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Biodiversity Impact Debate ............................................................................................................. 2

Biodiversity Impacts .................................................................................................................... 3
Ocean biodiversity loss > Extinction ........................................................................................ 4
Biodiversity Loss > Extinction .................................................................................................. 5
Biodiversity loss hurts economy .............................................................................................. 9
AT: Species Adapt .................................................................................................................. 10
AT: Biodiversity Impacts ............................................................................................................ 12
Ocean Biodiversity Alternate Causes .................................................................................... 13
No impact to Biodiversity loss ............................................................................................... 17
Biodiversity Alternate Causes we haz them ....................................................................... 22
AT: Invasive Species ............................................................................................................... 25
AT: Coral Reefs Impacts ......................................................................................................... 27
AT: Coral Reef Impacts Destruction Inev ............................................................................ 28
AT: Coral Reef Impacts Resilient ......................................................................................... 31
Economy Impact Debate ............................................................................................................... 33
Economy Terminal Impacts ....................................................................................................... 34
Economy Impact China War ............................................................................................... 38
US Key to Global Economy ........................................................................................................ 39
AT: Economy Impact .................................................................................................................. 41
Impact Calculus.............................................................................................................................. 47
Biodiversity o/w......................................................................................................................... 48
Biodiversity o/w Nuclear war ................................................................................................ 50
Nuclear war o/w Ecology........................................................................................................... 51
Global Warming o/w ................................................................................................................. 53
Humans o/w ecology ................................................................................................................. 55
Ecology o/w Humans ................................................................................................................. 59
Consequentialism Good ............................................................................................................ 61
Extinction Outweighs................................................................................................................. 64

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Biodiversity Impact Debate

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Biodiversity Impacts

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Ocean biodiversity loss > Extinction

Ocean biodiversity loss causes extinction
Craig 03
*Robin Kundis, Attorneys Title Insurance Fund Professor at Florida State University College of
Law and leading environmental law scholar, Winter 2003, Taking Steps Toward Marine
Wilderness Protection? Fishing and Coral Reef Marine Reserves in Florida and Hawaii, Lexis+
WD
The worlds oceans contain many resources and provide many services that humans consider
valuable. Occupying more than seventy percent of the Earths surface and ninety-five percent
of the biosphere, oceans provide food; marketable goods such as shells, aquarium fish, and
pharmaceuticals; life support processes , including carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, and
weather mechanics; and quality of life, both aesthetic and economic, for millions of people
worldwide. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the ocean to humanitys wellbeing: The ocean is the cradle of life on our planet, and it remains the axis of existence, the
locus of planetary biodiversity, and the engine of the chemical and hydrological cycles that
create and maintain our atmosphere and climate. Ocean and coastal ecosystem services have
been calculated to be worth over twenty billion dollars per year, worldwide. In addition, many
people assign heritage and existence value to the ocean and its creatures, viewing the worlds
seas as a common legacy to be passed on relatively intact to future generations. (It continues...)
More generally , ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all
the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms , carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements. In a
very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the
planets ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the
functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystems
ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity,
indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable. (It continues...) We may not know
much about the sea, but we do know this much: If we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we
will take most of the biosphere with us . The Black Sea is almost dead, 863 its once-complex
and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, "starving
out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermen's nets, and converting the web of life into brainless,
wraith-like blobs of jelly." 864 Mo re importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique.

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Biodiversity Loss > Extinction

Biodiversity Loss Leads to Extinction
Buczynski 10 gender modified* [Beth, writer and editor for important ecosystem sustainability,
UN: Loss Of Biodiversity Could Mean End Of Human Race, Care2, 18/10/10,
http://www.care2.com/causes/un-humans-are-rapidly-destroying-the-biodiversity-ne.html]
UN officials gathered at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Japan have issued a global warning that the rapid loss
of animal and plant species that has characterized the past century must end if humans are to survive.
Delegates in Nagoya plan to set a new target for 2020 for curbing species loss, and will discuss boosting medium-term financial help
for poor countries to help them protect their wildlife and habitats (Yahoo Green). Business

as usual is no more an
option for [hu]mankind*, CBD executive secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf said in his opening statements. We need a new
approach, we need to reconnect with nature and live in harmony with nature into the future. The CBD is an international legallybinding treaty with three main goals: conservation of biodiversity; sustainable use of biodiversity; fair and equitable sharing of the
benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. Its overall objective is to encourage actions which will lead to a sustainable future.
As Djoghlaf acknolwedged in his opening statements, facing the fact that many countries have ignored their obligation to these goals
is imperitive if progress is to be made in the future. Let us have the courage to look in the eyes of our children and admit that we
have failed, individually and collectively, to fulfil the Johannesburg promise made to them by the 110 Heads of State and
Government to substantially reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010, Djoghlaf stated. Let us look in the eyes of our children and
admit that we continue to lose biodiversity at an unprecedented rate, thus mortgaging their future. Earlier this year, the U.N.
warned several

eco-systems including the Amazon rainforest, freshwater lakes and rivers and coral reefs are
approaching a tipping point which, if reached, may see them never recover. According to a study by
UC Berkeley and Penn State University researchers, between 15 and 42 percent of the mammals in North America disappeared after
humans arrived. Compared to extinction rates demonstrated in other periods of Earths history, this

means that North American

species are already half way to to a sixth mass extinction, similar to the one that eliminated
the dinosaurs. The same is true in many other parts of the world. The third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook
demonstrates that, today, the rate of loss of biodiversity is up to one thousand times higher than the background and historical rate
of extinction. The Earths

6.8 billion humans are effectively living 50 percent beyond the planets
biocapacity in 2007, according to a new assessment by the World Wildlife Fund that said by 2030 humans will
effectively need the capacity of two Earths in order to survive.

Biodiversity loss threatens the Earths life support systems

Freidburg 11 (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitt, The biological diversity of organisms on Earth is not just something we enjoy when
taking a walk through a blossoming meadow in spring; it is also the basis for countless products and services provided by nature,
including food, building materials, and medicines as well as the self-purifying qualities of water and protection against erosion. New
findings indicate that much more biodiversity is necessary to keep ecosystems functioning in a world that is changing ever faster.
The protection of diversity is thus a crucial factor in maintaining Earth's life-support functions.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110811084513.htm)

The biological diversity of organisms on Earth is not just something we enjoy when taking a walk
through a blossoming meadow in spring; it is also the basis for countless products and services provided by
nature, including food, building materials, and medicines as well as the self-purifying qualities of
water and protection against erosion. These so-called ecosystem services are what makes Earth inhabitable for
humans. They are based on ecological processes, such as photosynthesis, the production of biomass, or
nutrient cycles. Since biodiversity is on the decline, both on a global and a local scale, researchers are asking the question as to
what role the diversity of organisms plays in maintaining these ecological processes and thus in providing the ecosystem's vital
products and services. In an international research group led by Prof. Dr. Michel Loreau from Canada, ecologists from ten different
universities and research institutes, including Prof. Dr. Michael Scherer-Lorenzen from the University of Freiburg, compiled findings
from numerous biodiversity experiments and reanalyzed them. These experiments simulated the loss of plant species and
attempted to determine the consequences for the functioning of ecosystems, most of them coming to the conclusion that a higher
level of biodiversity is accompanied by an increase in ecosystem processes. However, the findings were always only valid for a
certain combination of environmental conditions present at the locations at which the experiments were conducted and for a
limited range of ecosystem processes. In a study published in the current issue of the journal Nature, the research group
investigated the extent to which the positive effects of diversity still apply under changing environmental conditions and when a
multitude of processes are taken into account. They found that 84 percent of the 147 plant species included in the experiments

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promoted ecological processes in at least one case. The more years, locations, ecosystem processes, and scenarios of global change - such as global warming or land use intensity -- the experiments took into account, the more plant species were necessary to
guarantee the functioning of the ecosystems. Moreover, other species were always necessary to keep the ecosystem processes
running under the different combinations of influencing factors. These findings indicate that much more biodiversity is necessary to
keep ecosystems functioning in a world that is changing ever faster. The

protection of diversity is thus a crucial

factor in maintaining Earth's life-support functions.

Biodiversity loss risks extinction

Walsh 10 [Bryan, covers environment, energy and when the need arises particularly
alarming diseases for TIME magazine, Wildlife: A Global Convention on Biodiversity Opens in
Japan, But Can It Make a Difference? October 18, 2010
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/10/18/wildlife-a-global-convention-on-biodiversityopens-in-japan-but-can-it-make-a-difference/#ixzz131wU6CSp]

The story of non-human life on the planet Earth over the past few decades is a simple
one: loss. While there are always a few bright spotsincluding the recovery of threatened animals
like the brown pelican, thanks to the quietly revolutionary Endangered Species Acton a planetary

scale biodiversity is steadily marching backwards, with extinctions rising and habitat
destroyed. Species as diverse as the tigerless than 3,500 live in the wild todayto tiny frogs

could be gone forever if the trends keep heading downwards. In a bitterly ironic twist,
back in 2002 the United Nations declared that 2010 would be the international year of biodiversity,
and countries agreed to" achieve a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the
global, regional and national level," as part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At
this paper in Science shows (download a PDF here), however, the world has utterly failed to reduce
the rate of biodiversity loss, and by just about every measurement, things are getting worse
all the time. (Read the Global Biodiversity Outlook if you really want to be depressed.) With that
cheery backdrop, representatives from nearly 200 nations are meeting in the Japanese city of
Nagoyahome to Toyota and not a whole lot elsefor the 10th summit of the CBD, where they will
set new goals for reducing species loss and slowing habitat destruction. At the very least, they should
know how critical the biodiversity challenge isas Japanese Environment Minister Ryo Matsumoto
said in an opening speech:
All life on Earth exists thanks to the benefits from

biodiversity in the forms of fertile soil, clear water and clean air. We are now close to a
'tipping point' - that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity
loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do
not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the executive
secretary of the CBD, struck an even darker note, reminding diplomats that they were
on a clockand time was running out:
Let's have the courage to look in the eyes of our
children and admit that we have failed, individually and collectively, to fulfil the Johannesburg
promise made by 110 heads of state to substantially reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010.
Let us look in the eyes of our children and admit that we continue to lose biodiversity at an
unprecedented rate, thus mortgaging their future. But what will actually come out of the Nagoya
summit, which will continue until Oct. 29? Most likely there will be another agreementa new
protocoloutlining various global strategies on sustaining biodiversity and goals on slowing the rate
of species loss. (You can download a PDF of the discussion draft document that will be picked over at
Nagoya.) It won't be hard for governments to agree on general ambitions for reducing biodiversity
losswho's against saving pandas?but the negotiations will be much trickier on the question of
who will actually pay for a more biodiverse planet? And much as we've seen in international climate
change negotiations, the essential divide is between the developed and developing nationsand
neither side seems ready to bend. The reality is that much of the world's biodiversitythe most
fantastic species and the most complete forestsis found in the poorer, less developed parts of the
world. That's in part because the world's poor have been, well, too poor to develop the land around
them in the way rich nations have. (There was once a beautiful, undeveloped island off the East Coast
of the U.S., with wetlands and abundant forests. It was called Mannahatta. It's a little different now.)
As a result, the rural poorespecially in tropical nationsare directly dependent on healthy wildlife

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and plants in a way that inhabitants of developed nations aren't. So on one hand that makes the poor
directly vulnerable when species are lost and forests are chopped downwhich often results in
migration to thronging urban areas. But on the other, poverty often drives the rural poor to slash-andburn forests for agriculture, or hunt endangered species to sell for bush meat. Conservation and
development have to go hand in hand. That hasn't always been the mantra of the conservation
movementas Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes in Slate, conservation projects in the past sometimes
displaced the human inhabitants over a reserve or park, privileging nature over people. But that's
changed in recent decadesenvironmental groups like Conservation International or the Nature
Conservancy now spend as much of their time working on development as they do in protecting
nature. "Save the people, save the wildlife"that's the new mantra. The missing ingredient is
moneyand that's what will be up for debate at Nagoya. As climate change has risen on the
international agenda, funding for biodiversity has laggedthe 33 member nations of the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) donated $8.5 billion for climate change
mitigation projects in 2008, but just $3 billion annually for biodiversity. One way to change that could
be through "payment for ecosystem services." A biodiverse landscape, intact forests, clean

water and airall of these ebbing qualities of a healthy world are vital for our
economies as well. (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a UN-funded study,
estimates that nature degradation costs the world $2 trillion to $5 trillion a year, with
the poorest nations bearing the brunt of the loss.) Rich countries could pay more biodiverse
developing nations to keep nature runningallowing poorer countries to capitalize on their natural
resources without slashing and burning. Will that work? I'm skepticalthe experience of climate
change negotiations have shown that the nations of the world are great at high ideals and fuzzy goals,
but not so hot at actually dividing up the pie in a more sustainable fashion. That doesn't mean there
aren't smaller solutionslike Costa Rica's just-announced debt-for-nature dealbut a big bang from
Japan this month doesn't seem too likely. The problem is as simple as it is unsolvable, at least so far
there's no clear path to national development so far that doesn't take from the natural world. That
worked for rich nations, but we're rapidly running out of planet, as a report last week from the World
Wildlife Fund showed. And there's something greater at stake as well, as the naturalist E.O. Wilson
once put it:
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to

correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural
habitats-this is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us. We're losing
nature. And that loss really is forever.

BioD loss leads to extinction

Coyne and Hoekstra 7 - jerry coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the university of
chicago. Hopi e. Hoekstra is john l. Loeb associate professor in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology at harvard
university and curator of mammals at harvard's museum of comparative zoology. ,diversity lost as we head towards a lonely
planet, weekend australian, november 10, lexis

Extinction exacerbates global warming: by burning rainforests, we're not only polluting the atmosphere with carbon
dioxide (a greenhouse gas) but destroying the plants that can remove this gas from the air. Conversely, global warming
increases extinction, directly (killing corals) and indirectly (destroying the habitats of Arctic and Antarctic animals). As
extinction increases, then, so does global warming, which in turn causes more extinction and
so on, into a downward spiral of destruction. Why, exactly, should we care? Let's start with the most
celebrated case: rainforests. Their loss will worsen global warming, raising temperatures,
melting icecaps and flooding coastal cities. And, as the forest habitat shrinks, so begins the inevitable contact
between organisms that have not evolved together, a scenario played out many times and one that is never good. Dreadful
diseases have successfully jumped species boundaries, with humans as prime recipients . We
have got AIDS from apes, severe acute respiratory syndrome from civets and Ebola from fruit bats. Additional worldwide
plagues from unknown microbes are a real possibility. But it isn't just the destruction of the rainforests that
should trouble us. Healthy ecosystems the world over provide hidden services such as waste disposal, nutrient cycling, soil
formation, water purification and oxygen production. Such services are best rendered by ecosystems that are diverse. Yet,

through intention and accident, humans have introduced exotic species that turn biodiversity
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into monoculture. Fast-growing zebra mussels, for example, have outcompeted more than 15 species of native mussels in
North America's Great Lakes and have damaged harbours and water-treatment plants. Native prairies are becoming dominated by
single species (often genetically homogenous) of corn or wheat. Thanks

to these developments, soils will erode

and become unproductive which, along with temperature change, will diminish agricultural
yields. Meanwhile, with increased pollution and run-off, as well as reduced forest cover,
ecosystems will no longer be able to purify water, and a shortage of clean water spells
disaster. In many ways, oceans are the most vulnerable areas of all. As overfishing eliminates important predators, while polluted
and warming waters kill off phytoplankton, the intricate aquatic food web could collapse from both sides. Fish, on which so many
humans depend, will be a fond memory. As phytoplankton vanish, so does the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and
produce oxygen. (Half of the oxygen we breathe is made by phytoplankton, with the rest coming from land plants.) Species
extinction is also imperilling coral reefs, a big problem since these reefs have more than recreational value: they provide tremendous
amounts of food for human populations and buffer coastlines against erosion. Indeed, the global value of hidden services provided
by ecosystems -- those services, such as waste disposal, that aren't bought and sold in the marketplace -- has been estimated to be
as much as $US50thousand billion ($53.8 thousand billion) a year, roughly equal to the gross domestic product of all countries
combined. And that doesn't include tangible goods such as fish and timber. Life

as we know it would be impossible

if ecosystems collapsed. Yet that is where we're heading if species extinction continues at its
present pace. Extinction also has a huge impact on medicine. Who really cares if, say, a worm in the remote
swamps of French Guiana becomes extinct? Well, those who suffer from cardiovascular disease. The recent discovery of a rare
South American leech has led to the isolation of a powerful enzyme that, unlike other anticoagulants,
not only prevents blood from clotting but also dissolves existing clots. And it's not just this species of
worm: its wriggly relatives have evolved other biomedically valuable proteins, including antistatin (a potential anti-cancer agent),
decorsin and ornatin (platelet aggregation inhibitors) and hirudin (another anticoagulant). Plants, too, are pharmaceutical
goldmines. The bark of trees, for example, has given us quinine (the first cure for malaria), taxol (a drug that is highly effective
against ovarian and breast cancer) and aspirin. More

than one-quarter of the medicines on our pharmacy

shelves were originally derived from plants. The sap of the Madagascar periwinkle contains more than 70 useful
alkaloids, including vincristine, a powerful anti-cancer drug that saved the life of one of our friends. Of the roughly 250,000
plant species on Earth, fewer than 5 per cent have been screened for pharmaceutical
properties. Who knows what life-saving drugs remain to be discovered? Given present extinction rates,
it's estimated that we're losing one valuable drug every two years. Our arguments so far have tacitly assumed that species are worth
saving only in proportion to their economic value and their effects on our quality of life, an attitude that is strongly ingrained,
especially in Americans. That is why conservationists always base their case on an economic calculus. But we biologists know in our
hearts that there are deeper and equally compelling reasons to worry about the loss of biodiversity: namely, morality and
intellectual values that transcend pecuniary interests. What, for example, gives us the right to destroy other creatures? And what
could be more thrilling than looking around us, seeing that we are surrounded by our evolutionary cousins and realising that we all
got here by the same simple process of natural selection? To biologists, and potentially everyone else, apprehending the genetic
kinship and common origin of all species is a spiritual experience, not necessarily religious but spiritual nonetheless, for it stirs the
soul. But whether or not one is moved by such concerns, it is certain that our future is bleak if we do nothing to stem this sixth
extinction.

We are creating a world in which exotic diseases flourish but natural medicinal cures
are lost; a world in which carbon waste accumulates while food sources dwindle; a world of
sweltering heat, failing crops and impure water. In the end, we must accept the possibility
that we are not immune to extinction. Or, if we survive, perhaps only a few of us will remain, scratching out a grubby
existence on a devastated planet. Global warming will seem like a secondary problem when humanity finally faces the consequences
of what we have done to nature; not just another Great Dying, but perhaps the greatest dying of them all.

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Biodiversity loss hurts economy

Bio-d key to economy
Ansley, Australia correspondent, March 15 2012
(Greg, The NZ Herald, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10792060; CKP)
The last 20 years has seen an enormous scientific effort to answer this question. More

than 600 experiments

have examined how biodiversity loss impacts our ecosystems and showed overwhelming
evidence that reducing local biodiversity results in un-healthy ecosystems. If we do not slow
the rate of biodiversity loss, our economy will begin to pay a massive ecological price for
business as usual. The widespread consequences for humankind stand in sharp contrast to the
lack of current political leadership on the subject. This is particularly evident in Canada, where existing
environmental legislation is already weaker than comparable laws in the U.S. and Western Europe.

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AT: Species Adapt

Species Cant Adapt Fast Enough
Thompson 13 [Ron, scientist and writer for science mag, Species Not Evolving Fast Enough to
Cope With a Changing World, Science Magazine, 22-7-13,
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2013/07/species-not-evolving-fast-enough-copechanging-world
Scientists know that climate change is putting species around the globe in peril, but just how
much peril? After all, when evolution failed to keep pace with a major climatic event 65
million years ago, half the planet's species went extinct and dinosaurs were reduced to jittery
feathered creatures that get bullied by squirrels on bird-feeders. A new study suggests that our
current era of climate change won't just exceed the rate of evolution, but will do so by a factor
of thousands. Although the work doesn't go so far as predicting an extinction rate, it doesn't
bode well for the near future of global biodiversity. The world has warmed 0.6C in the past few
decades, and climate models say that we could see another 4 by century's end. "We want to
know if species will be able to adapt to climate change quickly enough based on how they
adapted to climate change in the past," says evolutionary ecologist John Wiens, of the University
of Arizona in Tucson, and lead author of the new study. Wiens decided to investigate by looking
at the top branches of family trees. When two living species are closely related, scientists can
estimate how long ago they diverged, thus providing an age for their common ancestor.
Researchers can also estimate temperature and precipitation in that ancestor's habitat, using
evolutionary models. With help from Yale University biology student Ignacio Quintero, Wiens
calculated such estimates for 540 species in 17 groups of living vertebrates. They studied
reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals primarily native to North and Central America, but
with some European, Asian, Australian, South American, and African species as well. Then they
used global climate models to determine how the local climate of each species is expected to
change by the end of this century. Despite differences in local climate and in the vertebrates
themselves, the results were consistent. The average rate of adaptation for 15 of the 17 groups
was less than 1C per million years. Two groups adapted slightly faster, but still below 2 per
million years. So if a frog breeds in autumn because the temperature is right, it might adapt to
warmer temperatures by breeding in December, January, or February. And lizards that survive
on those eggs might have to change their diet. But the study found that such adaptations
typically occur about 10,000 to 100,000 times too slowly to keep pace with global warming
projections for the year 2100. The researchers reached the same conclusion for the expected
regional increases and decreases in rainfall: Again, the species adapted 10,000 to 100,000 times
too slowly. Adapting too slowly does not mean certain death. A species can relocate. But due to
habitat destruction and other factors, not all species can move. If a rodent lives on a mountain
and warmer temperatures compel the animal to climb higher, it may run out of mountain while
temperatures keep rising. Wiens was surprised by the results because they suggest that the
studied species, which typically adapt to less than 1C of change per million years, now must
adapt to 4 between now and the year 2100. "It's almost crazy to think that they're going to, in
just a few decades, be more different than they've become over millions of years," he says.
Wiens cautions that the studywhich will be published in the August issue of Ecology Letters
looked at only hundreds of species, not the millions in real-life ecosystems, and does not
attempt to estimate an extinction rate. "If you extrapolated from our sample of species, it

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might be about 50%, but it could be more or it could be less," he says. "I think this is a very
interesting and worthy study, which will certainly stimulate a lot of discussion," says
evolutionary biologist Michael Donoghue of Yale University, who wasn't involved in the study.
But the paper itself notes that animals could be considerably more adaptable than its methods
suggest. "Somebody could reasonably argue that they've been evolving at this rate because
climates have been changing slowly," Donoghue says. Other studies have found remarkably
high rates of adaptation in some species, such as Galpagos finches, he says.

Adaptation takes thousands of years

PBS 12 [Public Broadcasting Service, Frequently Asked Questions About Evolution, 6/7/12,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat06.html]
Even though evolution is taking place all around us, for many species the process operates so
slowly that it is not observable except over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years -much too long to witness in a human lifetime. There are cases in quickly reproducing life forms
like bacteria and fruit flies, however, where evolution can be seen happening in a matter of
weeks for the bacteria and many months for the flies. In these cases the relatively large number
of generations in a given period of time is key, since evolutionary change occurs incrementally
from one generation to the next. All else being equal, the more generations you have, the
more quickly evolution happens.

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AT: Biodiversity Impacts

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Ocean Biodiversity Alternate Causes

Alt causes- over-fishing and large scale whaling hurt biodiversity
Shah, 3/3/2013- Global Issues (Anup, Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions, Accessed on
7/12/2013, http://www.globalissues.org/article/171/loss-of-biodiversity-and-extinctions)
This first Census of Marine Life (CoML) hopes to act as a baseline of how human activity is
affecting previously unexplored marine ecosystems. A database of global marine life has also
published as well as numerous videos (also on YouTube) and images. Although it is a large
project (in terms of cost, scope and duration), there are still many unknowns that will need
further research. For example, the current number of known marine species is estimated at
250,000. However, scientists believe that there as many as three times this number are yet to
be discovered and named. (See page 3 of their main 2010 report.) The Census was able to
determine, however, that over-fishing was reported to be the greatest threat to marine
biodiversity in all regions followed by habitat loss and pollution. One of the summary reports
also added that the fact that these threats were reported in all regions indicates their global
nature. A collection of regional and overview reports were also published on the Public
Library of Science web site. In the past century, commercial whaling has decimated numerous
whale populations, many of which have struggled to recover. Whaling stations like this one in
the Faroe Islands is also used to hold hunted dolphins and other animals. (Image source:
Wikipedia) Commercial whaling in the past was for whale oil. With no reason to use whale oil
today, commercial whaling is mainly for food, while there is also some hunting for scientific
research purposes. Large scale commercialized whaling was so destructive that in 1986 a
moratorium on whaling was set up by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). As early as
the mid-1930s, there were international attempts to recognize the impact of whaling and try
and make it more sustainable, resulting in the actual set up of the IWC in 1946. Many
commercial whaling nations have been part of this moratorium but have various objections and
other pressures to try and resume whaling. Japan often claims its whale-hunting is for scientific
research; the general population is often quite skeptical of such claims. (Image source:
Greenpeace) Japan is the prime example of hunting whales for the stated aim of scientific
research while a lot of skepticism says it is for food. Greenpeace and other organizations often
release findings that argue Japans whaling to be excessive or primarily for food, and for
research as secondary. General public negativity of commercial whaling has also led to a
difference between traditional whaling communities in the arctic region and conservationists.
Traditional indigenous communities have typically hunted whale in far smaller numbers
commercially, mostly for local food consumption, but the impacts of large-scale commercial
whaling has meant even their hunting is under pressure.
Alt causes- global warming is harming a multitude of marine species
Imtiyaz et al, 2011- Professor of Marine Sciences at Bhavnagar University (Belim, Threats to
Marine Biodiversity, Accessed on 7/12/2013,
http://academia.edu/3424137/Threats_to_Marine_Biodiversity)
Global warming will cause sea level rise. As a result higher temperature decreases the ability
of water to dissolve oxygen. Humans, however, have been increasing the amount of CO2 in
the atmosphere by burning enormous amount of fossil fuels. Loggerhead Turtle nests in
Florida have already producing 90% females owing to high temperatures, and if warming
raises temperatures by an additional 1 C or more, no males will be produced there. Coral

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reefs require particular environmental conditions for growth and water temperatures from
2329C are optimal for growth. Increasing temperature too much can cause the coral polyps
to expel the zooxanthellae and lead to coral bleaching where the zooxanthellae are expelled
from the coral by the polyps. Coastal power plants use seawater for cooling and discharge the
warmed water at the coast. This locally disturbs the ecological balance of the marine
communities, especially if it is already a low oxygen environment (gases are less soluble in
warm water). Warming is bad for polar communities, the Arctic pack-ice has been getting
thinner at a rate that if maintained will result in the Arctic becoming ice-free in a few decades,
and with its disappearance will go polar bears, walruses and many of the other Arctic species.
Alt causes- pollution severely harms marine biodiversity
Imtiyaz et al, 2011- Professor of Marine Sciences at Bhavnagar University (Belim, Threats to
Marine Biodiversity, Accessed on 7/12/2013,
http://academia.edu/3424137/Threats_to_Marine_Biodiversity)
Pollutants in the air, water, and soil can affect organisms in many different ways, from
altering the rate of plant growth to changing reproduction patterns, in certain extreme
situations, leading to extinction. Coral reefs can be damaged by a variety of pollutants that are produced by a
variety of sources. Because algae can potentially grow so much faster than coral, they can out-compete corals. Human
sewage, often untreated, can add nutrients, microorganisms, and other pollutants to coral
reefs (depletion). Nutrients in sewage can cause eutrophication. Industrial wastes enter the
sea as a result of deliberate dumping in specified location. These could be highly toxic, acidic
or alkaline in the form of solid, liquid, inert substances. Mass mortality of fish or other marine
organism has been reported from different regions caused by the release by industrial wastes.
Earlier, both sewage and industrial wastes used to be dumped right along the shoreline. Now
these are released through pipelines, either exposed or underground, some distance away
where circulation of water is faster so that these are carried farther in to deeper water. Of all
heavy metals, those which cause concern are mercury, cadmium, lead and arsenic. These occur us
extremely low concentration in the waters of the open ocean but tend to increase as we come to coastal waters because of
industrial material discharged in to sea. Sources of oil pollution are normally, tanker disaster, ballast water and bilage washings,
factories etc. Animals can be poisoned or suffer internal damage from ingesting oil so marine animals may become sleepy and
drown. One of the most prevalent side effects of an oil spill is hypothermia. This is an illness often endured by marine creatures
which have been exposed to it. Once the oil drifts into the water, it creates a sticky substance called the mousse. This mousse
gets stuck simply to the fur or feather of sea animals. The fur and feathers that are typically constructed up of air space to aid
insulation are unable to fly and die due to starvation. Oil spills affect marine life like filter feeders by concentrating in the flesh of
these animals. Clams, mussels, and oysters may quickly accumulate toxins which can kill the animals or be passed on along the
food chain. Human consumers often complain that shellfish harvested from an area impact by an oil spill taste heavy and oily.
Animals that rely on these filter feeders for food may become sick and die as a result of consuming them. Oil spill can be
especially harmful if they occur during coral spawning because the oil can kill eggs and sperm.

Alt causes- climate change decreases ocean biodiversity

Villarica 11/3/11-Time Magazine (Hans, New Evidence That Climate Change Threatens
Marine Biodiversity,Jul. 12, 2013,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/new-evidence-that-climate-changethreatens-marine-biodiversity/247813/)
Even though the world's oceans and seas aren't warming up as fast as landmass, there is still
cause for concern for marine life. A new study published in the journal Science presents
evidence that the speed and direction of climate change as well as the timing of seasonal
shifts are moving just as fast in large bodies of water as in land, and these point to serious
conservation problems for regions rich in marine biodiversity. Scientists led by Scottish Marine
Institute ecologist Michael Burrows calculated two metrics -- the velocity of climate change and

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the shifts in seasonal timing -- that they argue are more accurate gauges of biodiversity, or the
health of ecosystems, than traditional temperature records. Using 50 years of global
temperature and climate data, they made detailed predictions on the ability of organisms to
cope with warming, including biogeographic range shifts and life-cycle changes, that involve
much more than simple migration toward the Earth's poles and earlier springs coupled with
later autumns. They found that some marine reserves, such as the Coral Triangle in Southeast
Asia, may be in danger of losing their ambient temperatures rapidly. "What we have done is
think about warming from a different perspective: If I started off at one point experiencing a
particular temperature, how fast and in what direction would I need to walk or swim or crawl to
remain at exactly the same temperature?" says co-author David Schoeman. "This takes the idea
of warming and turns it from a question of time to a question of space."

Increased carbon emissions increases ocean acidification which hurts

biodiversity
SCBD 2009- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity(Scientific Synthesis od the
Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity, 7/12/13,
http://coralreef.noaa.gov/education/oa/resources/cbd_ts46_oceanacidification-web.pdf) RN
Ocean acidification is irreversible on timeframes of at least tens of thousands of years and is
determined in the longer term by physical mixing processes within the ocean that allow ocean
sediments to buffer the changes in ocean chemistry. Warming of the oceans as a result of
global climate change may also reduce the rate of mixing with deeper waters, which would
further delay recovery. Despite the projected increase in dissolution rates and CO2 uptake
from the atmosphere, associated with decreasing CaCO3 saturation states, it is likely that the
rapid increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations could eventually overwhelm the natural
buffering mechanisms of the ocean, leading to a reduced efficiency for carbon uptake by the
oceans over the next two centuries. Reduced buffering capacity of the ocean to take up CO2
will increase the fraction of CO2 retained in the atmosphere, a negative feedback loop leading
to further ocean acidification. Changing pH levels have potentially vast consequences for
marine ecosystems because of the critical role pH plays in mediating physiological reactions.
Furthermore, many important groups of marine organisms have a skeleton of CaCO3, which
dissolves when it reacts with corrosive acidified seawater. Hence, declining pH could interfere
with critical processes, such as reef building, carbon sequestration via phytoplankton
sedimentation, and consumer-resource interactions among marine organisms. The ecosystemwide response to changing pH is neither a simple function of having calcareous body parts, nor
a general decline in organism function, and depends on the specific pH regulation and
adaptation mechanisms of individual organisms, and the interplay among ecosystem
components. The current understanding of the response of marine organisms to ocean
acidification has been based largely on in-vitro, short-term, tank and mesocosm experiments,
leaving large knowledge gaps of the physiological and ecological impacts, and the broader
implications for ocean ecosystems. Despite recent advances, early studies have not included
key variables, such as temperature, light and nutrients, known to affect calcification rates, and
few observations are available over sufficient periods to indicate if organisms will be able to
genetically adapt to the changes. Furthermore, it is unknown if the observed responses of single
species can be extrapolated to the genetically diverse populations that exist in natural
ecosystems . Experimental results have, however, clearly demonstrated that the rate of
calcification in marine calcifiers is directly related to the seawater carbonate saturation state.

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It can therefore be predicted that the goods and services provided by the ocean, upon which
human populations are dependent, will be different under future acidified oceans as
increasing partial pressure of CO2, exerted by seawater (pCO2) influences the physiology,
development and survival of marine organisms. The understanding of the short-term impacts
of ocean acidification on different species of marine biota is building, and ongoing scientific
experimentation is facilitating a growing understanding of the wider ecosystem and longer-term
implications.

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No impact to Biodiversity loss

No impact to biodiversity
Sagoff 97 Mark, Senior Research Scholar Institute for Philosophy and Public policy in School of Public Affairs U. Maryland,
William and Mary Law Review, INSTITUTE OF BILL OF RIGHTS LAW SYMPOSIUM DEFINING TAKINGS: PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE
FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION: MUDDLE OR MUDDLE THROUGH? TAKINGS JURISPRUDENCE MEETS THE ENDANGERED
SPECIES ACT, 38 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 825, March, L/N Note Colin Tudge - Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy at the
London School of Economics. Frmr Zoological Society of London: Scientific Fellow and tons of other positions. PhD. Read zoology at
Cambridge. Simon Levin = Moffet Professor of Biology, Princeton. 2007 American Institute of Biological Sciences Distinguished
Scientist Award 2008 Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti 2009 Honorary Doctorate of Science, Michigan State University 2010
Eminent Ecologist Award, Ecological Society of America 2010 Margalef Prize in Ecology, etc PhD

Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the brink of an
episode of massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that human beings will suffer as a
result. On the contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have challenged biologists to explain why we need more
than a tenth of the 10 to 100 million species that grace the earth. Noting that "cultivated systems often out-produce wild
systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge

declared that "the argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when
you think about it, a theological one." n343 Tudge observed that "the elimination of all but a tiny minority of our
fellow creatures does not affect the material well-being of humans one iota." n344 This skeptic challenged ecologists
to list more than 10,000 species (other than unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity or functioning.
n345 "The human species could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures went extinct, provided only
that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need." n346 [*906] The monumental Global Biodiversity Assessment ("the
Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy of species. "At one extreme is the idea that each species is
unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the community
or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the Assessment, a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is "unlikely
that there is much, if any, ecological redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period over
which environmental policy should operate." n348 These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that
species overlap in function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with negligible
overall consequences to the community or ecosystem." n349 Other biologists believe, however, that species are

so

fabulously redundant in the ecological functions they perform that the life-support systems and processes of the planet and
ecological processes in general will function perfectly well

with fewer of them, certainly fewer than the millions and

millions we can expect to remain even if every threatened organism becomes extinct. n350 Even the kind of
sparse and miserable world depicted in the movie Blade Runner could provide a "sustainable" context for the human
economy as long as people forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The
Assessment makes this point. "Although any ecosystem contains hundreds to thousands of species interacting among
themselves and their physical environment, the emerging consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of . . . biotic
variables on whose interactions the balance of species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To make up your mind on
the question of the functional redundancy of species, consider an endangered species of bird, plant, or insect and ask how the
ecosystem would fare in its absence. The fact that the creature is endangered suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as
ecosystem processes are concerned. What crucial ecological services does the black-capped vireo, for example, serve? Are any
of the species threatened with extinction necessary to the provision of any ecosystem service on which humans depend? If so,
which ones are they? Ecosystems and the species that compose them have changed, dramatically, continually, and totally in
virtually every part of the United States. There is little ecological similarity, for example, between New England today and the
land where the Pilgrims died. n353 In view of the constant reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have
not suffered more as a result of ecological catastrophes. The cast of species in nearly every environment changes constantlylocal extinction is commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it seems, property values keep going up on
Martha's Vineyard in spite of the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One might argue that the sheer number

and

variety of creatures available to any ecosystem buffers that system against stress. Accordingly, we should be
concerned if the "library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic
engineering may well permit us to write a large number of additions to that "library.") In the United States as in many other
parts of the world, however, the number of species has been increasing dramatically, not decreasing, as a
result of human activity. This is because the hordes of exotic species coming into ecosystems in the United States far exceed the
number of species that are becoming extinct. Indeed, introductions may outnumber extinctions by more than ten to one, so
that the United States is becoming more and more species-rich all the time largely as a result of human action. n354 [*908]
Peter Vitousek and colleagues estimate that over 1000 non-native plants grow in California alone; in Hawaii there are 861; in
Florida, 1210. n355 In Florida more than 1000 non-native insects, 23 species of mammals, and about 11 exotic birds have
established themselves. n356 Anyone who waters a lawn or hoes a garden knows how many weeds desire to grow there, how
many birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life forms show forth when it rains. All
belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim that there are too few of them. Now,

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not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed, some may be disruptive or have no instrumental value. n357 This also
may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially because all exotics are native somewhere. Certain exotic species,
however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an area's sense of identity and place; others, such as the green crabs showing
up around Martha's Vineyard, are nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy [*909] with human migration. Everyone knows that
after a generation or two, immigrants to this country are hard to distinguish from everyone else. The vast majority of Americans
did not evolve here, as it were, from hominids; most of us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of many of our fellow
species as well, and they may fit in here just as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from native ones for a
period of time, just as we can distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll by, species, like
people, fit into the landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that a species had to come
over on the Mayflower, as so many did, to count as "truly" American? Plainly not. When, then, is the cutoff date? Insofar as we
are concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together, extinction seems not to pose a general
problem because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish, plants, and other creatures thrive on land and in
water in America today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The Ecological Society of America has urged managers to maintain
biological diversity as a critical component in strengthening ecosystems against disturbance. n360 Yet as Simon Levin

observed, "much of the detail about species composition will be irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties."
n361 [*910] He added: "For net primary productivity, as is likely to be the case for any system property, biodiversity matters
only up to a point; above a certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make little difference." n362
What about the use of plants and animals in agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000 types of
plants [we] know to be edible," a U.S. Department of the Interior document says, "only about 150 are extensively cultivated."
n363 About twenty species, not one of which is endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the world takes from plants.
n364 Any new food has to take "shelf space" or "market share" from one that is now produced. Corporations also find it difficult
to create demand for a new product; for example, people are not inclined to eat paw-paws, even though they are delicious. It is
hard enough to get people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder still to develop consumer demand for new foods.
This may be the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in remote places for rare and unusual plants and animals to add
to the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including mosses, lichens, and
seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be sure, any of the
more than 600,000 species of plants could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable to the species that
are now dominant? Has anyone found any consumer demand for any of these half-million or more plants to replace rice or
wheat in the human diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort.
There are many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause lice in sheep. How many does
agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are domesticated, not naturally occurring; they are
developed by artificial not natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This argument is not intended to
deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and protect the natural world. These
spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also recognize that they are spiritual and ethical values.
We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein compel our moral respect, our aesthetic appreciation, and our
spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume, however, that these
goals have anything to do with human well-being or welfare as economists understand that term. These are ethical goals, in
other words, not economic ones. Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual reasons. We
should do it-but someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting nature often
represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral, not economic, reasons-ethical, not prudential, reasons- that
we care about all our fellow creatures. They are valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is good for [*912] the
marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the economic sense, good for mankind. The most valuable things are quite
useless.

Impacts to biodiversity are greatly exaggerated

Lomberg 1 (Bjorn Lomborg, associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, August 9, 2001, Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse.
We are all familiar with the litany of our ever-deteriorating environment. It is the doomsday message endlessly repeated by the
media, as when Time magazine tells us that "everyone knows the planet is in bad shape", and when the New Scientist calls its
environmental overview "self-destruct". We

are defiling our Earth, we are told. Our resources are running
out. The population is ever-growing, leaving less and less to eat. Our air and water is more and
more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers - we kill off more than
40,000 each year. Forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, the coral reefs are dying.
The fertile topsoil is vanishing. We are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness,
decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world's
ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability. Global warming is probably taking
place, though future projections are overly pessimistic and the traditional cure of radical fossilfuel cutbacks is far more damaging than the original affliction. Moreover, its total impact will not
pose a devastating problem to our future. Nor will we lose 25-50% of all species in our lifetime 18

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in fact, we are losing probably 0.7%. Acid rain does not kill the forests, and the air and water
around us are becoming less and less polluted. In fact, in terms of practically every measurable
indicator, mankind's lot has improved. This does not, however, mean that everything is good enough. We can still do
even better. Take, for example, starvation and the population explosion. In 1968, one of the leading environmentalists, Dr Paul R
Erlich, predicted in his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, that "the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s,
the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions - hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." This did not happen.
Instead, according to the UN, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52% per person. The daily food intake
in developing countries has increased from 1,932 calories in 1961 - barely enough for survival - to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is
expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people going hungry in these countries has dropped from 45% in 1949
to 18% today, and is expected to fall even further, to 12% in 2010 and 6% in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but
ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800, food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according
to the World Bank, prices were lower than ever before. Erlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas Malthus.
Malthus claimed that, unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food production

Biodiversity does not lead to stability

Sasaki and Lauenroth, 11 - * Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University. PhD from
the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo. Member of the
Ecological Society of Japan, and Winner of the Best Poster Prize in 2007 and 2008 at the Annual
Meeting of Ecological Society of Japan (section: Plant Community and Species Diversity) AND
** Professor at the Department of Botany at the University of Wyoming. PhD in Range Science
from the University of Colorado (1/11/11, Dr. Takehiro Sasaki and Dr. William K. Lauenroth,
Dominant species, rather than diversity, regulates temporal stability of plant communities,
Oecologia, 166(3):761-8 CS)
We found a significant negative relationship between temporal stability and species richness,
number of rare species, and relative abundance of rare species (Fig. 2a, d, h). This is counter to

the growing body of empirical evidence that suggests that the temporal stability of
communities increases with diversity (Tilman 1999; Cottingham et al. 2001; Valone and Hoffman 2003;
Tilman et al. 2006). Many theoretical studies have focused on the portfolio and covariance effects (see
Materials and methods) in demonstrating how increased diversity can confer increased temporal stability
(Tilman 1999; Yachi and Loreau 1999; Hughes and Roughgarden 2000). However, we found no significant
relationships between summed variances and species richness and number of rare species (Fig.
3a, b), and we found significant positive relationships between summed covariances and species richness and
number of rare spe- cies (Fig. 3e, f). Neither the portfolio nor the covariance effect contributed
significantly to temporal stability in our communities. Rare species that generally exhibit greater
temporal fluctuations than common species should more often exhibit years of zero abundance than common
species because of their small population sizes (Lande 1993; Valone and Schutzenhofer 2007), resulting in
synchrony in response to high interannual variability in rainfall. This probably dampened the expected stabilizing
effect of species richness on temporal stability (Yachi and Loreau 1999). Valone and Barber (2008) also showed
that covariances between most pairs of species in natural communities were more often positive than negative,
potentially because of shared responses of coexisting species to fluctuations in a common resource base, possibly driven by climatic fluctuations. Moreover, the rela- tionship between summed abundance and species
richness was not significant (Fig. 3i), suggesting that overyielding was not important in our communities. A
previous study has indicated that functional diversity is a good predictor of the overyielding effect of species
richness (Griffin et al. 2009). Our findings suggest that, although we do not know the explicit

mechanism, the lack of change in functional diversity, despite the increase in species rich- ness
resulting from the removal of dominant species, might explain the absence of an overyielding
effect. Thus, there were no operational stabilizing effects of greater diversity; rather, greater
species richness supported by an increase in the number of rare species destabilized the
communities.

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Dominant Species control ecosystem stability, not diversity

Sasaki and Lauenroth, 11 - * Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University. PhD from
the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo. Member of the
Ecological Society of Japan, and Winner of the Best Poster Prize in 2007 and 2008 at the Annual
Meeting of Ecological Society of Japan (section: Plant Community and Species Diversity) AND
** Professor at the Department of Botany at the University of Wyoming. PhD in Range Science
from the University of Colorado (1/11/11, Dr. Takehiro Sasaki and Dr. William K. Lauenroth,
Dominant species, rather than diversity, regulates temporal stability of plant communities,
Oecologia, 166(3):761-8 CS)
Thus, our findings showed that temporal stability in communities was largely controlled for
nearly a decade by dominant species rather than by diversity itself, support- ing Grimes (1998)
mass ratio hypothesis. The generality of diversitystability relationships might be restricted by the
dynamics of a dominant species (Leps 2004; Polley et al. 2007), especially when the species has features
that distinguish it from others that would contribute to stability in highly stochastic systems . The results were
robust when we based the analyses on the subset data from 2002 to 2006 (Fig. S1 of the
Electronic supplementary material), suggesting that the confounding effects of directional responses
of vegetation to the removal treatment on the results were small. However, our results do not
necessarily suggest that diversity is unimportant to community sta- bility. In particular, minor vegetation
components such as subdominant and rare species might regulate stability in the longer term by influencing the
recruitment of dominant species (Grime 1998). A clear implication from this study is that community dominance
hierarchies and their changes might be among the important ecological components that need to be considered
when managing communities to maintain ecosystem functioning (Smith and Knapp 2003; Hillebrand et al. 2008;
Grman et al. 2010).

Impact to Biodiversity is a myth

Dodds 2007 (5/30/2007, Donald J. M.S. P.E., President of the North Pacific Research, The Myth
of Biodiversity, northpacificresearch.com/downloads/The_myth_of_biodiversity.doc CS)
Biodiversity is a corner stone of the environmental movement. But there is no proof that
biodiversity is important to the environment. Something without basis in scientific fact is
called a Myth. Lets examine biodiversity through out the history of the earth. The earth has
been a around for about 4 billion years. Life did not develop until about 500 million years
later. Thus for the first 500 million years bio diversity was zero. The planet somehow survived
this lack of biodiversity. For the next 3 billion years, the only life on the planet was microbial
and not diverse. Thus, the first unexplainable fact is that the earth existed for 3.5 billion years,
87.5% of its existence, without biodiversity. Somewhere around 500 million years ago life
began to diversify and multiple celled species appeared. Because these species were partially
composed of sold material they left better geologic records, and the number of species and
genera could be cataloged and counted. The number of genera on the planet is a indication of
the biodiversity of the planet. Figure 1 is a plot of the number of genera on the planet over the
last 550 million years. The little black line outside of the left edge of the graph is 10 million
years. Notice the left end of this graph. Biodiversity has never been higher than it is today.

Mammals can survive Biodiversity collapse

NPR, 7 (5/30/2007, Donald J. Dodds M.S. P.E., President of the North Pacific Research, The
Myth of Biodiversity, northpacificresearch.com/downloads/The_myth_of_biodiversity.doc CS)

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A closer look at the KT extinction 65 million years ago reveals at least three things. First the
1500 genera that remained had passed the test of environmental compatibility and remained
on the planet. This was not an accident. Second, these extinctions freed niches for occupation
by better-adapted species. The remaining genera now faced an environment with hundreds of
thousands of vacant niches. Third, it only took about 15 million years to refill all of those niches
and completely replaced the dinosaurs, with new and better species. In this context, a better
species is by definition one that is more successful in dealing with a changing environment.
Many of those genera that survived the KT extinction were early mammals, a more
sophisticated class of life that had developed new and better ways of facing the environment.
These genera were now free to expand and diversify without the presences of the life
dominating dinosaurs. Thus, as a direct result of this mass extinction humans are around to
discuss the consequences of change. If the EPA had prevented the dinosaur extinction, neither
the human race, nor the EPA would have existed. The unfortunate truth is that the all-powerful
human species does not yet have the intelligence or the knowledge to regulate evolution. It is
even questionable that they have the skills to prevent their own extinction.

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Biodiversity Alternate Causes we haz them

Current Climate trends make Biodiversity loss inevitable
The European Commision, 8 (7/17/08, The European Commisson, Planning for the inevitable:
the impact of climate change on biodiversity, The European Commission DG ENV, News Alert
Issue 116 CS)
Climate change is already having an impact on habitats and species in Europe, for example a
decrease in plant species has been recorded in some areas. According to recent research,
spatial planning is a key concept in making European ecosystems more resilient to climate
change, as it takes into account all factors that affect a habitat, including economic development,
transport, environmental protection, health and culture. Many scientific reports suggest that
unavoidable changes in climate will happen over the next 40-50 years as a result of past
emissions. Areas seen as most vulnerable to climate change include the Mediterranean and southern
Europe, mountain and sub-arctic areas, and densely occupied floodplains and coastal zones. Annual
temperatures could increase by 2.0-6.3 degrees centigrade by 2100. Rainfall could also increase by 1-2 per
cent per decade for northern Europe and decrease by 1 per cent in southern Europe. Events affecting
habitats and biodiversity will include heat waves, droughts, storms and rising sea levels . The

impact may cause species to move towards the north and an increase in extinction rates.
Mitigation remains the key focus of climate change policy, with less attention given to
understanding how to adapt to inevitable rising temperatures. The pressures of climate
change present a major challenge, not just for biodiversity policy, but also for land use policy, which
affects biodiversity. The EUs 2006 Biodiversity Communication and its Action Plan set an agenda for
action to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010, as agreed in the Gothenburg summit, 2001. However,
biodiversity continues to decline under pressure from land use change and development. For
example, as water supplies for urban populations shrink, building new infrastructures may place stress on
existing ground and surface water systems and the flora and fauna that rely on it. The research 1 reviewed
land use plans and policy in three countries: France, the Netherlands and the UK. It looked at their use of
natural resources, management of water and coastal zones, plans for designated sites and case studies on
urban, rural, inland and coastal sites. The policies were examined for their ability to account for

biodiversity adaptation to climate change and to identify ways of integrating spatial planning
and biodiversity policy. Spatial planning has a broader sense than land use, in that it accounts for all
activities and interests that concern a particular area. The authors found that although dynamic
biodiversity is becoming more fully realised in spatial planning policy, existing EU directives such
as the Birds Directive (CEC 1979), the Habitats Directive (CEC 1992), and the Natura 2000 network set up
to create a network of protected sites, by themselves cannot fully protect landscape features
necessary to support biodiversity under a period of prolonged climate change. They recommend
climate-proofing plans through the use of Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic
Environmental Assessment. Land use plans should be integrated with the adoption of common objectives,
time horizons and boundaries. The study also highlighted the need for more flexible responses to
climate change, with stakeholders safeguarding habitats in between protected areas. This would result
in more robust conservation planning across whole landscapes, reducing fragmentation of sites and
creating corridors and networks for wildlife. International cooperation was also found to be critical, as
wildlife moves across national boundaries. Integration with agriculture, transport and water sectors
would also lead to a better capacity to adapt to climate change. Barriers to putting a fully effective

policy in place include: planning time-scales that are too short, a lack of consensus on
intervention measures, uncertainty on the actual impact of climate change impacts, conflicts
of interest and public opinion which is sensitive to change, especially in treasured landscapes.

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Deforestation devastates global biodiversity

Cardillo, 6 Dr. Marcel Cadillo Proffesor in the Biology Divison at Imperial College London
(2006, Dr. Marcel Cadillo, Disapearing Forests and Biodiversity Loss: Which areas should we
protect?, International Forestry Review, Vol. 8, pp. 251-255, CS)
Forests are the most biodiverse terrestrial habitats on earth. Despite a growing awareness that
biodiversity and properly- functioning natural ecosystems make a crucial contribution to human wellbeing
(Rashid et al. 2003), deforestation is proceeding at a rapid pace throughout much of the world.
In Brazil, for example, more forest was lost in the 16 years up to 2004 than in all the preceding
centuries. With massive investmentsinroads,damsandothereconomicinfrastructure International Forestry
Review Vol.8(2), 2006 251252 M. Cardillo on the drawing board, it is predicted that 40% of remaining
forest in the Amazon basin will be lost by 2050 (Soares- Filho et al. 2006). In other heavily-

forested countries, such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, deforestation rates are also at
historically high levels (FAO 2006).

Population growth makes bio-d loss inevitable

Science Daily 7/28/11 (Ongoing Global Biodiversity Loss Unstoppable With Protected Areas
Alone http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110728123059.htm,)
Continued reliance on a strategy of setting aside land and marine territories as "protected
areas" is insufficient to stem global biodiversity loss, according to a comprehensive assessment
published July 28 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
Despite impressively rapid growth of protected land and marine areas worldwide -- today totalling over 100,000 in number and
covering 17 million square kilometers of land and 2 million square kilometers of oceans -- biodiversity

is in steep decline.
Expected scenarios of human population growth and consumption levels indicate that cumulative
human demands will impose an unsustainable toll on Earth's ecological resources and services
accelerating the rate at which biodiversity is being loss. Current and future human requirements will also
exacerbate the challenge of effectively implementing protected areas while suggesting that effective biodiversity conservation
requires new approaches that address underlying causes of biodiversity loss -- including the growth of both human population and
resource consumption. Says lead author Camilo Mora of University of Hawaii at Manoa: "Biodiversity is humanity's life-support
system, delivering everything from food, to clean water and air, to recreation and tourism, to novel chemicals that drive our
advanced civilization. Yet there is an increasingly well-documented global trend in biodiversity loss, triggered by a host of human
activities." "Ongoing biodiversity loss and its consequences for humanity's welfare are of great concern and have prompted strong
calls for expanding the use of protected areas as a remedy," says fellow author Peter F. Sale, Assistant Director of the United Nations
University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health. "While many protected areas have helped preserve some
species at local scales, promotion of this strategy as a global solution to biodiversity loss, and the advocacy of protection for specific
proportions of habitats, have occurred without adequate assessment of their potential effectiveness in achieving the goal." Drs.
Mora and Sale warn that long-term failure of the protected areas strategy could erode public and political support for biodiversity
conservation and that the disproportionate allocation of available resources and human capital into this strategy precludes the
development of more effective approaches. The authors based their study on existing literature and global data on human threats
and biodiversity loss. "The global network of protected areas is a major achievement, and the pace at which it has been achieved is
impressive," says Dr. Sale. "Protected areas are very useful conservation tools, but unfortunately, the steep continuing rate of
biodiversity loss signals the need to reassess our heavy reliance on this strategy." The study says continuing heavy reliance on the
protected areas strategy has five key technical and practical limitations: Concludes Dr. Mora: "Given the considerable effort and
widespread support for the creation of protected areas over the past 30 years, we were surprised to find so much evidence for their
failure to effectively address the global problem of biodiversity loss. Clearly, the biodiversity loss problem has been underestimated
and the ability of protected areas to solve this problem overestimated." The

authors underline the correlations

between growing world population, natural resources consumption and biodiversity loss to
suggest that biodiversity loss is unlikely to be stemmed without directly addressing the
ecological footprint of humanity. Based upon previous research, the study shows that under current

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conditions of human comsumption and conservative scenarios of human population growth, the
cummulative use of natural resources of humanity will amount to the productivity of up to 27
Earths by 2050 . "Protected areas are a valuable tool in the fight to preserve biodiversity. We need them to be well managed,
and we need more of them, but they alone cannot solve our biodiversity problems," adds Dr. Mora. "We need to recognize this
limitation promptly and to allocate more time and effort to the complicated issue of human overpopulation and consumption." "Our
study shows that the international community is faced with a choice between two paths," Dr. Sale says. "One option is to continue a
narrow focus on creating more protected areas with little evidence that they curtail biodiversity loss. That path will fail. The other
path requires that we get serious about addressing the growth in size and consumption rate of our global population.

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AT: Invasive Species

Environmental regs solve Invasive Species
Flesher, Huffington Post, 2011
[John, 11/30/11, Huffington Post, Ship Ballast Water Regulation Plan Released By EPA To Fight
Invasive Species, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/ship-ballast-waterregulation_n_1121782.html, 7/12/13, JB]
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed stricter requirements
Wednesday for cleaning ballast water that keeps ships upright in rolling seas but enables
invasive species to reach U.S. waters, where they have ravaged ecosystems and caused billions
of dollars in economic losses. The new standards would require commercial vessels to install
technology strong enough to kill at least some of the fish, mussels and even microorganisms
such as viruses that lurk in ballast water before it's dumped into harbors after ships arrive in
port. Environmentalists whose lawsuits forced the EPA to implement rules in the first place said
the new proposal is largely inadequate. More than 180 exotic species have invaded the Great
Lakes, about two-thirds of which are believed to have been carried in ballast water. Among
them are zebra and quagga mussels, which have spread across most of the lakes and turned up
as far away as California. Ballast water also has brought invaders to ocean coasts, including
Asian clams in San Francisco Bay and Japanese shore crabs on the Atlantic seaboard.\

Invasive Species Solved in now by U.S. Technology

Gilroy, University of Notre Dame, 2013
[William, 3/29/13, Science Daily, New Technologies Combat Invasive Species,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130329090622.htm, 7-12-13, JB]
A new research paper by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's
Environmental Change Initiative (ECI) demonstrates how two cutting-edge technologies can
provide a sensitive and real-time solution to screening real-world water samples for invasive
species before they get into our country or before they cause significant damage. "Aquatic
invasive species cause ecological and economic damage worldwide, including the loss of native
biodiversity and damage to the world's great fisheries," Scott Egan, a research assistant
professor with Notre Dame's Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics Initiative and a member of
the research team, said. "This research combines two new, but proven technologies,
environmental DNA (eDNA) and Light Transmission Spectroscopy (LTS), to address the growing
problem of aquatic invasive species by increasing our ability to detect dangerous species in
samples before they arrive or when they are still rare in their environment and have not yet
caused significant damage." Egan points out that eDNA is a species surveillance tool that
recognizes a unique advantage of aquatic sampling: water often contains microscopic bits of
tissue in suspension, including the scales of fish, the exoskeletons of insects, and the sloughed
cells of and tissues of aquatic species. These tissue fragments can be filtered from water
samples and then a standard DNA extraction is performed on the filtered matter. The new
sampling method for invasive species was pioneered by members of the ND Environmental
Change Initiative, including David Lodge and Chris Jerde, Central Michigan University's Andrew
Mahon, and The Nature Conservancy's Lindsay Chadderton. Egan explains that LTS, which was
developed by Notre Dame physicists Steven Ruggiero and Carol Tanner, can measure the size of
small particles on a nanometer scale (1 nanometer equals 1 billionth of a meter). LTS was used
in the research for DNA-based species detection where the LTS device detects small shifts in the

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size of nanoparticles with short single-stranded DNA fragments on their surface that will only
bind to the DNA of a specific species. "Thus, these nanoparticles grow in size in the presence of
a target species, such as a dangerous invasive species, but don't in the presence of other
species" Egan said. "In addition to the sensitivity of LTS, it is also advantageous because the
device fits in a small suitcase and can operate off a car battery in the field, such as a point of
entry at the border of the U.S." The Notre Dame researchers demonstrated the work with
manipulative experiments in the lab for five high-risk invasive species and also in the field, using
lakes already infested with an invasive mussel, Dreissena polymorpha or the zebra mussel. "Our
work implies that eDNA sampling and LTS could enable rapid species detection in the field in
the context of research, voluntary or regulatory surveillance and management actions to
lower the risk of the introduction or spread of harmful species," Egan said. "In the Great Lakes
alone, 180 nonindigenous species have been established since European settlement, with about
70 percent arriving through the ballast tanks of transoceanic ships. Ballast water monitoring is
one of many potential applications for LTS with ramifications for environmental protection,
public health and economic health."

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AT: Coral Reefs Impacts

Coral depletion can be solved with artificial reefs that are more resilient to
pollution
McIntyre, Director of sustainability, 11/15/12
(Mary, How Artificial Reefs will Save the Oceans date accessed: 7/12/13, KG)
In the past few years, society has become more and more environmentally conscious. People
drive electric cars, use solar panels, and recycle all kinds of goods. When many people think of
carbon dioxide emissions, they immediately think of the atmosphere and global warming, but
what they do not know is that the oceans are being drastically affected as well. Coral reefs are
dying off at an alarming rate due to this pollution, and it is hard to believe that something as
vast as the ocean is unable to dilute the contamination enough to save the coral. Coral reefs are
extremely diverse ecosystems necessary for sustaining an innumerable amount of species,
including ones that humans have not yet identified. Coral reefs grow at a very slow rate, so it is
necessary that humans who have caused its destruction work to encourage its regrowth. One of
the best ways to approach this is artificial reefsthey can range from massive ships to car
tires to refrigerators to human remains. Artificial reefs are by far the best way to combat the
destruction of coral reefs. In Alabama, the increase in the fish population is thanks to artificial
reefs. Overfishing is a global problem affecting both first and third-world countries. According to
the World Wildlife Fund, 60 percent of the worlds fisheries are overfished or fished to the
limit. More recent reports show that the number is growing. Artificial reefs are the best
solution to this problem because they simply produce more fish and help restore depleted
areas (Bailey). The benefits of artificial reefs are not limited to the increase of biodiversity. The
National Artificial Reef Plan, known as Rigs-to-Reefs, involves the cooperation between
environmental groups, the government, and the oil industryan extremely rare situation.
Oil companies donate the structures to states along the Gulf of Mexico, and these states
deploy the rigs into the water. The oil companies benefit because the disposal of these
materials is very expensive; in fact, they donate half the cost of the disposal to the state that
accepts the rig for use in an artificial reef. This money goes toward environmental research and
fishery maintenance (Artificial Reefs). According to Artificial Reefs, the density of the fish
populations near these artificial reefs is twenty to fifty times greater than in surrounding
waters. Critics of the Rigs-to-Reefs program claim that the high density of fish only encourages
overfishing, but this is not true. Overfishing has always been a problem, and people will always
take the maximum amount of fish that an area provideswhether it is a high density or a low
density. Artificial reefs do not cause overfishing, and they do not completely solve it; in order to
end overfishing, government regulations are necessary. Once regulations are in place by the
government, an overfished and depleted area can be restored by an artificial reef. Artificial
reefs are beneficial economically due to tourism, restoration of fisheries, and disposal of
otherwise unusable materials. They are beneficial environmentally because they restore the
marine environment in one of its particularly fragile and diverse ecosystems. Artificial reefs
are beneficial politicallyeven the government, oil companies, and environmentalists can
agree that they are valuable. Lastly, artificial reefs are beneficial socially because with Eternal
Reefs, a person can finally be able to say goodbye to his or her loved one. In the future, artificial
reefs will be used more often to reverse the negative effects of climate change, contamination,
and overfishing on the oceans reefs. Artificial reefs are the best way to restore coral reefs
because they are beneficial economically, environmentally, politically, and socially.

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AT: Coral Reef Impacts Destruction Inev

Coral reefs decline inevitable
Science Daily, 12
(Science Dailey, 9-16-12, Most Coral Reefs Are at Risk Unless Climate Change Is Drastically
Limited, Study Shows, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120916160926.htm, 712-13, DH)
Coral reefs house almost a quarter of the species in the oceans and provide critical services -including coastal protection, tourism and fishing -- to millions of people worldwide. Global
warming and ocean acidification, both driven by human-caused CO2 emissions, pose a major
threat to these ecosystems.? "Our findings show that under current assumptions regarding
thermal sensitivity, coral reefs might no longer be prominent coastal ecosystems if global
mean temperatures actually exceed 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level," says lead
author Katja Frieler from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. " Without a yet
uncertain process of adaptation or acclimation, however, already about 70% of corals are
projected to suffer from long-term degradation by 2030 even under an ambitious mitigation
scenario." Thus, the threshold to protect at least half of the coral reefs worldwide is estimated
to be below 1.5 degrees Celsius mean temperature increase.? A more comprehensive and robust
representation than in previous studies? This study is the first comprehensive global survey of
coral bleaching to express results in terms of global mean temperature change. It has been
conducted by scientists from Potsdam, the University of British Columbia in Canada and the
Universities of Melbourne and Queensland in Australia. To project the cumulative heat stress at
2160 reef locations worldwide, they used an extensive set of 19 global climate models. By
applying different emission scenarios covering the 21st century and multiple climate model
simulations, a total of more than 32,000 simulation years was diagnosed. This allows for a
more robust representation of uncertainty than any previous study.? Corals derive most of
their energy, as well as most of their famous color, from a close symbiotic relationship with a
special type of microalgae. The vital symbiosis between coral and algae can break down when
stressed by warm water temperatures, making the coral "bleach" or turn pale. Though corals
can survive this, if the heat stress persists long enough the corals can die in great numbers.
"This happened in 1998, when an estimated 16% of corals were lost in a single, prolonged
period of warmth worldwide," says Frieler.? Adaptation is uncertain and ocean acidification
means even more stress? To account for a possible acclimation or adaptation of corals to
thermal stress, like shifts to symbiont algae with a higher thermal tolerance, rather optimistic
assumptions have been included in the study. "However, corals themselves have all the wrong
characteristics to be able to rapidly evolve new thermal tolerances," says co-author Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. "They have
long lifecycles of 5-100 years and they show low levels of diversity due to the fact that corals
can reproduce by cloning themselves. They are not like fruit flies which can evolve much
faster."? Previous analyses estimated the effect of thermal adaptation on bleaching thresholds,
but not the possible opposing effect of ocean acidification. Seawater gets more acidic when
taking up CO2 from the atmosphere. This is likely to act to the detriment of the calcification
processes crucial for the corals' growth and might also reduce their thermal resilience. The new
study investigates the potential implications of this ocean acidification effect, finding that, as
Hoegh-Guldberg says: "The current assumptions on thermal sensitivity might underestimate,

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not overestimate, the future impact of climate change on corals."? This comprehensive
analysis highlights how close we are to a world without coral reefs as we know them. "The
window of opportunity to preserve the majority of coral reefs, part of the world's natural
heritage, is small," summarizes Malte Meinshausen, co-author at the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research and the University of Melbourne. "We close this window, if we follow
another decade of ballooning global greenhouse-gas emissions."

International trade decimates coral reefs

Moore, U.S. Agency for International Development, 2001

[Franklin Moore, Ph.D. in Development Studies, career member of the Senior Executive Service,
Barbara Best, Senior Coastal Resource Management and Policy Specialist for the U.S. Agency for
International Development, 2-19-01, AAAS, Coral Reef Crisis: Causes and Consequences,
http://www.aaas.org/international/africa/coralreefs/ch1.shtml, 7-12-13, JZ]
While coral bleaching may be one of the largest threats facing coral reefs, international trade is
having significant impacts on even the most remote and pristine reefs. Recent surveys of reefs
worldwide found that many species of high commercial value were absent, or present in very
low numbers, in almost all the reefs surveyed (Hodgson, 1999). Results suggest that almost all
coral reefs have been affected by overfishing, and that there may be no pristine reefs left in
the world. International trade is also posing significant threats to mangrove forests, another
critical coastal ecosystem that is intimately connected to coral reefs. Mangrove forests serve
as important nurseries for many reef species. They help to maintain coastal water quality by
reducing the run-off of sediments, pollutants and excess nutrients from the land. Nutrients and
energy flow between these habitats as species move between them. Trade Drives Destructive
Fishing Practices How does the international trade in wild coral reef animals and products more
directly impact reefs? Primarily through overfishing and the use of destructive fishing
practices. Live fish for both the food trade and marine ornamental trade are often caught with
the use of cyanide or other poison, which temporarily stuns the fish for easy collection.
Cyanide use is a serious threat to some of the world's richest coral reefs, as the cyanide kills
corals and many other coral reef organisms. The lucrative and unregulated international trade
in reef fishes drives the use of cyanide. It is estimated that since the 1960's, more than one
million kilograms of cyanide has been squirted onto Philippine reefs alone, and the practice
has spread throughout East Asia and the Indo-Pacific (Bryant et al., 1998). Various explosives,
such as dynamite and homemade bombs, are also used to kill fish for easy collection, but at an
enormous cost to the reef which is reduced to rubble. In Komodo National Park in Indonesia,
about half of the reefs have already been destroyed through the use of explosives, forming
beds of coral rubble that can extend several football fields in length. While the use of
explosives to collect dead fish is usually for domestic trade, some of the fish that are only
stunned will enter the international trade stream. International trade is also driving the
removal of the calcareous skeleton or base of the reef itself; reef skeletons are sold as "live
rock" for marine aquaria. This base is the resulting accumulation of coral skeletons over tens
to hundreds and thousands of years. Living coral, which constitutes the essential reef habitat
for a myriad of species, is also collected and shipped live for marine aquaria, or killed and
dried for the curio and shell trade. Trade Drives Overfishing and Removal of Targeted Groups
In addition to destructive practices, international trade is driving overfishing and the selected
removal of key groups from coral reefs. Major groups targeted for trade are: groupers and

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wrasses for the live food fish trade; dead fish and invertebrates for food, medicinal products,
and ornamentals including sharks, sea cucumbers, sea stars, mollusks and sea horses; live fish,
coral and other invertebrates for marine aquaria and the ornamental hobby; and "live rock" or
the calcareous base of the reef for marine aquaria. The marine ornamental trade for the pet
industry often targets rare fish and coral species, as these can fetch the highest prices. The
trade is also targeting large-polyped corals, which tend to be the slowest growing and the
least common. By targeting the large groupers and wrasses, the live food fish trade removes
key species from these ecosystems, thus altering their dynamics. The loss of some is
comparable to the loss of major predators from terrestrial ecosystems. Other fishes feed on
algae, and thus play an important role in ensuring that corals are not overgrown by more
rapidly growing algae. The removal of coral for the marine aquarium trade and for use as
curios and knickknacks, and the removal of the "live rock" base, reduces the essential reef
habitat. There are strong economic incentives associated with this international trade. The
live food fish trade through Hong Kong alone is estimated to have a retail value of about one
billion dollars a year. Some species of fish, selected live from a restaurant tank, can sell for
almost $300 per plate. The global retail of marine ornamental fishes and aquarium hobby
supplies is estimated at $500 million. Last year, for example, a pair of rare fish sold for over
$5,000 each. Over 1000 different species of coral reef animals are now traded for marine
aquaria. The impacts from international trade are quite different from other more chronic
causes of reef degradation, as these impacts are felt even in the most remote, pristine reefs.
The use of destructive fishing practices, such as the use of cyanide, is spreading throughout
the Indo-Pacific as fishing boats venture farther to find new unexploited fishing grounds

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AT: Coral Reef Impacts Resilient

Coral reefs resilient
Main, Staff Writer for Our Amazing Planet and Live Science, 13
(Douglas, April 4 2013, Live Science, Isolated Coral Reefs Can Heal Themselves,
http://www.livescience.com/28440-coral-reefs-can-regenerate.html, 7-12-13, DH)
Coral reefs may be more independent and resilient than previously thought.? New research
shows that an isolated reef off the northwest coast of Australia that was severely damaged by
a period of warming in 1998 has regenerated in a very short time to become nearly as healthy
as it was before. What surprises scientists, though, is that the reef regenerated by itself, found a
study published today (April 4) in the journal Science.? Until now, scientists have thought that
damaged reefs depend on new recruits from nearby reefs to quickly heal themselves, said study
author James Gilmour, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. But this study
found that may not always be the case at least with reefs like this one, which has good water
quality and isn't heavily impacted by humans, Gilmour told OurAmazingPlanet in an email.? Hot
water? In 1998, unusually warm weather heated up waters off the northwest coast of Australia
by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above average. These temperatures
persisted for several weeks. ? The heat led to the bleaching of the corals, in which corals kick
out the tiny symbiotic algae housed within them that provide corals food. If the water's
temperature quickly returns to normal, the coral can recover. But often, it dies, becoming a
white skeleton of its former self.? The 1998 event killed 70 percent to 90 percent of corals in
various parts of the reef, and the number of coral embryos collected by researchers
monitoring the reef dropped to almost zero. Gilmour said this shows that the remaining corals
weren't reproducing and that there weren't any coral embryos washing in from surrounding
reefs. Recovery was expected to take many decades, Gilmour said. [Stressed Coral: Photos of
Great Barrier Reef]? Recovery? At first, the reef grew slowly, mostly through the enlargement
of existing coral colonies. But to really recover, the coral needs to sexually reproduce, creating
sperm and egg that form embryos that then land on the ocean floor and grow into adult corals
if all goes well. These larvae can survive for hundreds of miles, swept along by ocean
currents, and colonize new areas under the right circumstances.? Larvae floating in from other
reefs could have helped the reef, had it not been so isolated.? But amazingly, after about six
years, the surviving corals matured and began to reproduce, creating even more new colonies
than before the bleaching. "They recovered, and the larvae they produced settled and
survived, at much higher rates than is often reported," Gilmour said. By 2012, the reef was
basically back to its old self.? The study suggests that, when it comes to reefs, being isolated
from human activity may trump being connected to other reefs . Why? Human activities can
hurt reefs in a number of ways. Overfishing, for example, removes fish that keep algae from
choking out and outcompeting corals, and sediment and pathogens in runoff water can lead to
coral diseases and death.? But the results also mean that local decisions about fishing and other
issues can help preserve reefs, which are threatened by global warming. "Managing local
conditions is a tangible way to maximize the resilience of coral reefs while the more difficult
problem of addressing the causes of climate change are resolved," Gilmour said.

Coral reefs are super resilient to global warming.

Goklany, science and technology policy analyst, 4/17/08
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(Indur, 4/17/8, Cato institute, The Remarkable Resilience of Nature,

http://www.cato.org/blog/remarkable-resilience-nature Date accessed: 7/12/13, KG)
It was blasted by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States but half a
century on, Bikini Atoll supports a stunning array of tropical coral, scientists have found. In
1954 the South Pacific atoll was rocked by a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more
powerful than the explosives dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion shook islands more than
100 miles away, generated a wave of heat measuring 99,000F and spread mist-like
radioactive fallout as far as Japan and Australia. But, much to the surprise of a team of
research divers who explored the area, the mile-wide crater left by the detonation has made a
remarkable recovery and is now home to a thriving underwater ecosystem. 99,000 degrees
Fahrenheit! By comparison the upper-bound estimate for global warming is a puny global
temperature increase of 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit (less in the ocean). So even if global warming
wipes out life on earth, global warming catastrophists can take comfort that nature will, as it
inevitably must, reassert itself. Some, convinced that humanity is the problem, may even
welcome such an outcome no humans, but plenty of nature (over time). [Fifty-four years later
at Bikini Atoll, recovery is not complete. Perhaps 28 percent of coral species may still be absent.]

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Economy Impact Debate

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Economy Terminal Impacts

Economic collapse causes escalating global wars
Kemp 10 Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served
in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security
affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council
Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 2010, The East Moves West: India, China, and Asias Growing Presence in
the Middle East, p. 233-4
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
The world economic situation weakens rather than strengthens, and India,

China, and Japan suffer a major

reduction in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls
and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial crisis for the energy-producing states, which are
forced to cut back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to
political unrest: and nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The
internal stability of some countries is challenged, and there are more failed states. Most serious is the
collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large
number of nuclear weapons. The

danger of war between India and Pakistan increases significantly. Iran,

its nuclear program. That further enhances
nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and
Iran as nuclear states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the
possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states
may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like
impact on stability. In this scenario, major disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds
of the planets population.
always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes

The best statistical support proves economic decline causes war

Royal 10 Jedediah Royal, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of
Defense, 2010, Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises,
in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and
Brauer, p. 213-215
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict.
Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security
and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national
levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's
(1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms

in the global economy are associated with the

rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent
leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution
of relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of
miscalculation (Feaver, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could
lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power
(Werner. 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles
impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections
between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996,

'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in

understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent
2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that

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states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if

the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the
likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those
resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers
protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external
armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external
conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and
prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the
favour. Moreover, the presence

of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international

and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has
also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which
has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a
sitting government. Diversionary

theory " suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from

economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external

military conflicts

to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995). and Blomberg, Hess, and

Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi
(1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the

tendency towards diversionary tactics

are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more
susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that

periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically
linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates
economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship
links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This
implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security
debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that

link economic
interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the
first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global
interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created
by economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views.

Historys on our sidethe 30s prove economic collapse causes global nuclear
war
Friedberg and Schoenfeld, 2008 [Aaron, Prof. Politics. And IR @ Princetons Woodrow
Wilson School and Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon Institute, and Gabriel, Senior Editor of
Commentary and Wall Street Journal, The Dangers of a Diminished America
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html]
Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial architecture. For
decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other
things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be
possible in the future? Meanwhile, traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished.

Iran and North Korea are continuing on their bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan
are progressing smartly down the road to chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly
relentless rise also give cause for concern. If America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum.
The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines

there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground
nearly to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by
the remorseless fanatics who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their
divisions. Today we run the risk that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with
could all be placed at risk. In such a scenario

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their nuclear toys , just at our moment of maximum vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly rock our principal strategic competitors even harder than they
will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the Russian stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices, now driven down by the global slowdown. China is
perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking unrest in

leaders of these countries seek to

divert attention from internal travails with external adventures.
a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity. None of this is good news if the authoritarian

Economic Collapse causes multiple scenarios of nuclear war

Friedberg and Schoenfeld 8 (Aaron, professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University's Woodrow
Wilson School and Gabriel, senior editor of Commentary, is a visiting scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., October
21, 2008, Wall Street Journal, The Dangers of a Diminished America, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html,
June 27, 2012) ALK

Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial
architecture. For decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of
that system. The worldwide use of the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other
things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on foreigners to pick up
the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the future?
Meanwhile, traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and
Islamic terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on
their bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to
chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern.
If America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power
vacuum. The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe,
and our position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines
could all be placed at risk. In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade
and finance ground nearly to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and
aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics who rose up on the crest of economic
disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk that rogue states may choose to
become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our moment of maximum
vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly rock our principal
strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the Russian
stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on
high oil prices, now driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its
economic growth depending heavily on foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both
will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking unrest in a country
where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity. None of this is good
news if the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal
travails with external adventures. As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when
many European nations are struggling to deal with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic
governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past dynamism, Japan faces
similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world economic and
geopolitical power. What does this all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world
stage. The choice we have before us is between the potentially disastrous effects of
disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership.

Economic Collapse leads to war empirics

Mead 9 [2/4, Walter Russell, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, Only
Makes You Stronger: Why the recession bolstered America, The New Republic]

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None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help
capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If

financial crises have been

a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war.
The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic
Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The

list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises.

Bad economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful place in 1928, but the
Depression poisoned German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. If the
current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts might start slouching toward
Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline,
but, if we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.

Continued economic decline causes global war

Mead 2009, (Walter Russell Mead http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=571cbbb9-2887-4d81-854292e83915f5f8&p=2)
So far, such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work; they have left the societies that have tried them in a
progressively worse position, farther behind the front-runners as time goes by. Argentina has lost ground to Chile; Russian
development has fallen farther behind that of the Baltic states and Central Europe. Frequently,

the crisis has weakened

the power of the merchants, industrialists, financiers, and professionals who want to develop a
liberal capitalist society integrated into the world. Crisis can also strengthen the hand of
religious extremists, populist radicals, or authoritarian traditionalists who are determined to
resist liberal capitalist society for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, the companies and banks
based in these societies are often less established and more vulnerable to the consequences of
a financial crisis than more established firms in wealthier societies. As a result, developing
countries and countries where capitalism has relatively recent and shallow roots tend to suffer
greater economic and political damage when crisis strikes--as, inevitably, it does. And, consequently,
financial crises often reinforce rather than challenge the global distribution of power and wealth. This may be happening yet again.
None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help
capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal
part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The

wars of the
League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American
Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost
as long as the list of financial crises. Bad economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty
peaceful place in 1928, but the poisoned German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler
to power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts might start slouching
toward Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline, but, if
we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.

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Economy Impact China War

US economic decline causes Chinese economic collapse
Mead, 04 (Senior Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy, Mar/Apr)
Similarly, in the last 60 years, as foreigners have acquired a greater value in the United States-government and private bonds,
direct and portfolio private investments-more and more of them have acquired an interest in maintaining the strength of the
U.S.-led system. A

collapse of the U.S. economy and the ruin of the dollar would do more than dent the
prosperity of the United States. Without their best customer, countries including China and
Japan would fall into depressions. The financial strength of every country would be severely shaken should the
United States collapse. Under those circumstances, debt becomes a strength, not a weakness, and other countries fear to break
with the United States because they need its market and own its securities. Of course, pressed too far, a large national debt can
turn from a source of strength to a crippling liability, and the United States must continue to justify other countries' faith by
maintaining its long-term record of meeting its financial obligations. But, like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a

collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the
world. That is sticky power with a vengeance.

Economic decline causes war with China

Ockham Research, 8 (Economic Distress and Geopolitical Risks, November,
http://seekingalpha.com/article/106562-economic-distress-and-geopolitical-risks)
China too is threatened by the global economic downturn. There is no doubt that China has emerged during
the past decade as a major economic power. Parts of the country have been transformed by its meteoric growth. However, in truth,
only about a quarter of the nations billion plus inhabitantsthose living in the thriving cities on the coast and in Beijinghave truly
felt the impact of the economic boom. Many of these people have now seen a brutal bear market and are adjusting to economic loss
and diminished future prospects. However, the

vast majority of Chinas population did not benefit from the

economic boom and could become increasingly restive in an economic slowdown. Enough
economic hardship could conceivably threaten the stability of the regime and would more than
likely make China more bellicose and unpredictable in its behavior, with dangerous consequences
for the U.S. and the world.

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US Key to Global Economy

US is key to it globally
Caploe 9. David Caploe, M.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in International Political Economy
from Princeton University 9(Chief Executive Officer of the American Centre for Applied Liberal
Arts and Humanities in Asia, A.B. in Social Theory from Harvard University, M.A. in Political
Science and Ph.D. in International Political Economy from Princeton University, Focus still on
America to lead global recovery, The Straits Times, April 7th ) Available at: Subscribing
Institutions via Lexis-Nexis
IN THE aftermath of the G-20 summit, most observers seem to have missed perhaps the most
crucial statement of the entire event, made by United States President Barack Obama at his preconference meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: 'The world has become
accustomed to the US being a voracious consumer market, the engine that drives a lot of
economic growth worldwide,' he said. 'If there is going to be renewed growth, it just can't be
the US as the engine.' While superficially sensible, this view is deeply problematic. To begin
with, it ignores the fact that the global economy has in fact been 'America-centred' for more
than 60 years. Countries - China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Korea, Mexico and so on - either sell to
the US or they sell to countries that sell to the US. This system has generally been advantageous
for all concerned. America gained certain historically unprecedented benefits, but the system
also enabled participating countries - first in Western Europe and Japan, and later, many in the
Third World - to achieve undreamt-of prosperity. At the same time, this deep inter-connection
between the US and the rest of the world also explains how the collapse of a relatively small
sector of the US economy - 'sub-prime' housing, logarithmically exponentialised by Wall Street's
ingenious chicanery - has cascaded into the worst global economic crisis since the Great
Depression. To put it simply, Mr Obama doesn't seem to understand that there is no other
engine for the world economy - and hasn't been for the last six decades. If the US does not drive
global economic growth, growth is not going to happen. Thus, US policies to deal with the
current crisis are critical not just domestically, but also to the entire world. Consequently, it is a
matter of global concern that the Obama administration seems to be following Japan's 'model'
from the 1990s: allowing major banks to avoid declaring massive losses openly and
transparently, and so perpetuating 'zombie' banks - technically alive but in reality dead. As
analysts like Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have pointed out, the
administration's unwillingness to confront US banks is the main reason why they are continuing
their increasingly inexplicable credit freeze, thus ravaging the American and global economies.
Team Obama seems reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which its policies at home are
failing not just there but around the world as well. Which raises the question: If the US can't or
won't or doesn't want to be the global economic engine, which country will? The obvious
answer is China. But that is unrealistic for three reasons. First, China's economic health is more
tied to America's than practically any other country in the world. Indeed, the reason China has
so many dollars to invest everywhere - whether in US Treasury bonds or in Africa - is precisely
that it has structured its own economy to complement America's. The only way China can serve
as the engine of the global economy is if the US starts pulling it first. Second, the US-centred
system began at a time when its domestic demand far outstripped that of the rest of the world.
The fundamental source of its economic power is its ability to act as the global consumer of last
resort. China, however, is a poor country, with low per capita income, even though it will soon

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pass Japan as the world's second largest economy. There are real possibilities for growth in
China's domestic demand. But given its structure as an export-oriented economy, it is doubtful if
even a successful Chinese stimulus plan can pull the rest of the world along unless and until
China can start selling again to the US on a massive scale. Finally, the key 'system' issue for
China - or for the European Union - in thinking about becoming the engine of the world
economy - is monetary: What are the implications of having your domestic currency become the
global reserve currency? This is an extremely complex issue that the US has struggled with, not
always successfully, from 1959 to the present. Without going into detail, it can safely be said
that though having the US dollar as the world's medium of exchange has given the US some
tremendous advantages, it has also created huge problems, both for America and the global
economic system. The Chinese leadership is certainly familiar with this history. It will try to
avoid the yuan becoming an international medium of exchange until it feels much more
confident in its ability to handle the manifold currency problems that the US has grappled with
for decades. Given all this, the US will remain the engine of global economic recovery for the
foreseeable future, even though other countries must certainly help. This crisis began in the US and it is going to have to be solved there too.

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AT: Economy Impact

No chance of war from economic decline---best and most recent data
Daniel W. Drezner 12, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University, October 2012, The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System
Worked, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IRColloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf
The final outcome addresses a dog that hasnt barked: the effect of the Great Recession on crossborder conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial
crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater
internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict , there
were genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border
disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global public
disorder.

The aggregate data suggests otherwise , however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has constructed

a Global Peace Index annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012 report is that The

average level of
peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.38 Interstate violence in particular has
declined since the start of the financial crisis as have military expenditures in most sampled
countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent
conflict ; the secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker
concludes, the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic
exclusion that might have been expected.40 None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating
swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed
compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in Europe. Currency volatility remains an
ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the
developed world have all lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind;
expecting a standard V-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the post-2008 global economy as
in a state of contained depression.41 The key word is contained, however. Given

the severity, reach and depth of

the 2008 financial crisis, the proper comparison is with Great Depression. And by that standard,
the outcome variables look impressive . As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different:
that its macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II and not even worse must
be regarded as fortunate.42

Economic decline doesnt cause war

Barnett 9

[senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor/online columnist for Esquire magazine,
columnist for World Politics Review, Thomas P.M. The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis, World
Politics Review, 8/252009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398bl.aspx]
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary
regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens
and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize

globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the
international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly
how

attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic
crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia
(where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by
most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential
campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the
various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements.
Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one
side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied

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down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has
been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the
usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we
pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led
us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the
smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual
places); Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or
disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of
international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by any rising
great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic
assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and
India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous
world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus"
spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can
we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The

world's major
economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly
friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate
damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars."
Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not
slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's
growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times
are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to
be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much
needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty
of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between
"fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such
"diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes
undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this

global financial crisis has proven the great

resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses
along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace.

Economic decline does not cause war

Ferguson 6 (Niall, Professor of History Harvard University, Foreign Affairs, 85(5), September / October, Lexis)
Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern
historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple
story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered.
Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did
all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and
conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others
were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe
economic crises were not followed by wars.

No resources for war during economic decline

Duedney 91 (Daniel, Hewlett Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society Princeton University, Environment and
Security: Muddled Thinking?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April)
Poverty wars. In a second scenario, declining living standards first cause internal turmoil, then war. If groups
at all levels of affluence protect their standard of living by pushing deprivation on other groups, class war and
revolutionary upheavals could result. Faced with these pressures, liberal democracy and free market systems could
increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining minimum order.9 If authoritarian regimes
are more war-prone because they lack democratic control, and if revolutionary regimes are war-prone because of their
ideological fervor and isolation, then the world is likely to become more violent. The record of previous depressions
supports the proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic expectations contribute to
international conflict. Although initially compelling, this scenario has major flaws. One is that it is arguably
based on unsound economic theory. Wealth is formed not so much by the availability of cheap natural
resources as by capital formation through savings and more efficient production. Many resource-poor countries, like
Japan, are very wealthy, while many countries with more extensive resources are poor. Environmental constraints
require an end to economic growth based on growing use of raw materials, but not necessarily an end to growth in the
production of goods and services. In addition, economic decline does not necessarily produce conflict. How
societies respond to economic decline may largely depend upon the rate at which such declines occur. And as people
get poorer, they may become less willing to spend scarce resources for military forces. As Bernard
Brodie observed about the modern era, The predisposing factors to military aggression are full bellies,
not empty ones. The experience of economic depressions over the last two centuries may be irrelevant,
because such depressions were characterized by under-utilized production capacity and falling resource prices. In the

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1930s increased military spending stimulated economies, but if economic growth is retarded by environmental
constraints, military spending will exacerbate the problem.

Economic Interdependence Checks Conflict

Andrew Kuchins, Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Institution, 2002
http://sdli.Stanford.edu/101/lectures/notes20.html
Economic Interdependence Argument: Major

war would be too economically devastating for a great

power to consider it in its interests. Economic globalization does not affect all countries and
regions equally. Institutional Arguments: Regional and global institutions are becoming
increasingly more powerful, and they encourage and facilitate cooperation and dispute
resolution between nation states in a peaceful manner.

No major violence empirically results from economic crashes

Nam, Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy, 10
*Moiss, January/February, Foreign Policy, It Didnt Happen,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/it_didnt_happen?wp_login_redirect=0,
accessed 7-13-13, UR]
Just a few months ago, the consensus among influential thinkers was that the economic crisis
would unleash a wave of geopolitical plagues. Xenophobic outbursts, civil wars, collapsing
currencies, protectionism, international conflicts, and street riots were only some of the dire
consequences expected by the experts.
It didn't happen. Although the crash did cause severe economic damage and widespread human
suffering, and though the world did change in important ways for the worse -- the International
Monetary Fund, for example, estimates that the global economy's new and permanent
trajectory is a 10 percent lower rate of GDP growth than before the crisis -- the scary predictions
for the most part failed to materialize.
Sadly, the same experts who failed to foresee the economic crisis were also blindsided by the
speed of the recovery. More than a year into the crisis, we now know just how off they were.
From telling us about the imminent collapse of the international financial system to prophecies
of a 10-year recession, here are six of the most common predictions about the crisis that have
been proven wrong:
The international financial system will collapse. It didn't. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac crashed, as Citigroup and many other pillars of the financial
system teetered on the brink, and as stock markets everywhere entered into free fall, the wise
men predicted a total system meltdown. The economy has "fallen off a cliff," warned
investment guru Warren Buffett. Fellow financial wizard George Soros agreed, noting the world
economy was on "life support," calling the turbulence more severe than during the Great
Depression, and comparing the situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.
The natural corollary of such doomsday scenarios was the possibility that depositors would lose
access to the funds in their bank accounts. From there to visions of martial law imposed to
control street protests and the looting of bank offices was just an easy step for thousands of
Internet-fueled conspiracy theorists. Even today, the financial system is still frail, banks are still
failing, credit is scarce, and risks abound. But the financial system is working, and the perception
that it is too unsafe to use or that it can suddenly crash out of existence has largely dissipated.

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Economic shocks have no effect on global peace your authors assume biased
studies
Bazzi, UC San Diego Department of Economics PhD, and Blattman, Yale
Departments of Political Science and Econ Assistant Professor, 11
*Samuel and Christopher, December 1, Center for Global Development, Economic Shocks and
Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices,
http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/1425755_file_Bazzi_Blattman_price_shocks_FINAL.pd
f, accessed 7-13-13, UR]
Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks have no discernible effect on new
conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less
sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally be- lieved. One possibility is that
successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and
coordination challenges.
Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations,
income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a nation is so fragile that a change in
prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger war even in the absence of a price shock.
The same argument has been made in debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal
collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19
B. A general problem of publication bias?
More generally, these findings should heighten our concern with publication bias in the con- flict
literature. Our results run against a number of published results on commodity shocks and
conflict, mainly because of select samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly, alternative measures of instability.
Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of published research
findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested
rela- tionships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and models; and
when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical significance. The cross-national study of
con- flict is an extreme case of all these. Most worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative
de- pendent variables or publishes systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006)
have shown that the majority of published conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks that have grown in popularity.
We are also concerned there is a file drawer problem (Rosenthal 1979). Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results;
but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it is published. If not, back to the file drawer.

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AT: US-China War

No China warglobalization locks in interdependence
Xuetong and Haixia 12 Yan Xuetong, Dean of the Institute of Modern International
Relations at Tsinghua University and the Chief Editor of The Chinese Journal of International
Politics, he has his own Wikipedia page, Qi Haixia, Lecturer Ph.D in the Institute of International
Studies , Tsinghua University, Football Game Rather Than Boxing Match: ChinaUS Intensifying
Rivalry Does not Amount to Cold War, Chinese Journal of International Politics 5(2): 105-127,
Summer 2012, 10.1093/cjip/pos007
Economic globalization created a strategic need for superficial friendship between China and
the United States. While scholars disagree over exactly when economic globalization began, all agree that it sped up
after the end of the Cold War. This is because the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance ended
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulting in a global market. Meanwhile, the pace of
information-flow increased among states, shrinking the size of the globe and leading to
popularization of the expression global village. Levels of interdependence have increased
along with the growing proximity of international economic relations. That a strategy of
complete confrontation can no longer effectively protect national interests is now obvious. It is for
this reason that certain scholars argue that there has been a qualitative change in the nature of the security dilemma since end of
the Cold War.35 Under

the conditions of globalization, interdependence between China and the

United States has continued to grow, and for the sake of economic interests, neither is willing
to adopt a strategy of all-out confrontation. Economic interdependence, however, will not diffuse the political and
security conflicts between the two states. Different interests in different spheres have thus created a foundation for superficial
friendship between the United States and China.

Ignore rhetoricconverging interests check China war

Wallerstein 12 Immanuel Wallerstein, sociologist, historical social scientist, and worldsystems analyst, Senior Research Scholar for the Yale Sociology Department, China and the
United States: Rivals, Enemies, Collaborators? Agence Global, Commentary No. 321,
1/15/2012, http://www.iwallerstein.com/china-united-states-rivals-enemies-collaborators/
While the collapse of the Soviet Union rendered irrelevant any Chinese-U.S. alliance against it, the relations between the two
countries did not really change. They became, if anything, much closer. The

situation in which the world finds itself

today is that China has a significant balance of payments surplus with the United States, much
of which it invests in U.S. Treasury bonds, thereby underwriting the ability of the U.S.
government to continue to spend vast amounts of resources on its multiple military activities around the globe (and
particularly in the Middle East), as well as to be a good customer for Chinese exports. From time to time,
the rhetoric each government currently uses about the other is a bit harsh, but nowhere near
the rhetoric of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Still, it is never
wise to pay too much attention to the rhetoric. In global affairs, rhetoric is usually intended
primarily to have a political effect within ones own countries, rather than reflecting true
policy towards the country at which it is ostensibly aimed. One should pay more attention to
the actions of the two countries. Notice the following: In 2001 (just before 9/11), off Hainan Island, a Chinese
plane and a U.S. plane collided. The U.S. plane had probably been spying on China. Some U.S.
politicians called for a military response. President George W. Bush did not agree. He more or less apologized to the
Chinese, obtaining the eventual return of the airplane and of the 24 captured U.S. airmen. In the various efforts of the United
States to get the United Nations to support its operations in various ways, the Chinese often dissented. But they have never
actually vetoed a resolution sponsored by the United States. Caution on both sides has
seemed to be the preferred form of action, despite the rhetoric. So where are we? China, as all the major
powers today, has a multifaceted foreign policy, engaging with all parts of the world. The question is what its priorities are. I believe
that priority number one is its relations with Japan and the two Koreas. China is strong, yes, but would be immeasurably stronger if it
were to be part of a northeast Asian confederation. China and Japan need each other, first of all as economic partners and secondly

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to ensure that there be no military confrontation of any kind. Despite occasional nationalist flare-ups, they have been visibly moving
in this direction. The most recent move is the joint decision to trade with each other using their own currencies, thereby cutting out
the use of the dollar, and insulating them from the ever more frequent fluctuations in the dollars value. Furthermore, Japan is
weighing the uncertainty that the U.S. military umbrella may not last forever and it needs therefore to come to terms with China.
South Korea faces the same dilemmas as Japan, plus the thorny problem of how to deal with North Korea. For South Korea, China is
the crucial constraint on the North Koreans. And for China, instability in North Korea would pose an immediate threat to its own
stability. China can play for South Korea the role that the United States no longer can. And in the difficult adjustments of China and
Japan to their desired collaboration, South Korea (or a putatively united Korea) can play an essential balancing role. As the United
States perceives these developments, is it not reasonable to suppose that it is trying to come to terms with this kind of confederal
Northeast Asia as it constructs itself? One could analyze the military posturing of the United States in Northeast, Southeast, and
South Asia not as a serious military stance but as a negotiating ploy in the geopolitical game that is being played out over the next
decade. Are

China and the United States rivals? Yes, up to a point. Are they enemies? No, they are not enemies.
Are they collaborators? They already are more than they admit, and will be much more so as
the decade proceeds.

Both US and China prefer cooperation

Lieberthal and Jisi 12 Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center and
senior fellow in Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development at Brookings, was a
professor at U Michigan for 26 years, and Wang Jisi, Director, Center for International and
Strategic Studies and Dean of the School of International Studies, Peking University, Addressing
U.S.-China Strategic Distrust, Brookings, 3/30/2012,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/03/30-us-china-lieberthal
The U.S. and China have a wide-ranging, deep and relatively mature relationship. The
presidents of both countries have repeatedly indicated the value of developing a cooperative
relationship for the future. Both sides have a pragmatic awareness of the issues on which they
disagree, and both appreciate the importance of not permitting those specific disagreements
to prevent cooperation on major issues where cooperation can be mutually beneficial. In
addition, the leaders and top working-level officials on both sides have gained substantial
experience in dealing with each other and, in many cases, have come to know each other fairly well. 1

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Impact Calculus

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Biodiversity o/w
Species have moral value beyond the well-being of individual members
Wendy Donner, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carleton University, 2002
[Land Value Community p. 100-101]
Callicott justifies his theory on the basis of both ecological and evolutionary Darwinian principles
and considerations. Although eschewing traditional extensionalism that we have seen he
rejects, Callicott nonetheless claims, "All contemporary forms of life thus are represented to be
kin, relatives, members of one extended family. And all are equally members in good standing of
one society or community, the biotic community or global ecosystem."4 This theory holds as the
prime bearer of value the biotic community and other wholes such as ecosystems and entire
species, as opposed to individual members of such species. Thus when we are making practical
decisions about the environment, we ought to follow the fundamental rule of doing that which
will "enhance the diversity, integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community."5 He also
argues that nonhuman species as a whole have intrinsic value, and we may be obligated to
sacrifice individual members of sentient species to save an endangered but nonsentient plant
species from extinction.6 But Cafficott also attempts to respond to criticisms of untempered holism and tries to embrace both holism and individualism. His theory "provides moral
standing for both environmental individuals and for the environment as a whole."7
Callicott appeals to a Humean-Darwinian account of human feelings of benevolence to explain how we can feel sympathy for both individuals and wholes. Darwinian natural selection has operated to select for
those members of the human community who had both more intense and wide-ranging feelings of sympathy. This provides a basis in our feelings for our placing value on the natural environment. He says that
both individuals and wholes as such can be "the objects of certain special, naturally selected moral sentiments.' Intrinsic value on this model is a bivalent concept grounded on both subjective and objective factors.
Intrinsic value is, as it were, "projected" onto appropriate objects by virtue of certain naturally selected and inherited intentional feelings, some of which ... simply have social wholes as their natural objects.
Wholes may thus have intrinsic value no less problematically than individuals.9
This account of intrinsic value is not without problems of its own, a point at which I shortly turn. But Calllcott is at pains to emphasize that in his view the land ethic can accommodate standing for individuals. This
is because many of the harshest criticisms of the theory question its commitment to individual
members of species and argue that it has inhumane consequences. Accordin to Callicott our moral sentiments can move back and forth between holistic and individualistic objects. However he wavers on this
point and in the en where he puts the primary weight is not clear.

Species have moral vlue beyond the well-being of the individuals

Holmes Rolston III, Professor of Philosphy at Colarodo State University, 2002
[Environmental Ethics p. 35]
A species exists; a species ought to exist. An environmental ethics must make these assertions
and move from biology to ethics with care. Speciesexist only instantiated in individuals, yet they
are as real as individual plants or animals. The assertion that there are specific forms of life
historically maintained in their environments over time seems as certain as anything else we
believe about the empirical world. At times biologists revise the theories and taxa with which
they map these forms, but species are not so much like lines of latitude and longitude as like
mountains and rivers, phenomena objectively there to be mapped. The edges of these natural
kinds will sometimes be fuzzy, to some extent discretionary. One species will slide into another
over evolutionary time. But it does not follow from the fact that speciation is sometimes in
progress that species are merely made up and not found as evolutionary lines with identity in
time as well as space.
A consideration of species is revealing and challenging because it offers a biologically based
counterexample to the focus on individuals-typically sentient and usually persons-so
characteristic in classical ethics. In an evolutionary ecosystem, it is not mere individuality that
counts; the species is also significant because it is a dynamic life-form maintained over time. The
individual represents (re-presents) a species in each new generation. It is a token of a type, and
the type is more important than the token..
If, in this world of uncertain moral convictions, it makes any sense to assert that one ought not
to kill individuals without justification, it makes more sense to assert that one ought not to

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superkill the species without superjustification. Several billion years' worth of creative toil,
several million species of teeming life, have been handed over to the care of this late-coming
species in which mind has flowered and morals have emerged. Ought not this sole moral species
do something less self-interested than count all the produce of an evolutionary ecosystem as
nothing but human resources? Such an attitude hardly seems biologically informed, much less
ethically adequate. It is too provincial for intelligent humanity. Life on Earth is a
many-splendored thing; extinction dims its luster. An ethics of respect for life is urgent at the
level of species.

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Biodiversity o/w Nuclear war

Biodiversity loss comparatively outweighs nuclear war, economic collapse and
tyranny.
Chen 2000 [Jim, Professor of Law at the U of Minnesota, Minnesota Journal of Global Trade Winter 2000, pg. 211]
The value of endangered species and the biodiversity they embody is literally . . . incalculable.
What, if anything, should the law do to preserve it? There are those that invoke the story of Noahs Ark as a moral basis for biodiversity preservation. Others regard the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the
biblical stories of Creation and the Flood, as the root of the Wests deplorable environmental record. To avoid getting bogged down in an environmental exegesis of Judeo-Christian myth and legend, we should let

The loss of biological diversity is quite arguably the

gravest problem facing humanity. If we cast the question as the contemporary phenomenon
that our descendents [will] most regret, the loss of genetic and species diversity by the
destruction of natural habitats is worse than even energy depletion, economic collapse,
limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. Natural evolution may in due course renew the earth will a diversity of
Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology determine the imperatives of our moment in natural history.

species approximating that of a world unspoiled by Homo sapiens in ten million years, perhaps a hundred million.

Biodiversity loss itself outweighs human extinction. We have a moral

imperative to protect the other species on Earth.
Elliott`97
*Herschel, University of Florida Emeritus Philosophy, 1997 A General Statement of the Tragedy of the Commons, February 26,
http://www.dieoff.org/page121.htm]
Third,

all systems of ethical beliefs are hypotheses about how human beings can live on Earth. As
like all factual claims, their truth or falsity depends on empirical evidence. For

such, they make factual claims. And

this reason, the sequence of biological events which the general statement of the tragedy of the commons describes is of decisive importance for ethical theory. It shows (1) that moral behavior must be
grounded in a knowledge of biology and ecology, (2) that moral obligations must be empirically tested to attain necessary biological goals, (3) that any system of moral practices is self-inconsistent when the

empirical criteria give a necessary (though not a

sufficient) condition for acceptable moral behavior. Regardless of the human proclivity to
rationalize, any system of ethical beliefs is mistaken if its practice would cause the
breakdown of the ecosystem which sustains the people who live by it. Indeed, biological
necessity has a veto over moral behavior. Facts can refute moral beliefs Fourth, ecosystems are in dynamic equilibrium.
behavior, which it either allows or makes morally obligatory, actually subverts the goal it seeks. Thus

In addition, technology and human institutions are constantly evolving in novel and unpredictable ways. Furthermore, living things must compete with each other for space and resources; yet each organism also

the welfare of all organisms -- including human

beings -- is causally dependent on the health and stability of the ecosystems which sustain
them. As a consequence, the stability and well-being of the Earth's biosystem has moral
priority over the welfare of any of its parts -- including the needs and interests of human
societies and individuals.
depends symbiotically on the well-being of the whole for its own survival and well-being. Indeed

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Nuclear war o/w Ecology

Environmental collapse cant cause extinction---nuke war outweighs--magnitude and probability
David Schweickart 10 is Professor at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics (University of Virginia), and
a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Ohio State University). Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible? Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 41 (2010)
67396752

It is not true either that the various ecological crises we are facing will bring about "the end of the world." Consider
the projections of the Stern Review, the recently released report commissioned by the British Government. If nothing is done, we
risk "major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and the next, on a scale similar to those associated with
the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century." This is serious. Some sixty million people died in World
War Two. The Stern Review estimates as many as 200 million people could be permanently displaced by rising sea level and drought.
But this is not "the end of the world." Even

if the effects are far worse, resulting in billions of deaths--a highly

unlikely scenario --there would still be lots of us left. If three-quarters of the present population perished, that
would still leave us with 1.6 billion people--the population of the planet in 1900. I say this not to minimize the potentially horrific
impact of relentless environmental destruction, but to caution against exaggeration. We are not talking about
thermonuclear war--which could have extinguished us as a species. (It still might.) And we shouldn't lose sight of
the fact that millions of people on the planet right now, caught up in savage civil wars or terrorized by U.S. bombers (which dropped
some 100,000 lbs. of explosives on a Baghdad neighborhood during one ten-day period in January 2008--the amount the fascists
used to level the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War), are faced with conditions more terrible than anyone here is
likely to face in his or her lifetime due to environmental degradation.

Preventing nuclear war is our greatest ecological imperative

Roderick Nash, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UC-SB, 1989
[The Rights of Nature p. 197-198]
The history of American liberalism offered environmental radicals a way to justify violence.
George Wuerthner told readers of the August 1985 issue of Earth First! that a culture, like
Lawrence Koh berg's individual, gained "moral maturity" when individuals aware of "universal
truths" opposed "unjust laws." In the United Stat, this process had not always been nonviolent.
"It took a civil war Wuerthner explained, "to extend certain inalienable rights to people in our
society." Now some were looking to violence as the only way to implement "the next major
extension of rights... the land." 140
The almost unthinkable, global scale of destruction that nuclear war and "nuclear winter" would
mean for the natural world received surprisingly little attention from anti-war activists. Most
opposition to nuclear war has centered on the horror of nuclear weapons for human beings and
their civilization. Yet a few commentators have. recognized broader ethical implications. If
humankind self-destructed the species could be said to deserve its fate, but what about the
other beings, species, and ecosystems that would be dragged into oblivion as well? This
planetary perspective appeared in Jonathan Shell's best selling book, The Fate of the Earth
(1982), in which he pleaded not only for humans to save themselves from extinction but to have
"respect for the earth" as the basis "of human as of other life." 141 In Star Wars and the State of
Our Souls: Deciding the Future of Planet Ear (1985), Patricia M. Mische pointed out that modern
weapons have created "a crisis of morality of ethics" because "we have new power over life and
death--not only human life but over the planetary processes in all [their] forms." This God-like
power required, in her opinion, that "we become.., more morally mature." Lewis Thomas who
had compared the earth to a living cell, believed nuclear war would deal "the biosphere.., a

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mortal or near-mortal blow." Life on the planet might survive, but as it did a billion years ago
when bacteria topped the evolutionary tree. Michael Allen Fox agreed that nuclear war could
result in "ecocide." Apart from the decimation and possible termination of human life, a
holocaust "must be regarded as morally worse in terms of its consequences for the non-human
environment." On this point Fox noted the deep ecologist belief that "other things have a right
to continue existing even if we insist on obliterating ourselves."
Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, leaders in forecasting the ecological effects of nuclear war and
publicizing the concept of nuclear winter preferred scientific to ethical arguments, but implicit in
their work was the idea that atom bombs confronted humans with the awesome responsibility
of being in charge of evolution. Linking people and nature in a single biological and ethical
community, Sagan urged his generation to "cherish our fragile world as we do our children and
our grandchildren. Sagan turned to civil disobedience, as did scores of scientists and physicians.
On several occasions in 1986 they illegally entered the Nevada Test Site to prevent detonation
of nuclear bombs and were arrested for criminal trespass. Harvard psychologist John Mack cited
the Boston Tea Party, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in a justification of his
arrest in Nevada. "I recommend civil disobedience," he told cheering Harvard students, "for your
spiritual health." 146
Nuclear war and nuclear winter have the potential of focusing attention on the rights of both
humans and nature as no other recent issue. The environmental movement has begun to
recognize that what is at stake in disarmament is nothing less than the fate of the planet.
Philosophers and scientists agree that the rights of any individual organism have no significance
apart from the existence of a habitat, which alone assures existence, liberty, and the
opportunity to pursue happiness. Some raise questions about the rights of the habitat itself.
Ending the threat of nuclear holocaust is likely to become a major moral imperative for future
liberators of nature as well as people.

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Global Warming o/w

Global warming is a moral catastrophe even from a non-anthropocentric point of view
Allen Thompson, assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University, 2009
[Ethics & the Environment 14.1]
Of course, many environmentalists think this is an inane question. It's so obvious, they think,
anthropogenic global warming is morally odious[End Page 88] for many reasons. First, it's very likely to cause tremendous human suffering. If something
drastic is not done soon to curb emission of greenhouse gases, warmer oceans and melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will cause sea levels to raise dramatically, enough to flood coastal cities
worldwide, displacing hundreds of millions of people and upsetting the social and economic processes that would be called upon to help mitigate the suffering of these refugees. As isotherms migrate toward the
poles, tropical diseases like malaria will plague societies completely unaccustomed and unprepared to deal with them. Recently, top British climate scientists predict that by 2100 one third of the planet's land
surface may be affected by extreme drought, compared to only about two percent today, rendering agriculture virtually impossible (McCarthy 2006). If temperatures rise enough to trigger various positive
feedback loops, such as melting vast undersea frozen methane hydrates, then, as NASA scientist James Hansen (2006) writes, "all bets are off." There is good reason to believe that unchecked global warming will
cause an astonishing level of human suffering.

Further, if we grant to nonanthropocentric environmental holists that parts of the natural world
such as species and ecosystems are morally considerable for their own sake, possessing some
form of intrinsic moral value, global warming is obviously morally objectionable. Predictions
regarding the loss of plant and animal species across the globe range from twenty to sixty
percent, largely due to loss of habitata loss of biodiversity unprecedented since the last "mass
extinction," between the Paleocene and the Eocene epochs, fifty-five million years ago. If
species and ecosystems are intrinsically valuable, then it is again easy to see why global warming
is obviously a moral catastrophe of the highest order.
So there is a lot wrong with anthropogenic global warming: the loss of many plant and animal species, the loss of many and perhaps unique bioregional ecosystems, and of course the concomitant sum of human
suffering and injustices. All this makes global warming morally bad, and I will agree. However, my view is that the intuition of moral horror at the threat of global warming feels as though something even more
were at stake. Putting aside McKibben's objectionable dualism, his moral intuition was right

: global warming is fearful as if it were the very end of

nature.
Consider an analogy with a nuclear holocaust, or more specifically, a [End Page 89] contrast between nuclear and conventional weapons.4 Someday in the distant future, we may be in a position to know the sum
of all the ecological and human disaster caused by anthropogenic climate change. Now consider the possibility these same consequences, or similar ones, were brought about by what I'll call conventional means,

we are busy driving untold numbers of species into extinction

and destroying many irreplaceable but regional ecosystems by means other than changing the
atmosphere. And of course humans are able to more directly bring great suffering to bear upon other human beings. Suppose we were to cause all of this suffering, injustice, and destruction
that is, by means other than global climate change. This seems possible

without altering the basic dynamic equilibrium of the global biosphere. Now, do we feel the same sense of moral horror? Do we have the same intuition, that is, as if it were the very end of the world? I submit the
answer is "no." By hypothesis, the consequences in terms of human suffering and injustice, on one hand, and the loss of species and ecosystems, on the other, are the same but the sense of moral horror is not.
There is a gap. Global warming is something analogous to warfare by means of nuclear, rather than conventional, weapons. If this is right, then the question is a sensible one: apart from the obvious, i.e., bad
consequences and injustices, what's so bad about global warming

We must take ethical responsibility for global warming

Allen Thompson, assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University, 2009
[Ethics & the Environment 14.1]
However, when the same environmental damage can all be tied to a common causal factor,
namely, global warming, I suggest that this highlights our sense of culpability; when all the
environmental damage can be connected to single causal factor, the reality of our collective
responsibility becomes salient in a way that otherwise is not possible.6 Dale Jamieson and
others have noted that moral issues connected with global warming can be confusing because
no one individual or event is responsible for the destruction of the global environment. I am
claiming that since the cause of this destruction can be coherently framed under the single
description of global warming, our ability to recognize that we are responsible is heightened in a
way that explains why we would have the moral intuition that global warming was somehow the
end of the world. It allows us to form an appropriate sense that we really are responsible. My
final point is connected. Consider a Baconian conception of the scientific enterprise: to

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dominate and subdue nature in the service of human ends. For all of human history the natural
world has set the background conditions for life, largely conditions over which we have had no
control. Thus scientific knowledge of the natural world was prized for the power it allowed us to
exercise over nature. But with control comes responsibility. Meteorological events were
something over which we seemed to have no influence, and certainly no control. These acts of
nature or, for some, acts of God, were helpful or harmful to us but were certainly not our
responsibility. But this has changed. We now know that the fundamental conditions of the
biosphere are something that, collectively, we are responsible for. Science and technology have
enabled us to wrest some control over nature but this has now come at the cost of being
responsible for far more than we ever bargained for. I believe that at least part of the intuition
of moral horror that we feel about anthropogenic global climate [End Page 96] change is
existential angst over the burden of this responsibility. We valued not being responsible for
conditions of the natural environment and we have lost what we valued. Our anxiety, I believe,
is over our loss of innocence. We don't fear the end of the natural world; we fear responsibility
for the natural world. Being anxious over our responsibility for global warming is appropriate
and good. I have argued that McKibben's ontological claim, that anthropogenic global climate
change is the end of nature, is mistaken. At the same time, it remains true that there is no
corner of the globe, no feature of our biosphere, which escapes the influence of human activity.
Whether we accept it or not, human beings now shoulder the responsibility of planetary
management; once the planet was larger than us, but it no longer is. Collectively, our activities
play a significant role in determining the basic conditions under which all terrestrial life carries
on. Given our responsibility, a certain level of anxiety is appropriate because this is an awesome
responsibility. Consider an analogy that is sure to raise the hackles of some: the fundamental
responsibility that parents bear toward children. This responsibility does not arise from specific
roles in the child's genesis, for adoptive parents bear it just as well. It is the responsibility of
enabling the child to be and become a flourishing human being. Things do not bode well for the
child whose parents are not anxious in the face of their responsibility, let alone ignorant of the
fact that they bear it. The view I have defended finds that part of our trepidation over global
warming arises from what may be the unwelcome recognition that humanity now bears an
awesome responsibility for the flourishing of life on Earth and recognizing that this anxiety
bodes well for humanity is how I learned to stop worrying and love global warming.

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Humans o/w ecology

Humans are unique because of sentience, free will, and morality. Value does
not exist without the human.
Younkins 2004
Edward, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University in
West Virginia, THE FLAWED DOCTRINE OF NATURE'S INTRINSIC VALUE October 15, 2004 / No
147 Le Quebecois Librehttp://www.quebecoislibre.org/04/041015-17.htm
Many environmentalists contend that nature has an intrinsic value, in and of itself, apart from its contributions to human well-being.
They maintain that all created things are equal and should be respected as ends in themselves having rights to their own
actualization without human interference. Ecological egalitarians defend biodiversity for its own sake and assign the rest of nature
ethical status at least equal to that of human beings. Some even say that the collective needs of nonhuman species and inanimate
objects must take precedence over mans needs and desires. Animals, plants, rocks, land, water, and so forth, are all

said to possess intrinsic value by their mere existence without regard to their relationship to individual
human beings. Environmentalists erroneously assign human values and concern to an amoral material
sphere. When environmentalists talk about the nonhuman natural world, they commonly attribute
human values to it, which, of course, are completely irrelevant to the nonhuman realm . For example, nature
is incapable of being concerned with the possible extinction of any particular ephemeral species. Over 99 percent of all species of life
that have ever existed on earth have been estimated to be extinct with the great majority of these perishing because of nonhuman
factors. Nature cannot care about biodiversity. Humans happen to value biodiversity because it reflects the state of the natural
world in which they currently live. Without humans, the beauty and spectacle of nature would not exist such

ideas can only exist in the mind of a rational valuer. These environmentalists fail to realize that value means having
value to some valuer. To be a value some aspect of nature must be a value to some human being. People have the capacity
to assign and to create value with respect to nonhuman existents. Nature, in the form of natural
resources, does not exist independently of man. Men, choosing to act on their ideas, transform nature for human
purposes. All resources are man-made. It is the application of human valuation to natural substances that makes them resources.
Resources thus can be viewed as a function of human knowledge and action. By using their rationality and ingenuity, men affect
nature, thereby enabling them to achieve progress. Mans survival and flourishing depend upon the study of nature that includes all
things, even man himself. Human beings are the highest level of nature in the known universe. Men are a distinct natural

phenomenon as are fish, birds, rocks, etc. Their proper place in the hierarchical order of nature needs to
be recognized. Unlike plants and animals, human beings have a conceptual faculty, free will, and a
moral nature. Because morality involves the ability to choose, it follows that moral worth is related to
human choice and action and that the agents of moral worth can also be said to have moral value. By
rationally using his conceptual faculty, man can create values as judged by the standard of enhancing
human life. The highest priority must be assigned to actions that enhance the lives of individual human
beings. It is therefore morally fitting to make use of nature. Mans environment includes all of his surroundings. When he
creatively arranges his external material conditions, he is improving his environment to make it more useful to himself. Neither fixed
nor finite, resources are, in essence, a product of the human mind through the application of science and technology. Our resources
have been expanding over time as a result of our ever-increasing knowledge. Unlike plants and animals, human beings

do much more than simply respond to environmental stimuli. Humans are free from natures
determinism and thus are capable of choosing. Whereas plants and animals survive by adapting to nature, men sustain
their lives by employing reason to adapt nature to them. People make valuations and judgments. Of all the created
order, only the human person is capable of developing other resources, thereby enriching creation. The
earth is a dynamic and developing system that we are not obliged to preserve forever as we have found
it. Human inventiveness, a natural dimension of the world, has enabled us to do more with less. Those
who proclaim the intrinsic value of nature view man as a destroyer of the intrinsically good. Because it is mans rationality in the
form of science and technology that permits him to transform nature, he is despised for his ability to reason that is portrayed as a
corrupting influence. The power of reason offends radical environmentalists because it leads to abstract knowledge, science,
technology, wealth, and capitalism. This antipathy for human achievements and aspirations involves the

negation of human values and betrays an underlying nihilism of the environmental movement . Many
environmentalists and scientists do not believe in free will or the possibility of knowledge (i.e., that there is such a thing as

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objectivity). If forces beyond his power of choice determine mans actions, and if mans mind is unable to apprehend truth, it follows
that there are no grounds for recognizing a profound difference between man and animals.

There is no good way to base ethics on lifewell inevitably have to kill plants
Nicholas Agar, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Victoria University, 2001
[Lifes Intrinsic Value p. 64]
Albert Schweitzer is the modern figure most closely associated with the view that all individual
living things warrant special moral treatment. According to Schweitzer, "the great fault of all
ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of
man to man .... [A] man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and
animals as thatof his fellow men." Schweitzer was not entirely blind to the toll in other lives
demanded by human life. Yet he urged that we kill, whether it be in the process of eating or
fighting infection, only with a due sense of seriousness.'
The sayings and writings of the Jams and Schweitzer show it is not difficult to present life in an
appealing light. It is much more difficult, however, to come up with a philosophically rigorous
defense of biocentric value. Some have accused Schweitzer of offering less a fully worked out
moral biocentrism than a limp biosentimentalism, and though he may have been deeply
affected by the fates of termites and daisies, he was not in the business of finding watertight
arguments.3 There are serious doubts about the fitness of the concept of life to play any major
role in moral theory. Compare life and concepts allied to it with sentience and the intentional
notions at the heart of the psychological view. Traditional views about what agents ought to do,
and what they are owed, have coevolved with theory about what kinds of things agents are. The
longevity of this relationship explains why normativity closely tracks folk psychological, or at
least partially folk pyschological, notions. Life and the notions allied to it seem bonded to moral
notions in altogether flimsier and more haphazard ways. We may be happy intoning the phrase
"all life is precious," but we certainly feel in no way committed to heroic bladeof-grass rescue
acts.
Anthropocentrism is inevitable.

ARNOULD& DEBUS 08[JACQUES ARNOULD& ANDR DEBUS. AN ETHICAL APPROACH TO

PLANETARY PROTECTION. ADVANCES IN SPACE RESEARCH 42 (2008) 10891095.]

Scientific development, as earlier alluded, has put humanity in a singular position. On the one hand,
modern sciences have demonstrated (sometimes to an inordinate extent) that human species is
immersed in a cosmic, bio- logical as well as historical reality, and that human beings are only
one part among a multitude of others thus depriving us of any possible claim to occupy a
central or pinnacle position. And on the other, these same sci- ences have at the same time
demanded and contributed to unprecedented levels of technological expertise: people in the 20th
century were the first to become, albeit partially, what Rene Descartes called the masters and
possessors of nature, achieving greater autonomy with respect to nature and in the same time
increasing responsibility for it. Indeed, Dominique Bourg proposes a dis- tinction between speculative
anthropocentrism (based on the former reasoning of different cultures on the place of humankind within
nature) and practical anthropocentrism (resulting from the actual and responsible central place occupied
by human societies) (Bourg, 1993, p. 227). Of course, in the great scheme of the cosmos and its
history, the world began without man, and it will end without him. . . to quote the famous words
of Claude Le vi-Strauss (Le vi-Strauss, 1955, p. 447); but, for the moment at least, this practical

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anthropocentrism remains impassable. The position of humanity on the Earth would seem
incompat- ible with the idea of equality between all species; or, as Joseph Ki-Zerbo wisely noted: If
humankind has the same status as all other living creatures, then why blame humans alone for
all current disasters? (Ki-Zerbo, 1992, p. 30).That being the case, who can humanity count on to act or
to set standards and values, if not on itself? It is the principle of modern humanism that places humanity
as both the source of values and the supreme end in itself. The humanist position should not
necessarily be under- stood as requiring a profession of atheism or a total disin- terest in everything
non-human. On the contrary, the sentiment of contingency associated with contemporary humanism
calls for greater attention and care with respect to the consequences of human actions. While
not seen as a partner, the terrestrial biosphere can no longer be consid- ered as simply a backdrop of
minor importance to the human comedy or tragedy. The same is now true, though to a lesser extent, of
the broader space environment made up of the other celestial bodies. Whether they arouse the interest
of scientists, the desire of businessmen or the imag- ination of utopian visionaries, these celestial bodies
fall nonetheless within the sphere of human influence, real or potential. Contemporary humanism is

tinged with universalism.

Even if the Affirmatives authors are interesting in helping the environment, they are still
anthropocentric because they value it for its use to humans

Huebert, J.D., Chicago University, and Walter Block, College of Business Administration, Loyola University, New
Orleans, 2007. [Space Environmentalism, Property Rights, and Law, The University of Memphis Law Review, pg. 281-309]
J. H.

Few, if any, human beings would self-identify as enemies of "the environment." After all,
everyone wants clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, and does not want anyone to
invade his person or property with harmful substances without permission. People who go
this farand only this farwith their environmentalism probably comprise the majority of
humanity. They can be said to be adherents of anthropocentric environmentalism.5
Anthropocentric environmentalists can be found across the political spectrum. For example, voices ranging from the right6 to the
extreme Marxist left7 have called for unprecedented global government intervention to combat perceived environmental threats to
human well-being. Others, however, have advocated laissez-faire capitalism as the appropriate means to protect the environment to
maximize human well-being on Earth.8 For

the anthropocentric environmentalist, non-human creatures

and objects are valuable to the extent that humans value themthey have no "intrinsic"
value apart from this.9
No reason to morally value ecological communities
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, editor in chief of the Oxford University Press monograph series on
Environmental Ethics and Science Policy, 2002
[Land Value Community p. 89-90]
Moreover, which (of many) alleged ecological communities whose stability we ought to seek is
not clear. One could seek to stabilize (whatever that means) the ecosystem,19 or the
association,20 or the trophic level, or the biosphere. Optimizing the well-being of one such
community typically leads neither to the optimization of another community, nor to that of the
biosphere, nor to that of a particular association. If not, then Callicott has no scientific or
biocentric basis for choosing a given "whole" as the unit that is to be optimized.21 Instead one
must make a human value judgment to optimize the well-being of a particular community.
Admittedly, once one makes a human value judgment about which particular whole one wants
to attempt to stabilize or balance, that particular ecological conclusions are valid within certain
spatial and temporal scales becomes obvious. Nevertheless, a given ecological conclusion

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regarding a particular type of balance or stability, for example, typically holds for some "wholes"
(e.g., communities), but not for others, and for some spatial and temporal scales, but not for
others.Because ecologists cannot optimize the welfare of all the different wholes there is no
general "community" level at which ecological problem solving takes place, and thus no
unambiguous way to operationalize (biologically) Callicott's and Leopold's views. Because no
universal scientific/ecological theory exists to which ethicists can appeal in defining the "whole"
about which Leopold and Callicott speak, ecologists are forced to work on a case-by-case basis.
Numerous alleged "wholes" (e.g., populations) exhibit density vagueness rather than density
dependence, whereas other wholes do not.22 Also, many ecosystemic or holistic "explanations"
are neither falsiflable nor even testable, but arguably "theological ecology."" Ecologists simply
do not agree on the underlying processes that allegedly structure communities and
ecosystems.24
A second biological problem with Callicott's grounding environmental ethics on the science of
ecology occurs in his arguments against according rights to individual members of the biotic
community. He says that safeguarding the rights of each individual is not possible; such a
"safeguard" would stop all trophic processes beyond photosynthesis.25 The biological problem
with Callicott's reasoning here is that nature does not respect communities either. We find
strong biological evidence (e.g., fossilized pollens) of radical changes in community composition
and structure throughout history. These changes in community composition and structure, in
turn, suggest that there is no such thing as a stable or balanced community "type" existing
throughtime. Rather communities are definable only stochastically or statistically and thecommunity "types" only appear stable
because the time frame of examination is relatively short. Even if climate and environment remained the same, communities could
not be classified into balanced or stable "types" on the basis of climate or time.26 And if not, then the same argument that Callicott
uses against Regan can be used against him. Nature does not respect biological communities so, on Callicott's own terms (and this is
not an argument that I would make), how can he avoid a stipulative and questionbegging argument that humans ought to respect
biological communities? The point is not that this objection is correct. Rather, the point is that Callicott's own arguments fall victim
to some of the same scientific flaws with which he charges Regan.

There is no pristine nature with value outside of the human.

Robert Frodeman, Asst Prof Phil and Religious Studies at UNT, 2008
*with Erin Daly Separated at Birth, Signs of Rapprochement: Environmental Ethics and Space
Exploration Ethics & the Environment 13.1+
MartynFogg, on the other hand, notes that efforts to protect a bar- ren environment are often
misanthropic critiques of human nature emphasizing our capacity for evil, or sentimental illusions
based on out- of-date ecology. He offers as an example the ecocentrist notion of ecological
harmonythat there exists an ideal balance in nature that is perfect, unchanging, and which nurtures
and sustains(Fogg 2000a, 209). Such a state is a cozy sentimentality, he claims.Nature is...better
regarded as a continuous state of flux dominated by chaos and dishar- mony(ibid.). Fogg counters
Alan Marshalls argument that rocks exist in a state of blissful satori by stating,rocks dont think,
dont act and dont care.They cannot have values of their own (ibid.,210).

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Ecology o/w Humans

Ocean policy must begin by valuing its ecologies as a good in itselfnot just a
resource for human needs
Susan Bratton, Chair of Environmental Studies at Baylor University, 2004
[Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004) 1-22]
Theoretical environmental ethicists have to date produced few discussions specifically analyzing
human relationships with marine organisms, other than the more charismatic vertebrates, such
as whales and dolphins. [End Page 1] Although philosophers have penned extensive
commentaries on "the land ethic," based on the writings of Aldo Leopold, the discipline has not
generated a parallel ethos for the oceans. A number of commentators have, however, tackled
maritime environmental issues by extending widely accepted terrestrial models, including "the
land ethic," to oceanic ecosystems. Jon Van Dyke (1993, 1996), for example, applies stewardship
ethics, sustainable development, and the precautionary principle to the oceans. Stephen Kellert
(1997), after discussing universal environmental values models relative to the earth's coasts,
calls for a "sense of place." Marc L. Miller and Jerome Kirk (1992), both of whom have expertise
in marine policy, propose an idealized holothetic model for marine environmental ethics, based
on a supposed historic progression in human cultures. First, tribal societies, with less developed
technology, perceive humans as vulnerable and the environment as powerful, and therefore
deify or spiritualize their environment. This is followed by a development ethic, which provides
greater control over nature. Miller and Kirk identify the development ethic as dominant among
today's maritime industries and government agencies concerned with extraction or harvest,
including the National Marine Fisheries Service. Miller and Kirk advocate, for vulnerable humans
living in a vulnerable environment, a holothetic ethic based on an analogy between an organism
and an ecosystem, and employing ecological and cybernetic paradigms focusing on "the
interrelationships and systematic features of living and nonliving communities" (237). This
holothetic ethic, however, is not explicitly a "sea ethic" nor is it particularly biocentric. They
themselves identify it as "fundamentally humanistic, even utilitarian" (238).
Baird Callicott applies an unmodified "land ethic" to the problem of establishing "moral values
for framing American ocean policy" (1992, 299). Invoking the contrast between anthropocentric
values, where human needs and desires are dominant, with biocentric values, which assume the
nonhuman portions of the environment have worth in themselves; Callicott compares three
historic ethical positions, which largely originated in terrestrial, and even land-locked settings. In
approaching marine ecosystems, Callicott sticks to continental exemplars and compares the
resource conservation ethic Gifford Pinchot advocated for forestry, to the preservationist ethos
John Muir touted for the Sierras, and the ecocentric ethos that grew out of Aldo Leopold's
attachment to the Wisconsin Sand Counties and the wilderness ranges of the Southwest. For
Callicott, the resource [End Page 2] conservation ethic is based on untrue assumptions. Since
ecosystems are complex entities, and more than the sum of their interdependent parts, environmental ethics "must aim at something larger and more comprehensive than a maximum
sustained flow of desirable products (like lumber and game) and experiences (like sport hunting
and fishing, wilderness travel, and solitude) garnered from an impassive resource pool" (Callicott
1992, 303). The resource conservation ethic also "assumes an untruth" in giving
superior status and privileges to human beings, who are not "specially created and uniquely
valuable beings." Humans are instead "members of a biotic team" and "citizens of one humming

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biotic community" (303). Callicott does not, however, ask if we modern humans, evolved to live
on land, are as much members of the sea community as we are members of the land
community?
Callicott recognizes the importance of the recent policy transfer of the wilderness ethic from
terrestrial biomes to the oceans, thus identifies John Muir as "the first American
environmentalist privately to ponder the proposition that nature itself possessed intrinsic value,
value in and of itself, quite apart from human utilities. . . ." Muir's moral vision is holistic, and
each species contributes to "the unity and completeness in the living natural world" (Callicott
1992, 302). Callicott depicts Aldo Leopold as climbing to higher ecological pinnacle than Muir by
proposing the "land community." Callicott then merely extends this bio-egalitarianism to the
seas, by crediting Leopold with the insight that: "We and other citizen-members of the biotic
community sink or swim together. Leopold's affirmation that plants, animals, soils and waters
are entitled to full citizenship as fellow-members of the biotic community is tantamount to the
recognition that they too have intrinsic, not just instrumental, value. An evolutionary and
ecological world view, in short, implies a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic" (Callicott
1992, 303-4). Callicott laments the historic fact that Leopold called his ecologically based
philosophy "the land ethic." He argues Leopold's view supports the contemporary concept of
sustainable development, which is "the only viable option for environmental management
oceanic as well as terrestrial" into the 21st century (Callicott 1992, 306).
Callicott spiritualizes, and therefore further universalizes, his ocean ethic when he quotes John
Muir's (1916) argument that God has a plan for the smallest and least significant of creatures.
Muir, recognizing the importance of life at all scales wrote: "And what creature that the Lord
[End Page 3] has taken the pains to make is not essential to completeness of that unitthe
cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete
without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and
knowledge" (1916, 302). Callicott accepts Muir's inclination to invoke religious imagery, while
claiming that this kind of higher meaning is validated by science. He notes that Darwin removed
humans from their ascendant position as "demi-god" and relegated them to their present
limited and ephemeral place in evolutionary history. Callicott actually transfers the "spiritual
truth" of Muir's position to scientific ecology, when he argues "the likes of H.C. Cowles, S.A.
Forbes, and F. E. Clements [all early ecologists] would soon validate Muir's intuition that there
exists a unity and completeness in the living natural world, to which each species, especially
many of the transmicroscopic ones, functionally contributes" (24). Callicott proposes "higher,"
and perhaps inspirational, values for framing ocean policy. His arguments concerning scale,
science and spirituality further imply that is valid to transfer the "land ethic" to the oceans, both
because ocean food webs depend on microscopic plankton, and their unseen depths have a long
association with divine mystery

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Consequentialism Good
Theres always value to liferealizing that fact and the struggling for it are what gives life
meaning.
Coontz 2001
Phyllis D., PhD Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh, et al,
JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY HEALTH NURSING, 2001, 18(4), 235-246
In the 1950s, psychiatrist and theorist Viktor Frankl (1963) described an existential theory of
purpose and meaning in life. Frankl, a long-time prisoner in a concentration camp, re- lated several
instances of transcendent states that he experienced in the midst of that terri- ble suffering using his
own experiences and observations. He believed that these experi- ences allowed him and others to
maintain their sense of dignity and self-worth. Frankl (1969) claimed that transcendence occurs by
giving to others, being open to others and the environment, and coming to accept the reality that some
situations are un- changeable. He hypothesized that life always has meaning for the individual; a
person can always decide how to face adversity. Therefore, self-transcendence provides mean- ing and
enables the discovery of meaning for a person (Frankl, 1963). Expanding Frankl's work, Reed
(1991b) linked self-transcendence with mental health. Through a developmental process individuals
gain an increasing understanding of who they are and are able to move out beyond themselves despite
the fact that they are ex- periencing physical and mental pain. This expansion beyond the self occurs
through in- trospection, concern about others and their well-being, and integration of the past and future to strengthen one's present life (Reed, 1991b).

Existence is a prerequisite to value to life and natures value.

Wapner 2003
Paul, Associate prof and director of Global Environmental Policy Program @ American U,
Dissent, Winter, http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=539
THE THIRD response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they
themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world . Postmodernism
prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism is
exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain ? Doesn't postmodern cultural
criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world ? What
else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social
construction of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, but how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed,
nature doesn't speak; rather, some person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction.

All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical
postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have
said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about
the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't
ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character . Put differently,
yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on
nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we

need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of

expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse
embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some
fashion, of environmental preservation .

Ethical principles cant guide public policy because they are subjective and non-falsifiable
Posner 99 highly influential legal theorist; Chicago Law School professor (Richard, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, p vii-x, AG)
The book is in two parts, each containing two chapters. The first part is primarily critical, the second primarily constructive. Chapter 1 tackles normative moral theory on its own

arguments for why we should alter our moral beliefs or behavior are
wasting their time if what they want to do is to alter those beliefs and the behavior the beliefs might influence. Moral
terms, arguing that people who make philosophical

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intuitions neither do nor should yield to the weak arguments that are all that philosophers can bring to
bear on moral issues. I call this position "pragmatic moral skepticism." It must not be confused with philosophically more radical isms. I am not a moral nihilist, nor an
epistemological skeptic or relativist, but merely a limited skeptic, as an example will show. That the Nazis killed millions of defenseless civilians is a fact; its truth is independent

That the Nazis' actions were morally wrong is a value judgment: it depends on beliefs
that cannot be proved true or false. I thus reject moral realism, at least in its strong sense as the doctrine that there are universal moral laws
of what anyone believes.

ontologically akin to scientific laws. I am a kind of moral relativist. But my metaethical views are not essential to pragmatic moral skepticism, the doctrine that moral theory is
useless, although they help to explain why it is useless. The doctrine is supported by bodies of thought as various as the psychology of action, the character of academic
professions in general and of the profession of academic philosophy in particular, and the undesirability of moral uniformity; and above all by the fact that the casuistic and
deliberative techniques that moral theorists deploy are too feeble, both epistemologically and rhetorically, to shake moral intuitions. The analogy (of a pregnant woman forced
to carry her fetus to term to a person forcibly attached by tubes to a famous violinist for nine months in order to save the violinist from dying of kidney disease) with which
Judith Jarvis Thomson defends a right of abortion, and at the other end of the spectrum of abstraction the elaborate contractarian and natural-law arguments that John Rawls,
Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, and others make on behalf of their preferred resolutions of issues in applied

ethics, are convincing only to readers

predisposed to agree with the philosophers' conclusions. The class of innovators whom I call "moral entrepreneurs" do have the
power to change our moral intuitions. But moral entrepreneurs are not the same as academic moralists, such as Thomson and the others I have named. Moral
entrepreneurs persuade, but not with rational arguments. Academic moralists use rational arguments; but in part because of the sheer feebleness of such arguments, they do
not persuade. Chapter 2 carries the discussion explicitly into the realm of law. I examine issues in jurisprudence, constitutional law, and (to a limited extent) common law and
statutory law. I try to show with reference both to individual theoristsDworkin again, JurgenHabermas, and othersand to particular cases that moral theory, and such

are useless in the resolution of concrete legal issues

cousins of it as jurisprudence and constitutional theory,

. This is true even when
those issues concern such morally charged subjects as abortion, affirmative action, racial and sexual discrimination, and homosexual rights. Consider the constitutionality of laws
forbidding physician-assisted suicide, the issue that impelled a group of distinguished moral philosophers led by Dworkin to submit an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court
that the Court ignored in its decisions upholding those laws. Judges are properly wary about using moral or constitutional theory to decide cases. At the same time, as I illustrate
with the Supreme Court's decisions invalidating sex segregation in military academies and a state constitutional provision forbidding local governments to prohibit discrimination
against homosexuals, judges are insensitive to the limitations of their own knowledge of the social realities out of which cases arise. They are right to distrust theory that
academics press upon them, but they have as yet nothing to put in its placeunless it is an attitude of caution. That is the right attitude in the circumstances. Until judges
acquire a better knowledge base, the limitations of moral and constitutional theory provide a compelling argument for judicial self-restraint, although to accept it would be to
renounce the dream of many constitutional theorists that the Supreme Court might make over American society in the name of the Constitution but in the reality of radical

scholars would be more

helpful to the courts and to society as a whole if they examined constitutional cases and doctrines in relation not to what passes as theory in
jurisprudential circles but rather to the social context of constitutional issues, their causes, their costs, and their consequences. This is a neglected
egalitarianism, Catholic natural law, laissez-Faire economics, or reactionary populism, depending on the theorist. Constitutional

perspective, which I illustrate in Chapter 2 by reference to the "real world" effects of constitutional criminal procedure.

Moral tunnel vision is complicit with evil

Isaac 2 Professor of Political Science, Indiana (Jeffrey, Ends, Means and Politics, Dissent 49.2, p 35-6,
ebsco, AG)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political
responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the

purity of one's

intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with
morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean

in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of
complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much
about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of
action, that ismostsignificant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that
generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be
sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized
conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that
powerlessness; it is often a form of

ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

Ignore value to life claimsdeciding other peoples lives are not worth living enslaves the
world and denies pluralistic conceptions of lifes value
Szacki 96 Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Warsaw (Jerzy, Liberalism After Communism, p 197, AG)
Liberalism does not say which of these different moralities is better than others. It is neutral on this question and regards its neutrality as a virtue. Liberalism as a political
doctrine assumes that - as Joseph Raz wrote -'there are many worthwhile and valuable relationships, commitments and plans of life which are mutually incompatible'.56 It

society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive

religious, philosophical and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines'.57 What is more,
recognizes that - as John Rawls put it - 'a modern democratic

for a liberal this is not only a fact to take note of: he or she is ready to acknowledge that 'now this variety of conceptions of the good is itself a good thing, that is, it is rational for

the task of politics cannot and should not be to

resolve the dispute among different conceptions of life. This is completely unattainable or is attainable only by
a totalitarian enslavement of society in the name ofsome one conception. This being the case, according to Dworkin,
members of a well-ordered society to want their plans to be different'.58 Thus,

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political decisions must be as far as possible independent of conceptions of the good life, or what gives value to
life. Since citizens of a society differ in these conceptions, the government does not treat them as
equals if it prefers one conception to another.'59
'

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Extinction Outweighs
Extinction is ethically bankruptvalues are relational and cannot exist without the human
valuer.
Fox 1987
Michael Phil Prof @ Queens U, Canada nuclear weapons and the ultimate environmental crisis,
Environmental Ethics, p. 175-178
Finally, deep ecologists, like Bill Devall and George Sessions, Arne Naess, and Paul Taylor, argue for a radical shift from homocentric or anthropocentric locus of valuation and ethical thinking to a

are firmly committed to the position that nonhuman life forms have independent,
intrinsic, or inherent value, that they possess value in and of themselves and without reference to
human experiences, interests, or needs. It is claimed further by them that a revolution in value theory
(axiology) is necessary to recognize this fact, and that humans must cultivate attitudes similar to those of native peoples in order to live in harmony with nature and to
enable themselves to carry out their obligation to preserve and nurture other life forms for their own sake. If nonhuman life forms, as species or as individuals,
possess intrinsic value, it follows that annihilating or decimating them is morally abhorrent . In short, the extinction
biocentric or ecocentric one. That is, they

or massive slaughter of Homo sapiens is not the gravest tragedy that the Earth could suffer. By assigning intrinsic value to other species, deep ecologists assert that other things have a right to continue existing
even if we insist on obliterating ourselves in whole or in part. IV. Anthropocentric conclusions It is thought by some that a nonanthropocentric position, such as those just sketched, is needed in order to give

Nuclear war is, or course, only one way in which the biosphere may be
permanently damaged or destroyed by humans impact upon it. The greenhouse effect, pollution, and
global deforestation are others one might mention. Nuclear war, however, is or may be unique depending on whether it is thought o have potentially
purchase to concern over the wanton destruction of the Earth.

omnicidal consequences. Some would maintain that we put a theory of environmental ethics to the supreme test and find it promising only if we can posit the view that in the absence of humans the biosphere
would continue to possess value. As Norton points out, this position is often couched in termss of hypothetical "last people arguments," i.e. arguments that pose the question whether the last people on Earth
should care about its fate after they are gone. The dangers and uncertainties of nuclear war do cast us in the uncomfortable role of hypothetical last people on Earth, and so we may well want to raise this
question. There are really two questions. (1) Would nuclear devastation that falls short of biocide matter to those humans (if any) who survived nuclear war? (2) Should the prospect of widespread environmental
destruction (biocidal or otherwise) matter to us now if omnicide also occurred and left behind no humans to experience the consequences? The answer to question (1) is obvious, since the surviving humans
would experience a variety of negative effects on their lives even from limited environmental damage and long-term nuclear pollution of the biosphere. This can be understood in purely instrumental terms. The
second question is not so easy to answer from the standpoint of the weak anthropocentrist who does not posit the intrinsic value of natural objects and processes. Here it is tempting to say that once human
being are annihilated, nothing else matters. This is not because nothing else in nature can present occasion for value judgment to take place, but rather because once the only class of being to which anything can
matter, or which alone can be said plausibly to have an axiological point of view on the world is removed from the scene no value judgments can take place and all talk of them is rendered pointless. In my view,

value is neither subjective and ineffable nor objective and independent of consciousnesses that are
capable of forming value judgments in response to certain features of experience. Value , rather, is a
relational concept that has both subjective and objective elements . According to the relational theory, interactions with things of
the world presents occasions for value judgments and values can be thought of as existing but only in the episodic state of reciprocity between objects and valuing beings.
Such a standpoint allows for the fact that certain features of the world tend to elicit fairly uniform axiological responses from us. Yet it does not require that we attribute the

The paradox at the heart of this account, of course,

is that if we ask, "Where do values reside?" the answer must be, "Nowhere. Neither in the world nor in
the mind, but somewhere in between and in the interaction connecting them," for what else can it
mean for a value to be a relational entity other than that it is something that connects X and Y., yet is
neither X nor Y? None of this entails that animals, plants, and ecosystems do not matter or have no
value, but it does entail that they have no value apart from interaction with valuing beings who have ex
hypothesi, subtracted themselves form the picture. One can always assert the counterfactual claim that
in the post-nuclear war period, nature would have value if valuing beings encountered it and had the
appropriate sorts of experiences and thoughts; however. this assertion requires an act of imagination
on the part of valuers who now exist and can contemplate possible futures, and is therefore a purely
fanciful thought experiment that is of no real consequence. One could just as well speculate, in any event, that if beings capable of
values we posit entirely to the things themselves or to any of the qualities they possess.

value judgments ever visited our planet after a nuclear holocaust, they would find it valueless whimpering
wasteland, in whole and in part. What are the implications of all this value talk for the second question above? It might appear that anthropocentrism in environmental ethics, if
built upon a relational theory of value of the kind I have outlined, is unable to sustain any concern for nature and the impact of human action upon the biosphere other than that
which affects human interests. Certainly there is a predisposition on the part of a to argue that unless we ascribe intrinsic value to nature and to various nonhuman beings, we

Weak
anthropocentrism can serve as a foundation for moral concern over the fate of the biosphere in two
ways. First, there is an objective side to the value relation which deserves our respect and cultivation
since it is inseparable from the valued experiences that make life worthwhile. Second , as Norton indicates,
the recognition of our evolutionary continuity with other generate values (e.g., symbolic and cultural values) all
foster a concern for the biosphere that is anthropocentric, yet one that is neither narrowly exploitative
nor dependent on the dubious attribution of intrinsic value of the nonhuman world. If the environment can
cannot explain ' why it would be wrong to despoil the environment through nuclear war or other means. But this approach is mistaken.

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be seen in these ways as generative, inspirational, and rejuvenating, then there should be no lingering difficulty over the answer to
the second question. It is, simply put, the intimacy we have with nature, as sensitive and dependent organisms

that supports and sustains our concern for the fate of the Earth . It follows that nuclear war can be
condemned in the strongest terms, and from an anthropocentric perspective, whether it results in
omnicide, biocide, the decimation of human and/or nonhuman species and environment, or some
combination of these. Furthermore, in addition to its consequences in human terms nuclear war must be
regarded as morally worse in terms of its consequences for the nonhuman environment .

Future extinction destroys the meaning of past and present lifewe depend on a future to
find meaning in our activities
Robin Attfield, Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, 1999
[The Ethics of the Global Environment p. 65-67]
But James manages to show that there is more to the relation between shared activities and a fully meaningful life. (He has in mind activities like contributing to art or to an ongoing subject of study.) Shared
activities are valuable for human beings because we are social beings. Shared activities, more than purely private activities, enable one to be continuously and happily engaged, and provide one with an immediate

, shared activities
enhance the meaning of one's activity by putting it within a broader group activity, which itself
becomes a valued end .13
and continuing sense of the value of one's activity. The activity of others agrees with and confirms one's own activity, providing an antidote to flagging interest. Moreover

While these are mainly empirical, psychological claims, they also go a long way towards showing that, normally and typically, shared activities occupy a central place in a meaningful life. Perhaps there are also
conceptual ties between the capacity for these activities and a worthwhile human life; I have argued this elsewhere ,'4 but my argument there concerned the intrinsic value of the exercise of each of a whole range
of capacities, without turning on the shared or communal nature of the activities in question.

James' argument turns to activities stretching out continuously into the future. Such activities
(for example, science, philosophy and the arts) can also be shared activities, at least in the sense
that they are 'engaged in with the hope and anticipation that future generations will continue
them or participate in them'. 15 It could be added here that people who engage in such activities often regard their activity as defined (in part) by the contributions of past
generations, and see themselves as continuing a tradition. Such sequential collaboration increases the meaning and value of the activity just as concurrent participation does. This is again a perceptive psychological observation on James' part.
The argument continues as follows:
Sequential shared activity bestows meaning and value on the agent's life here and now whenever these activities are engaged in with the hope and anticipation that future generations will continue and
participate in them. Without this hope and anticipation, intergenerational activities would lose some or all of their point. 16
But interruption diminishes the value of activities pursued for the sake of the ends produced; and we might reasonably add that it also diminishes the value of activities performed for their own sake where the
context which makes them worth pursuing for their own sake includes the prospect of continuing, intergenerational participation. '[H]ope and anticipation of a future is a fundamental context or horizon for

Sothe prospect of human extinction deprives these intergenerational activities of some of their meaning, and makes them comparatively valueless. Or so the conclusion would run. James takes this
valuable and meaningful human activity.'17

conclusion to apply both to activities like the construction of durable and lasting public goods such as buildings and bridges, of which the ends would be interrupted and nullified, and to activities like science,
philosophy and the arts, of which the current intrinsic value might be held to turn, in part, on their character as involving the prospect of future participation. 'As Schell suggests . . ., only extinction can annihilate
the prospect of future value. 18
This is how James relates his argument to nuclear omnicide and its implications:

A nuclear holocaust does not merely promise to cause unimagined suffering and the death of
those who are killed. Such an event would not only end our lives and prevent future generations
from coming into existence; it would also render intergenerational activities and activities
shared with contemporaries incomplete and futile - interrupting the career of humanity in
midcourse and annihilating the value and meaning which otherwise would have existed.19
And writing a decade earlier, Edwin Delattre went even further:
To the extent that men are purposive ....the destruction of the future is suicidal by virtue of its
radical alteration of the significance and possibilities of the present. The meaning of the present
depends on the vision of the future as well as the remembrance of the past. This is so in part because all projects require
the future, and to foreclose projects is effectively to reduce the present to emptiness. 20
Yet while all this shows that certain current activities would lose one of their central sources of value if life on. Earth were shortly going to be obliterated, it does not show that life here and now would lose its
meaning altogether. Even if we grant that participation in shared activities is a necessary condition of a fully meaningful life, the prospect of the curtailment of shared intergenerational activities would not spell
the abandonment of shared activities in general. Would you, in these circumstances, give up (for example) conversation? Philosophy, science and the arts could, I suggest, also continue (in principle, right up to the
last moment). So could sports like football; and it would be morally imperative that some shared activities should not be abandoned, such as the nursing of the dying. Given what was granted above about the
value of shared activities, these shared activities could well continue to be sources of value, muted by gloomy anticipations, and beset, no doubt, by the reservations of some participants about whether these
activities were really worth pursuing in the circumstances.
For there could be replies to such reservations. Reactions to news of the prospect of an early death can range from making peace with family and friends (hardly signifying loss of all sense of value) to refusing to
be interrupted in (say) playing the piano, in completing a game of chess, or in sitting in the shade in one's garden. In part, the implication is that some activities, such as playing music or chess, are intrinsically
worthwhile; and this would be one way to reply to the sceptical reservations just mentioned. Indeed this implication would supply sufficient reason to persevere with many current activities (some of them shared
ones). While these activities could well be less pleasant than usual (pleasure usually depending on unimpeded circumstances),.they would not for that reason have become meaningless.

a considerable source of
belief in the worthwhileness of current activities is the prospect of continuing, intergenerational
participation. This is well brought out when James considers the objection that not all value can
depend on hope for the future, as some people are prepared to die for the sake of honour, and
such self-sacrificial activity is profoundly meaningful. But, as James replies, the death of an
individual is not comparable with the extinction of humanity. 'Self-sacrifice is a shared social
Thus future generations may not play quite the place in our values maintained by James. However, his argument does not show nothing. It shows that

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activity .... The hero, the duelist and the martyr hope to be remembered as those who chose
death before dishonor. Fully meaningful self-sacrificial activity is possible only where there is
hope of a human future. 21 And what applies to self-sacrifice holds of a wide range of much
more mundane behaviour.

We have a moral obligation to prevent extinction

Robin Attfield, Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, 1999
[The Ethics of the Global Environment p. 71-73]
Philosophers who raise the question of why the interests of future people matter, and thus
comprise a reason for conserving either resources or natural systems, usually write as if this
questioning is consistent with recognition of current interests and values. But this view
confronts the problem of reconciling disregard for the interests of one period and of recognising
exactly similar ones of another period, apparently a clear case of unjustifiable discrimination.
One writer who has honestly faced up to the implications of writing off the future is Thomas H.
Thompson, who recognises that the questions of 'Why care about future generations?' and
'Why be moral?' are in practice the same question. 28 According to Thompson, these questions
were capable of affirmative answers for devotees of religious belief, and to some extent for
those influenced by Enlightenment substitutes for such belief, such as belief in progress, but for
contemporary secular people no reason is left for the preservation of humanity, whether
'forever' or at all. 29
Ernest Partridge's response to Thompson's case is profound, albeit incomplete. People, he
argues, have a psychological need to transcend their petty interests, and to identify with larger
ideals, movements or causes; and caring for posterity is a central case of such selftranscendence. Self-transcendence typically involves love, and, as John Passmore has suggested,
to love is to care about the future of what we love, and for its sake rather than for our
own.Partridge bears out these claims by imagining that astronomers establish that events on
the sun will extinguish all life and human culture from the face of the earth in two hundred
years' time; such awareness would profoundly and enormously affect people now, because we
need the future to lead fulfilled lives in the present .30This thought-experiment probably gains
in forcefulness through not distinguishing between concern in the present for future
generations of humanity and concern for those of other species; but there is no need to
consider them separately here, as both are crucial to the value-theory of this book. The possible
strategy (which technology might conceivably permit) of transporting both human culture and
some of the species with which humans interact to another planet is not mentioned by
Partridge; but its predictable appeal in the circumstances which he depicts further bears out his
point about the importance of the future for present people.
Responses like Partridge's help to show how people are often motivated to care for individuals
and groups beyond their own interests; and the issue of actual motivations has to be tackled in
response to positions like Thompson's. -But so does the issue of what we have reason to do,
whether or not we are actually motivated; for the value of life and of quality of life (as opposed
to their perceived value) cannot fluctuate with whether given agents care about it or not. And if
life of a positive quality gives those agents who can promote or preserve it reasons to care, as
morality presupposes, then this applies in principle to caring about future lives just as much as
to present ones. Our intuitions about the appalling nature of allowing or actually causing human
extinction point in the same direction. The ethic put forward in this book (see Chapters 2 and 3

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above) recognises all this and turns out to supply reasons for caring, and not only guidance
about policies and conduct.
If so, then anyone who accepts this value-theory and ethic, whether his or her outlook is secular
or religious, implicitly recognises a multitude of reasons to care. Religious beliefs such as those
discussed in Chapter 3 will sometimes accompany (and may underpin) this recognition; but
belief in stewardship, as argued there, can adopt a secular form, not dependent on belief in
perpetual progress, and equally capable of fostering this same recognition. Partridge's argument
adds that self-transcendence, in which such caring is central, is also beneficial for the
psychological health of those who care, averting the narcissistic self-preoccupation and
alienation which is so prevalent in current society. Indeed he
holds, reasonably enough, that people lacking self-transcendence should be pitied.3'

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