankind is the only or principal source of value and meaning in the world, and that nonhuman nature is there for no other purpose but to serve humankind. (1992a: 51, emphasis added) Breaking this statement down into three propositions, we can discern different aspects of the deep ecological critique of anthropocentrism. Firstly, that there is a morally relevant divide between humans and
non-humans is a statement that all except committed biospheric egalitarians would agree with. As explained in the next chapter, being human counts for something in a way which the charge that anthropocentrism is simply 'ungrounded speciesism' fails to register (Routley and Routley, 1979). That the difference between humans and non-humans may be one of degree rather than kind does not deflate the importance of this basic distinction between how humans interact with each other and how they interact with the rest of the world. As will be recalled, in the introduction I argued that the moral basis of green political theory is a composite one, made up of two moral spheres, one human only and the other concerning social-environmental relations. The

second statement, that humans are the only morally relevant beings in the world, does not follow from the first. Accepting our status as the only or main source of value and meaning in the world can ground widely different attitudes to the world. From this perspective anything from the complete and unhindered exploitation of the world (the third statement) to the widespread protection of vast tracts of nature from human interference can be forthcoming.
For purely human reasons, informed by the idea that we attribute value in an otherwise valueless world, our action in the world can be either extensive or minimal, and is compatible with extending moral considerations to human interaction with the non-human world. And

finally, there is nothing inherently ecologically unfriendly about the fact that humans, as far as we know, are the only species with a moral sense. It is the third statement that goes to the heart of the deep ecology position, where anthropocentrism is understood as expressing an exclusively strong instrumentalist conception of the world. In Eckersley's formulation the non-human is said to be exclusively of instrumental concern to the anthropocentrist. However, it does not follow, either logically or in practice, that the first two positions lead to this instrumentalist one. This
hypothesis can be viewed as, in part, a metaphysical claim, the idea that the world exists solely for human tine and enjoyment. Without such a metaphysical context it is difficult to sets how this statement can be meaningful. Unlike the previous two arguments, which can be thought of as expressing general ethical features, the presumption that the non-human world is there purely for human use is a meta-ethical claim. The problem with anthropocentrism, for deep ecology, is thus not how it operates as an ethical theory, since ethics is meaningless outside an anthropocentric context, but how it operates as a metaphysical position about the place it accords humans within the natural order. Yet there is no necessary reason why this strange claim - which, religious justifications apart, would be extremely difficult to establish - should be thought of as essential to anthropocentrism. The real reason why deep ecologists are suspicious of reformed anthropocentrism is that the status of the non-human world remains contingent: that is, it does not enjoy permanently protected status. This suspicion rests on the fact that deep ecology has at its heart an a priori position which privileges the preservation of nature over the human use of nature (see below).

Human/Nature Distinctions Good

Distinct borders between humans and nature should exist they helps us better respect nature as beyond our power Katz 2 (Eric, Understanding Moral Limits in the Duality of Artifacts and Nature
A Reply to CriticsProject Muse, Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 138-146) The goal of my position in environmental philosophy is to accentuate the difference between the natural world and the world of human culture and artifacts. This is a pedagogicaldualism. We humansoverly impressed with our power to manipulate the natural universemust learn that the proper way to treat autonomous nature is different from the way we treat our artifacts . We must not treat nature as a mere commodity for the furtherance of human satisfaction. We leave nature alone. Such a commitment does not prevent us from acting in the largely artifactual world to solve environmental problems such as pollution, environmental racism, sustainable development, or overpopulation. 6 But why do we need to manage the autonomous natural world? Am I only offering a negative vision? Perhaps.
But we need to know what we cannot and should not do before we can start working out what we should. We must appreciate the limits of human activity. We must know our limitations. Let me close with a story by Walter Benjamin, which I have borrowed from the novel about Benjamin's death by Jay Parini. 7 In a remote Hasidic village, so the story goes, some Jews were huddled together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening beside a log fire. They were local people, all of them, with the exception of one person whom nobody could identify. He was obviously poor, a ragged man who squatted silently on all fours in a shadowy corner at the back of the room. A number of topics were discussed, and then it was suggested that everybody should say what he would ask for if only one wish were granted him. One man wanted money; another would have a faithful son-in-law; a third imagined a brand-new carpenter's bench, with shining tools. Everybody [End Page 144] spoke in turn, and when they had finished, only the beggar had said nothing. They prodded him, of course, andwith reluctancehe said, "I wish I were the powerful king of a large important country. Then, one night while I slept in my palace, an enemy would invade my kingdom, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate my castle, and they would meet with no resistance from my guards. Awakened from a deep sleep, I would have no time to dress; I would have to escape in my nightshirt. Fleeing over hill and dale, through forests day and night, I would arrive at last right here in this despicable inn, and I would be found squatting here in this corner, right now. This is my wish." The others looked around the room, deeply confused. "And what good would that do you?" asked one man. After a pause, the beggar said: "At least I'd have a nightshirt." Recognizing

the duality of human artifacts and natural entities is the first step to a critical understanding what we do and do not have, what we can and cannot achieve, in our interaction with nature and natural processes.

Borders between humans and non-humans are good these are normative boundaries necessary for the organization of social change Fuller 3 (Steve, A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is no Longer Required
for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller Colin Barron History of the Human Sciences 2003 16: 77 DOI: 10.1177/0952695103016002004 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/16/2/77)
In that sense, the social is a misnomer. For Bruno, what social scientists call social is an anthropomorphization of the phenomena of combination or association, which one might find throughout all of nature. Thats very important to keep in mind, because when people wanted to establish some- thing called social science, they actually thought there was something different and this is the point of the debate. Social

science was and is undeniably a moral project. I dont think any of the founders of social science would have denied it either. And thats a very important issue here, because if you look at people like Marx, or Weber, or Durkheim, all of them will grant at the empirical level that indeed human beings behave just like other natural things. None of those thinkers resisted a generalized, naturalistic, evol- utionary perspective. But for all of them, what distinguishes human beings is the ability to organize resistance to to establish

collective identities in spite of such natural forces. The whole point of social organization is specific- ally to combine in ways that go against the natural course of things. In that sense, resistance and conflict are what characterize the distinction between the human and the nonhuman: not going with the flow. For example, Max Webers fundamental sociological categories
were modelled on legal categories. Legal categories are not simply empirical gen- eralizations of what is already happening in the world. Rather, they consti- tute a normative statement that is projected towards some kind of goal , or ideality, towards which organized human beings might aspire, whose vehicle is the State. What makes Webers sociological categories different from legal ones is that the categories are not invoked as a piece of legislation to coerce people. Rather, Weber does the reverse, testing his categories against empiri- cal reality. My point is that the

distinctive sociological concepts are shaped in opposition in resistance to what is already there. This also applies to Durkheim. If we
look at his so-called social facts, as in the famous study of suicide, we find that suicide rates are lowest among people who have close family ties and strong religious beliefs, especially Catholics. People usually read this exclusively in terms of Durkheim showing that there are social regularities that count as distinctive social facts sui generis. But Durkheim had an additional agenda that brings out the moral project of social science. He wrote in a period when the family and religion were declining. Moreover, Durkheim was a republican and a secularist. He therefore saw a role for the State in normatively integrating the French people. The regularity in suicide patterns was thus seen as a problem not merely a fact that can be addressed in some fashion. Finally, in

the case of Marx, his categories are very obviously normative, especially exploitation. After all, the concept of exploitation basically declares that there is something wrong with what capitalists call profit. Thus, from the very beginning, social science has been a moral project. Social scientists have not ignored the existence of empirical regularities, including ones in which humans and non-humans are governed by the same sorts of laws. Rather, the human or the social is demarcated for the normative purpose of creating the project of humanity. Social sciences founders
were not deluded into thinking that there is a prior human essence, especially as that phrase is derided today. Rather humanity was a project in the making. It was a political project to which social science would contribute, not necess- arily by social engineering, but more indirectly. At this point, I want to return to Kant, since Bruno has decided to make Kant the bogeyman of this argument. Im usually no big fan of Kant, but I want to take up Kants moral theory, because crucial to understanding what is going on here is Kants distinction between autonomy and heteronomy. The idea of autonomy is that if one is acting as a moral agent, one is self-directed. An implication of this idea for Kant is that one is resisting natural passions, animal instinct in other words one is going against the flow. Now the idea of autonomy has been very important for organized knowledge production practices in the West. The idea of science, the idea of the university are all tied to the idea of autonomy. And the relevant sense of autonomy is precisely Kants sense, because what one is resisting here are the taken-for-granted notions, are the ordinary ways of understanding things, are taking things at face value. In that respect inquirers qua inquirers have to engage in acts of resistance. While Bruno may dismiss the idea of false consciousness for its making fun of people, in fact the

capacity to make charges of false consciousness that received views might be systematically wrong epitomizes what organized inquiry is about. This is especially true if we keep in mind the larger dare I say modern project of humanity. Admittedly this project has been con- ducted in a very high-handed fashion, but that doesnt mean that
its a project not worth pursuing. In fact, as we have democratized knowledge production practices and opened up our universities, the sphere of autonomy has increased. The alternative to autonomy is the way Bruno portrays researchers, which is as simply following the agents around. In other words, researchers become purely heteronomous. Go wherever your intellectual passions lead you; follow this, follow that, just look at everything thats out there and treat it all the same, without any discrimination.

Separation of humans from nature is critical to changing our current destructive practices this separation is the only way to establish moral agency Yamauchi 5(Tomosaburo. Animal Liberation, Land Ethics and Deep Ecology Published in Journal of Kyoto Seika Univ. No. 29
pp. 14-15, http://www.kyoto-seika.ac.jp/event/kiyo/)

The image of humans as part of nature tends to appear mainly in the literature on ecology as science, metaphysics, religion, education or literary intuitions, not especially in practical ethics. If we are only a part of nature, then, there would not have arisen the moral question of how are we to restore nature? or how are we to live in the age of a deteriorated environment? If we are solely earthbound natural beings in the centre of various relations, we could not much change the world. From such a view of humans and
nature, action or movement towards restoration of envi- ronment would hardly emerge. It is our very ability to be able to change the environment for better or for worse, which give rise to moral questions. We are asking moral questions and making decisions because we are involved in a relationship and, moreover, can change the relationship. Here, in this sense, the

questioning

and decision-making self is a being something apart from nature. This aspect of us humans, as the subject who values, judges, chooses, and acts accordingly, could be called the moral agent.
Humans thus have two aspects, the moral agent who can choose freely, and the moral patient interrelated with nature as a part of nature. There is still a tendency to consider moral agents as humans who conquer, control, or domi- nate nature. People who criticize such views have tended to go to the opposite extreme and think that humans are originally, as a part of nature, interrelated and interconnected in the webs of relationships with nature. In other words, they tend to attain mystic unification with nature, making elimination of self-ness their ideal. Naess writes, Here is a difficult ridge to walk: to the left we have the ocean of organic and mystic views, to the right, the abyss of atomic individualism. (Naess, 1989, p.165.) In order to avoid falling for either extreme, it would be helpful and useful to introduce the moral agent/patient dichotomy into our discussion. A

moral agent is a person who can unify with nature. Accordingly, they must be distin- guished from the dominator or conqueror of nature. On the other hand, the moral agent must also be distinguished from that kind of Zen master who recommended either mystic enlightenment or the noninterference with nature (wu wei) which appears in Taoist versions of deep ecology. If one can establish the moral agent
who is able to change nature for better or for worse, leaving intuitive moral principles aside for the moment, then one would find the third way between anthropocentrism (of conquering nature) and eco-centrism (of unification with, or embodiment of, nature). This would seem to represent a big step towards convergence between the Western human/nature dualism and Eastern monism of humans and nature. The moral agent thus estab- lished could be free to choose the best view path among paths located between anthropocentric and eco-centred tendencies. Once

the notion of moral agent is established in eco-holistic environmental ethics, it will make possible the alteration of the world. We saw that industrial society is not sustainable. Therefore, industrialism can not be generalized on a global scale without destroying the global
environment. It could be permissible only as a exceptional course for exceptional countries; that is, unlimited industrialism means partialism from an ethical viewpoint (that is, it is not universal- izable.) Compared with industrialism, the traditional subsistent cultures were sustainable and the practice could be generalized for all within the global village; it is therefore impartial. One of the most urgent tasks in restoring nature is the restriction of industrialism and urban- ism and the revival of subsistent cultures.

Although animal liberationism, land ethics, and deep ecology are not consistent with industrialism, they have not shown us yet the practical way to cope with industrialization .
Subsistent cultures would, therefore, seem to be much more promis- ing for the purpose of restoring nature, as they could be mixed with, and temper, industrialism, if they cannot be the alternative course to industrialism. In any case, to look back to subsistent cultures in the fresh light of environmental ethics would offer new ways towards restoring nature.

Arendt Case Turn

Links
Humans must be considered apart the plurality of human nature is what enables all action Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p.7-8)
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the hu- man condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition-not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quamof all political life. Thus the language of the
Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words "to live" and "to be among men" {inter homines esse) or "to die" and "to cease to be among men" {inter homines esse de- sinere) as synonyms. But in its most elementary form, the human condition of action is implicit even in Genesis ("Male and female created He them"), if we understand that this story of man's creation is distinguished in principle from the one according to which God originally created Man (adam), "him" and not "them," so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multipli- cation.1 Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality

is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. All three activities and their corresponding conditions are inti- mately connected with the most general condition of human exist- ence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and pre- serving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and pre- serve the
world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant in- flux of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. How- ever, of the three, action

has the closest connection with the hu- man condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of
action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.

Distinguishing humans from animals is what enables everlastingness without such distinctions, there is no philosophical thought or productive action Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p.39)
The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce thingsworks and deeds and words19 which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlasting- ness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cos- mos where everything is immortal except themselves. By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non- perishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwith- standing, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a "divine" nature. The distinction between man and ani- mal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristof), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeu- ein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who "prefer immortal fame to mortal things," are really hu- man; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals. This was still the opinion of Hera- clitus,20 an opinion whose equivalent one will find in hardly any
philosopher after Socrates.

Identification as distinctly human enables the creation of politics Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p.22)
The vita activa, human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man's activities, which would be pointless without such location; yet this environment, the world into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic. No

human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings. All human activities are conditioned by the fact that men live together, but it is only action that cannot even be imagined out- side the society of men. The activity of labor does not need the presence of others, though a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans in the word's most literal significance. Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a godnot, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato
described him in one of his myths. Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it,1 and only action

is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.

Separating ourselves from the non-human is essential it alone enables the creation of the political realm, power, action Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p. 198)
According to this self-interpretation, the political realm rises directly out of acting together , the "sharing of words and deeds." Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it. It is as though the wall of the polis and the bound- aries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself. Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated home- steads. The

polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to
be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It

is the space of appear- ance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly . This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of themlike the slave, the for- eigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or crafts- man prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our worlddo not live in it. No man,
moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To

men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being,"28 and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes
away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.29 The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore pre- dates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not sur- vive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of menas in the case of great catastrophes when the body politic of a people is de- stroyedbut with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves. Wherever

people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever. That civilizations can rise and fall, that mighty
empires and great cul- tures can decline and pass away without external catastrophes and more often than not such external "causes" are preceded by a less visible internal decay that invites disasteris due to this peculiarity of the public realm, which, because it ultimately re- sides on action and speech, never altogether loses its potential character. What first undermines and then

kills political com- munities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instru- ments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of ex- amples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose reali- ties, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. The word itself, its Greek equivalent dynamis,
like the Latin potentia with its various modern dervatives or the German Macht (which derives from mogen and moglich, not from machen), indicates its "potential" character. Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power

springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse. Because of this
peculiarity, which power shares with all potentialities that can only be actualized but never fully materialized, power is to an astonishing degree independent of material factors, either of numbers or means. A comparatively small but well-organized group of men can rule almost indefinitely over large and populous empires, and it is not infrequent in history that small and poor countries get the better of great and rich nations. (The story of David and Goliath is only metaphorically true; the power of a few can be greater than the power of many, but in a contest be- tween two men not power but strength decides, and cleverness, that is, brain power, contributes materially to the outcome on the same level as muscular force.) Popular revolt against materially strong rulers, on the other hand, may engender an almost irresist- ible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of materially vastly superior forces. To call this "passive resistance" is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by righting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize, since nobody can rule over dead men. The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only

where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities,
which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material pre- requisite for power. What keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed (what we today call "organization") and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining to- gether is power. And whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates

himself and does not partake in such being together, forfeits power and becomes impotent, no matter how great his strength and how valid his reasons.

Impacts
Abstract philosophisizing means death the end of politics, action, and human interaction Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p. 20)
In our context it is of no great importance whether Socrates himself or Plato discovered the eternal as the true center of strictly metaphysical thought. It weighs heavily in favor of Socrates that he alone among the great thinkersunique in this as in many other respectsnever cared to write down his thoughts; for it is obvious that, no

matter how concerned a thinker may be with eternity, the moment he sits down to write his thoughts he ceases to be con- cerned primarily with eternity and shifts his attention to leaving some trace of them. He has entered the vita activa and chosen its way of permanence and potential immortality. One thing is cer- tain: it is only in Plato that
concern with the eternal and the life of the philosopher are seen as inherently contradictory and in conflict with the striving for immortality, the way of life of the citizen, the bios politikos. The philosopher's experience of the eternal, which to Plato was arrheton ("unspeakable"), and to Aristotle aneu logon ("without word"), and which later was conceptualized in the paradoxical nunc stans ("the standing now"), can

occur only outside the realm of human affairs and outside the plurality of men, as we know from the Cave parable in Plato's Republic, where the philosopher, having liberated himself
from the fetters that bound him to his fel- low men, leaves the cave in perfect "singularity," as it were, neither accompanied nor followed by others. Politically

speaking, if to die is the same as "to cease to be among men," experience of the eternal is a kind of death, and the only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no living creature can endure it for any length of time. And this is precisely what sepa- rates the vita contemplativa from the vita activa in medieval thought.21
Yet it is decisive that the experience of the eternal, in contradistinction to that of the immortal, has no correspondence with and cannot be transformed into any activity whatsoever, since even the activity of thought, which goes on within one's self by means of words, is obviously not only inadequate to render it but would interrupt and ruin the experience itself.

Without human power, a condition of human action, the world devolves into tyranny and futility Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p.202)
Under the conditions of human life, the

only alternative to power is not strength-which is helpless against power-but force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow men and of which one or a
few can possess a monopoly by acquir- ing the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From

this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerless- ness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all. In historical experience and traditional theory, this combination, even if it is not recognized as such, is known as tyranny, and the time-honored fear of this form of government is not exclusively inspired by its cruelty, which-as the long series of benevolent tyrants and enlightened despots attestsis not among its inevitable features, but by the impotence and futility to which it condemns the rulers as well as the ruled.

Alt
We must reconsider the human condition from a historical perspective that emphasizes the unique human experience Arendt 58 (Hannah, The human condition, p. 5-6)
To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible. What

I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously,
is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessnessthe heedless reckless- ness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of "truths" which have become trivial and emptyseems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it

is nothing more than to think what we are doing. "What we are doing" is indeed the central theme of this book. It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as ac- cording to current opinion, are within the range of every human being.
For this and other reasons, the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations. Systematically, therefore, the book is limited to a discussion of labor, work, and action, which forms its three central chapters. Historically, I deal in a last chap- ter with the modern age, and throughout the book with the various constellations within the hierarchy of activities as we know them from Western history. However, the modern age is not the same as the modern world. Scientifically, the modern age which began in the seventeenth cen- tury came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century; politically, the modern world, in which we live today, was born with the first atomic explosions. I do not discuss this modern world, against whose background this book was written. I

confine myself, on the one hand, to an analysis of those general human capacities which grow out of the human condition and are permanent, that is, which cannot be irretrievably lost so long as the hu- man condition itself is not changed. The purpose of the historical analysis, on the other hand, is to trace back modern world aliena- tion, its twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins, in order to arrive at an un- derstanding of the nature of society as it had developed and pre- sented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age.

Cap Links

Post-humanism
Cultural theorys focus on the relation between the human and non -human mystifies the material roots of profit in the exploitation of labor rather than nature DeFazio 12 (Kimberly, English Professor at University of Wisconsin Lacrosse, Winter/Spring 12,
Machine-Thinking and the Romance of Posthumanism, http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/machinethinkingandtheromanceofposthumanism.htm )
In the 21st century, global

capitalism's commodification of all aspects of life has reached new heights, requiring new modes of explaining away the material roots. From cloning and bioengineered
food, to ever-newer forms of human-technological hybrids, to overfishing and industrialization of slaughterhouses, to the privatization of public sources of water and the selling of "hot air" (which makes it possible for rich nations to avoid lowering emissions), to the "synthetic biology" by which biocapitalists like J. Craig Venter hope new living creatures will be produced to substitute fossil fuelsthere is no aspect of social or natural life that is immune from the market. Capital's endless and inherently crisis-ridden drive to accumulate profit has, on the one hand, led to a new scramble among nations of the global North to privatize the world's dwindling natural resources regardless of the human and ecological consequences. What this competitive drive has lead to, among other things, is the scientific explorations of new bio-horizons: what Venter calls a "new industrial revolution" (Pollack). On the other hand, the most recent effects of capitalist crisisbeginning with the 2007 housing market crashhave been used to justify further privatization of social resources, leading to historically unprecedented cuts in wages, employment and social programs throughout the global North. It is not surprising, then, that cultural

theory has become more and more concerned with the relation between human and non-human life and with the instrumentalities used by the former to control the latter. Broadly characterized by a "posthuman" displacement of humanist priorities of reason, rationality and Cartesian dualism, at the center of which is a human subject constructed as fundamentally different from and superior to non-human animals and life and capable of developing reliable knowledge of and control over the objective worlda wide range of cultural writing today has become concerned with the increasing subjugation of nature to human calculation and control, and call
for a new inquiry into the relation of the human and its other. Some, like Giorgio Agamben, address the increasing efforts of the state to control and manage all aspects of human and non-human life (Homo Sacer; The Open). Others, like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, focus on the efforts by corporations to privatize the knowledges, affects and technologies that have been developed through the collective energies of what they call the multitude: the efforts to enclose the digital commons in the interests of a powerful few (Commonwealth). Graham Harman goes so far as to suggest that the "being" of tools is constitutive of all being in the contemporary moment (Tool-Being), while Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio celebrate the displacement of homo sapiens by the notion of robo sapiens (Robo Sapiens). Among one of the most popular developments in contemporary posthumanist theory, animal studies, writers like Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver, and Matthew Calarco, taking their cue from Derrida's later writings (i.e., The Animal That Therefore I Am), address

what is for them the instrumentalizing and unethical discourses of humanism, which justifies its violence toward non-human species by its epistemological centering of the human: the "anthropological machine" (Agamben, The Open). But what drives the "new industrial revolution" (Venter) is what drove the "old" one: the use of technology to appropriate surplus labor (the source of profit) at the point of production. Profit is not derived from "nature" but labor: in order for nature to become a commodifiable
resource, it must become transformed by human labor, which is itself a dialectical outcome of nature. This is another way of saying that the commodification of life on such a planetary scale today is only possible on the basis of the commodification of human labor power. Biocapitalism

is first and foremost a regime of wage labor. Contemporary cultural theory's concern with the effects of capitalism on non-human life, however, has mystified capital's material roots, and one of the central means by which this has been accomplished is what I call machine-thinking.

Rejecting Boundaries
A rejection of ontological and linguistic boundaries reinforces capitalism not only will the material basis of capital will recreate entrenched attitudes, this rejection will destory binaries such as class that are the only method of truly confronting material oppression DeFazio 12 (Kimberly, English Professor at University of Wisconsin Lacrosse, Winter/Spring 12,
Machine-Thinking and the Romance of Posthumanism, http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/machinethinkingandtheromanceofposthumanism.htm ) A broader point that needs to be made here is that, while for Heidegger the problem is the subject/object binary, and for posthumanists it is the human/animal distinction, what they all reject as metaphysical thinking is the logic of the "binary" which is the structuring principle of class society. Class societies, in which a few control the labor and products of others and thus have control over the lives of the majority, necessarily create cultural and conceptual divisions which codify these class relations. Conceptual divisions have their material roots not in the mind but in the world which the mind reflects, through more or less complex mediations. This is one of the basic principles of
materialism: ideas are not the product of the (individual) mind; rather, social consciousness is shaped by social existence. Therefore

changing how people think and thus act (whether to oneself, other humans, animals or the environment) requires changing the material divisions that produce othering. Philosophy which simply does away with conceptual distinctions in thinking, as Heidegger and other romantics do, not only gets rid of the very concepts (like "class," "exploitation," "determination") needed to understand the structuring principles of class society, but, in effect, displaces material change of objective conditions onto the subjective change of the individual. This is the essential politico-cognitive work that neoromantic theory does for capital. Whether through such concepts as Keats' "negative capability" Kant's
"sublime," Heidegger's "Being" or "the question of the animal" that is the more recent focus of such writers as Derrida, Wolfe, and Calarco, romantic

machine-thinking celebrates the dissolution of boundaries: between self and other, subject and object, philosophy and poetry, rich and poor, the social (as city) and nature. It constructs a
post-rational linguistic realm of higher values which exceed restricting social codes and conventions. Boundaries, in romanticism, are viewed as the imposition of cultural codes and linguistic conventions that rigidly delineate, not as material (as effects of labor relations). It

is through the replacement of "mechanical" concepts with speculative ones that romanticism blurs social boundaries and epistemological distinctions in an effort, not to transform capitalism, but to find a freer mode of thinking within it. As Wordsworth puts it in his Preface
to Lyrical Ballads, it involves taking familiar incidents and "throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of imagination"or, in the updated idiom of posthumanism, a "revolution in language and thought" (Calarco, Zoographies 6). Heideggerian pre-reflective experience, like "the question of the animal," is in

short the space in which "abstract" binaries like class (not to mention other social differences) evaporate. By blurring lines, romantic theory seeks, as Heidegger puts it, "the
liberation of language from grammar" ("Letter on Humanism" 218), rather than social transformation. To liberate language from grammar is of course to free up thinking (from cultural bounds), to suspend the social structures of language and, according to Heidegger, to come closer to understanding Being. Grammarless language is thus the fantasy of the plentitude of meaning outside of the social. No matter how adamantly posthumanism condemns Heidegger's human-centered thinking, the very de-essentializing strategies it deploys to challenge human-animal distinctions are informed by the (Heideggerian) desire to escape existing social conventions, through the relay of the animal.

Dualism Good
Human created things are distinct and separate from nature Katz 2 (Eric, Understanding Moral Limits in the Duality of Artifacts and Nature
A Reply to CriticsProject Muse, Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 138-146)
In turning from formal or structural issues to questions of substance, I have to admit that I am not going to respond to every criticism that has been leveled against my work by Hettinger and Ouderkirk; instead I want to discuss some general issues. First,

there is the question of dualism. I am of two minds about this subject. Let me begin with a paraphrase of a famous story
about Paul Freund, the Harvard law professor, who once began a talk with the following comments: "There are two kinds of people. Those who like to make distinctions, and those who do not. I belong to the second group." Freund's joke, I believe, resonates with a good deal of truth concerning any discussion of dualismthe

criticism of dualism itself always presupposes a dualistic orientation. So although I do not believe that all dualisms are bad, as I will presently show, I can redirect any criticisms of my work as dualistic by turning the tables on the accuser: why create a dualism of philosophical positions, those that make distinctions and those that do not? I believe that there is a clear distinction between natural entities and human-created artifacts. Indeed, I believe that the distinction is
so clear that I am often perplexed by people who claim that there is no distinction. The most general form of the counterargument is that since humans are the products of natural evolution, and since artifacts are the products of human thought and skills that are themselves evolutionary products, then artifacts are as natural as human beings. 1 But this argument clearly blurs important distinctions in the manner in which entities are produced in the world. Artifacts

are the result of human intentions. Natural entities are not. What could be clearer? Superimposed upon this basic distinction there is a spectrum of various kinds of entities. Things can be more or less natural, more or less artifactual. A wooden chair is more natural than a plastic chair, because it is more closely related to the naturally
produced material that forms its basic structure. The plastic chair is the result of many more artifactual [End Page 140] human actionsit is farther from its original natural material or source. But both chairs are definitely artifacts, and completelyshould I say essentially or ontologically?different from naturally occurring entities, for example, a fallen tree that I sit on while walking through the forest. Why are the chairs different? Because they are the result of human intention, human actions to interfere with and mold the natural processes of the world. We could stand around forever and watch nonhuman nature at work and we will never see it produce a chair. Is this distinction some kind of nefarious dualism? Ouderkirk claims

that I use this distinction to "place humans outside of nature," that I use the fact of human intentionality to separaxte both humans and their artifacts from the natural world. I do not think that I am doing this. Clearly, I place human artifacts outside of the natural world, but I think it is an illegitimate jump to say that I therefore place humans outside of the natural world. I realize that we are biological beings, the products of an evolutionary process. But I insist that what we dothe things we create, build, make, imaginethese are all artifactual, outside the realm of naturally occurring entities, processes, and systems. Our artifacts, our culture, would not exist if we humans had not intentionally interfered with and molded the natural world. Nature alone could not create the world in which we now find ourselves.

Post-Humanism Fails
Post-humanism is just an excuse for avoiding social problems like poverty Fuller 3 (Steve, A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is no Longer Required
for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller Colin Barron History of the Human Sciences 2003 16: 77 DOI: 10.1177/0952695103016002004 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/16/2/77)
Well I do think its a little premature to talk about post-human when we havent really quite accomplished the human yet. I often think that the

attempts to go beyond the human to incorporate animals, by animal rights activists and a kind of a reaction to humanitys failure to solve ordinary problems of poverty, to enable people to participate actively as citizens in their society. These projects have not been accomplished. They are the standing failures of the Enlightenment. Consequently, a
environmentalists, is lot of so- called progressive thinkers just move on to something else. In effect, they say: Well, we didnt succeed with the humans, so were going to leave them behind now and work on the animals and make sure they dont get screwed up. In this respect, Im somewhat disappointed with Fukuyamas Our Posthuman Future (2002) because he certainly asks some hard questions. Unfortunately, the normative repertoire at his disposal is very much of the traditional Chris- tian sort, which will not quite appeal to the audience that is necessary for having an open discussion about where were going with biotechnology. Downloaded from hhs.sagepub.com at Fukuyamas heart is in the right place, but his politics are much too con- servative for me. Here

we need some imagination to rescue the human project. Im afraid that sometimes we jump on the post-human bandwagon because we want to forget about the human.

Political Action Key

Abstract intellectualism is uselessenvironmental philosophers should orient themselves towards problem solving De-Shalit 2k (Avner, Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Environment, Ethics, and Society, Mansfield College, Oxford University The Environment: Between Theory and Practice, p. 20, Questia)
So animal rights philosophers have been missing the chance to find a way to many people's hearts. But why is this so crucial? I think it is crucial because it is the wrong way of practising political philosophy. To see why, let us recall a classical book by Max Weber (1968). In Politics als Beruf, Weber presented an important distinction between two approaches to moral reasoning. One is the 'ethics of conviction', which often follows deontology, or a set of rules of conduct; the other is the ethics of responsibility, according to which it would be irresponsible to act according to one's principles alone: rather, one should also consider what others will do as a result of one's actions. It seems to me that political philosophy has this approach in mind. Political

philosophy should orient itself towards real-life problems, including the problem of public good and collective action, where people tend to react in certain undesirable ways to what others do. In such cases
there must be a way of taking into account the effect that my actions have (we include here both what I claim to be doing and the reasons I give for doing it) on others' behaviour and actions. Political reasoning would then have two stages: first, a

discussion of principles, but second, a consideration of their actual application and their effect on others' behaviour. However, many environmental philosophers, while ascribing rights to animals, ignore the way others may react. I believe that many people who might have been persuaded of the importance of treating animals fairly (using the argument of what cruelty can do to the human soul) will regard the notion of animal rights as so obscure or absurd that they dismiss as mad philosophers who suggest this idea, and scorn all such
claims as nonsense. Some may claim that I overestimate the criticism of the general public. But it seems to me that even activists and animal rights advocates are beginning to realize that the claim made on behalf of animal rights, while achieving more and more acceptance among philosophers, is still a curiosity as far as the media and the general public are concerned. Even in cases when activists and the general public do use the term 'animal rights' to describe their campaign, they often do so metaphorically, to describe their opposition to cruelty to animals. This is why legislative bodies continuously pass laws marketed as protecting animals, but which in fact permit a wide range of ill treatment. 10 Thus, for example, Robert Garner admits that, even though in Britain animal rights has become a high profile issue, most of the time 'it simmers below the surface failing to emerge as a crucial vote decider at election times, regularly being ambushed by anthropocentric concerns usually of an economic nature' (Garner 1996a : xii; see also Ryder 1996 : 166-94). Even in the area of animal experimentation, perhaps the area in which one would expect arguments of animal rights to be most appealing, because some of the experiments are so shocking, achievements are still very limited. One might still ask, What's wrong with claimingphilosophicallythat animals have rights? Indeed, one can claim that animal rights arguments, perhaps philosophy in general, is first and foremost meant to have an impact on the elitethat is, other philosophers and maybe other scholars, intellectuals, and artists. Only later will the idea penetrate to the decision-makers, and later still to the general public. The public in general is important, but not that important, because it is not the public that has to be convinced, but the philosophers and decision-makers. I will therefore raise the question of how political philosophy, such as environmental philosophy, should be conducted. First, two clarifications are in order. I am not dismissing the claim that philosophy in general is an elite practice, one less about convincing people and more about finding the truth or even about constructing aesthetic theories about the world. This could be argued. Those who see philosophy in this way might regard political, or applied, philosophy as inferior branches of philosophy. Others might think that philosophy is only about changing the world, and that everything else is a waste of time, a petit bourgeois preoccupation. I cannot devote too much space to debate either of these positions. Suffice it to say that I tend to find that there is room and needboth scientific and social needfor both: there is a time for 'pure' philosophy, and there is a time for 'political' philosophy. There is a timeand a needto search for the truth, to be engaged in debates for the sake of the debate, and there is a time to change the world. 11 However,

what is important, I think, is to remember that environmental philosophy grew out of a desperate need to supply sound philosophical, normative arguments against the continuation of several policies that were causing damage to the environment, putting people's lives at serious risks, ignoring the well-being of future generations, and harming other species. In that sense, at least, the need for environmental philosophy was a need for political philosophy.

Practical political deliberation is the only way to prevent environmental collapse its the only way to change minds and persuade policymakers De-Shalit 2k (Avner, Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Environment, Ethics, and Society, Mansfield College, Oxford University The Environment: Between Theory and Practice, 4-5)
However, it would be wrong, if not dangerous, to blame the 'other'. From the prophets in biblical times to the French revolutionaries and the early Fabians, history

is full of examples of theorists and philosophers who abandoned all hope of persuading others through deliberation, and became impatient and hence more radical in their ideas. This explains why the shift from humanistic to misanthropic attitudes has been rapid. Perhaps the
'easiest' way to solve a problem is to lose faith in a form of gradual change that can still remain respectful of humans. Such an attitude, I believe, only brings about a new series of problems encompassing dictatorship, totalitarianism, and lack of personal freedom. In this book I seek to maintain the philosophical impetus, not to point the finger at the politicians or the activists. Rather, I

wish to examine ourselvesthe philosophers who engage in discussing the environmentto discover how we might construct a theory that is much more accessible to the activists and the general public (without relinquishing any of our goals), and which can be harnessed to the aims of political philosophy. Here, the counter-argument would go something like this: 'OK, so the argumentation supplied by
environmental philosophers is so removed from that used by activists and governments. So what? The only outcome of this is that more arguments, or, if you like, a pluralistic set of arguments, will emerge. Some arguments are relevant to academia alone; others can be used in politics. Thus, for example, in the university we could maintain an ecocentric environmental philosophy, 7 whereas in politics anthropocentric 8 arguments would dominate.' In response to this, it could be argued that plurality of argument is indeed welcome. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the divergence between, say, ecocentric

environmental philosophy and anthropocentric environmental philosophy is not so vast in terms of the policies they recommend. In fact, as John Barry argues, 'reformed naturalistic humanism' is capable of supporting a stewardship ethics just as well (J. Barry 1999 : ch. 3). But my point is that saving the environment is not just a matter of theory: it is an urgent political mission. In a democratic system, however, one cannot expect
policies to be decided without giving any thought to how these policies should be explained to the public, and thereby gain legitimacy. In other words, the rationale of a policy is an increasingly important, if not inseparable, part of the policy; in particular, the openness and transparency of the democratic regime makes the rationale a crucial aspect of the policy. A policy whose rationale is not open to the public, or one that is believed to be arrived at through a process not open to the public, is considered ademocratic (cf. Ezrahi 1990). Consequently,

a policy's legitimacy is owed not only to its effectiveness, but also to the degree of moral persuasion and conviction it generates within the public arena. So, when constructing environmental policies in democratic regimes, there is a need for a theory that can be used not only by academics, but also by politicians and activists. Hence the first question
in this book is, Why has the major part of environmental philosophy failed to penetrate environmental policy and serve as its rationale?

Ecological Preservation Harms 3rd World

Preserving the wilderness works to the detriment of 3rd world populations Guha 99 (Ramachandra, Historian and Columnist for the Telegraph of Calcutta, Philosophical
Dialoges: Arne Naess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, pg 316) If the above dichotomy is irrelevant, the emphasis on wilderness is positively harmful when applied to the Third World. If in the United States the preservationist/utilitarian division is seen as mirroring the conflict between "people" and "interests," in countries such as India the situation is very nearly the reverse. Because India is a long settled and densely populated country in which agrarian populations have a finely balanced relationship with nature, the setting aside of wilderness areas has resulted in a direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. Thus, Project Tiger, a network of parks hailed by the international
conservation community as an outstanding success, sharply posits the interests of the tiger against those of poor peasants living in and around the reserve. The designation of tiger reserves was made possible only by the physical displacement of existing villages and their inhabitants; their management requires the continuing exclusion of peasants and livestock. The initial impetus for setting up parks for the tiger and other large mammals such as the rhinoceros and elephant came from two social groups, first, a class of exhunters turned conservationists belonging mostly to the declining Indian feudal elite and second, representatives of international agencies, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), seeking to transplant the American system of national parks onto Indian soil.

In no case have the needs of the local population been taken into account, and as in many parts of Africa, the designated wildlands are managed primarily for the benefit of rich tourists. Until very recently, wildlands preservation has been identified with environmentalism by the state and the conservation elite; in consequence environmental problems that impinge far more directly on the lives of the poore.g., fuel, fodder, water shortages, soil erosion, and air and water pollutionhave not been adequately addressed.5

Luke Indict
Lukess contradicts himself David Couzens Hoy 86, Professor of Philosophy, UCSC, Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault,
Lukes, and the Frankfurt School, Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy, 1986
The neo-Marxian justification of the counterfactually postulated ,real' interests tends to be a priori, or at least not simply an empirically verifiable matter from within a given ideology. In contrast, Lukes suggests that such justification can appeal to evidence, and is an empirical as well as a philosophical matter. Given this insistence on verifiability, however, his central

thesis that power is an essentially contested concept, and his related contention that the social sciences are relativistic, can be misleading. His presentation indicates that the third model is not a more encompassing model that could incorporate the other models as special cases. The models are incompatible. Given this incompatibility and the relativistic appeal to the inability to resolve the contest between the various conceptions, one might assume that Lukes believes there are no grounds for deciding between the apparently incommensurable theories. Lukes himself would then appear to be making his own radical model an exception. He would be committing what Maurice Mandelbaum aptly dubs the self-excepting fallacy," since Lukes could not believe both in the truth of the results of his model and in relativism. Lukes clearly believes, however, in the inadequacy of the behaviourist models and the superiority of the radical model. Reasons can be given, he thinks, for one view rather than another, and in particular, for the claim that the view enables one to see further and deeper than another. Such a claim can only be made out by bringing out both the implications of alternative views and their unacceptability. That they are unacceptable can always be denied: hence essential contestability. But the contending positions are not incommensurable: the contests are real ones.