Professional Documents
Culture Documents
water" hard to relish. Indeed, what we learn from these writers' portrayals of
rarely possesses adequate physical or meta- physical means to achieve his ends . Amidst
Conrad's raging sea storms, in the darkness and sterility of Cooper's Antarctic winter, and before the fury of Melville's
great whale, we can assess the range of human ability, indeed of rational inquiry itself and mark
Yet still we push on . We talk about " the ocean as a new
frontier of opportunity " and the cor- responding need for a national marine effort!' to further
exploration and promote overseas markets. We realize that we have ravished our land
frontiers , but we continue to be enraptured by the idea of growth in our attitudes
toward the sea. We pay lip service to the need to maintain our marine environment, but our thirst for
individual power propels us onward toward uncontrolled proliferation . The
their furthest limits.
failure, our failure, to negotiate multilaterally acceptable laws of the sea has its roots in the thirst for power among those
offer us much if we employ their wealth wisely. But too often we do not. And the problem as it is and
collective vision of
empire . We want to control the world "out there." We want to make it part of
ourselves, subject to our command . There is even an element of play involved here. For while we
want and need to control our environment to keep it from hurting us, we take plea- sure from
as it has been throughout our history is
making it jump through our hoops. Indeed, whether for pleasure or for profit, we continue to reveal
through our actions toward the sea the clean,
Today, we
routinely hear reports of ocean pollution and depleted fisher- ies, exposes
on dying coral reefs and endangered whales, and triumphant tales about preservation in the
National Marine Sanctuaries and the Hawaii Ocean Preserve. These stories should have a familiar
ring; they echo a century of ef- forts to conserve and preserve the American
landscape. The plight of today's ocean, however, has been long in the making. When the ocean became
an im- portant geography in the American mind at the beginning of the twentieth century, so
too began a process of utilization, degradation, and pollution, the consequences
of which we are only beginning to realize. The central thesis of this book is that the ocean in the
twentieth-century American imagination took on many of the characteristics that
were typically associated with fron- tier territories: a trove of inexhaustible
resources, an area to be conserved for industrial capitalism, a fragile ecosystem
requiring stewardship and protection from "civilizing" forces, a geography for sport, a
space for recreation. and a sea- scape of inspiration. The frontier meanings
enjoyed wide circulation in the social imagination of the terrestrial frontier since the
beginning of the nine teenth century." Ocean explorers, like many Americans, enacted similar
attitudes in their interactions with the marine frontier of the twentieth century.
With a rapacity that would have stunned Lord Byron, one frontier replace: another, and the fate
of both seem equally assured.
p. 60-61)
This ideology of savage war has become an essential trope of our mythologization of history, a
cliche of political discourse especially in wartime. In the 1890s imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt rationalized
draconian military measures against the Filipinos by comparing them to Apaches. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his multivolume
history of naval operations in the Second World War, recounts the posting of this slogan at fleet headquarters in the
South Pacific: "KILL JAPS, KILL JAPS, KILL MORE JAPS!" Suspecting that peacetime readers may find the sentiment unacceptably
extreme, Morison offers
the following rationale; This may shock you, reader; but it is exactly how we felt. We were
fighting no civilized, knightly war . . . We were back to primitive days of fighting Indians on the
American frontier; no holds barred and no quarter. The Japs wanted it that way, thought they could thus
terrify an "effete democracy"; and that is what they got, with the additional horrors of war that modem
science can produce.17 It is possible that the last sentence is an oblique reference to the use of the
atomic bomb at the war's end. But aside from that, Morison seems actually to overstate the extraordinary character of the
counterviolence against the Japanese (we did, after all, grant quarter) in order to rationalize the strength of his sentiments. Note too the
dramatization of the conflict as a vindication of our cultural masculinity against the accusations of
"effeteness." The trope of savage war thus enriches the symbolic meaning of specific acts of war,
transforming them into episodes of character building, moral vindication, and regeneration. At
the same time it provides advance justification for a pressing of the war to the extreme point of
extermination, "war without quarter": and it puts the moral responsibility for that outcome on the
enemy, which is to say, on its predicted victims. As we analyze the structure and meaning of this mythology of violence,
it is important that we keep in mind the distinction between the myth and the real-world situations and practices to which it refers.
Mythology reproduces the world with its significances heightened beyond normal measure, so
that the smallest actions are heavy with cosmic significances, and every conflict appears to press
toward ultimate fatalities and final solutions. The American mythology of violence continually
invokes the prospect of genocidal warfare and apocalyptic, world-destroying massacres; and there
is enough violence in the history of the Indian wars, the slave trade, the labor/management strife of
industrialization, the crimes and riots of our chaotic urbanization, and our wars against nationalist and Communist
insurgencies in Asia and Latin America to justify many critics in the belief that America is an
exceptionally violent society.
nuanced understanding
U.S. history . This would advance, as noted in La Pietra Report, an understanding about the
complexity and the contexts of relations and interactions, including the ways in which they are infused with
a variety of forms of power that define and result from the interconnections of distinct but related histories (OAH
of the
2000, 1). Taking the U.S. nation as only one example of social analysis involves recognizing the meanings and conditions
out of which nations are formed. There is no one experience of belonging to a nation, no single
substantial
reframing of the basic narrative of U.S. history (OAH 2000, 2). Toward a More Global
Sense of the Nation Knowing how history is a site of political struggle, how
singular, fixed, and static history celebrates the U.S. nation and its place in the world as that common
base of factual information about the American historical and contemporary experience (27) argues for in the Fordham
report. Our world history courses are central to defining, understanding, and knowing not only other nations but also the
position of each nation in relation to the United States. The centrality that the west holds (notably the United
specific representations
of the west that normalize the imperial practices that established this nation. The
role that the United States holds on the world stage frequently remains unquestioned in social
classrooms . Certainly, we engage with various images and tropes to continue to advance how the
colonialist past continues to remain present in our historical sensibilities. Moreover, the increasing number and choices of
archival sources function as a complement to further understanding the nation. If students are left to rely on the variety of
historical resources rather than question the use of such resources, then the most likely outcome of their learning will be
the reflection on the past with nostalgia that continues to celebrate myths and colonial sensibility. To evaluate the history
narrative now is to reconsider what it means and to develop a historical consciousness in our students that goes beyond
archival and nostalgic impulses associated with the formation of the nation and U.S. nation building. We need to insist
that the nation, and the past that has contributed to its present day understanding, is simultaneously material and
symbolic. The nation as advanced in our histories cannot be taken as the foundational grounds . The
studies
means by which the nation is fashioned calls for examining the history through which nations are made and unmade. To
admit the participatory nature of knowledge and to invite an active and critical engagement with the world so that
students can come to question the authority of historical texts will, I hope, result in students realizing that the
classroom is not solely a place to learn about the nation and being a national, but rather a place to develop a
move toward understanding why history and nation still needs a place in social studies education. In understanding how
the historicity of nation serves as the ideological alibi of the territorial state (Appadurai 1996, 159) offers us a starting
point. The challenge facing social studies educators is how we can succeed in questioning nation, not by displacing it from
center stage but by considering how it is central. That means understanding how powerfully engrained the history of a
nation is within education and how a significant amount of learning is centered around the nation and its history. History
is a forum for assessing and understanding the study of change over time, which shapes the possibilities of knowledge
itself. We need to reconsider the mechanisms used in our own teaching, which need to be more than considering history as
a nostalgic reminiscence of the time when the nation was formed. We need to be questioning the contexts for learning that
can no longer be normalized through historys constituted purpose. The changing political and social contexts of public
history have brought new opportunities for educators to work through the tensions facing social studies education and its
Links
Frontier Specific
Arctic
The arctic is viewed as savage land that is uninhabitable to the normal
person scholars have created the unknown as fantastical
McGhee 2005, PhD, archaeologist and author specializing in the archaeology of the Arctic
(Robert, The Last Imaginary Place A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University
Press, Print.)
The treeless tundra and steppe environments that invaded earths mid-latitudes during the last ice age
supported vast herds of grazing animals. These were ideal conditions for hunters who
had developed the weapons and skills to undertake cooperative hunts for caribou, horses, wild
oxen and other animals as large as mammoths.The major leap from slowly developing archaic forms to
modern humans, with their rapidly evolving cultures and technologies, occurred at a
time when ice-age environmental conditions prevailed in most temperate regions of the world. It has been
argued that the challenges imposed by these Arctic-like conditions were an important stimulus to the developing ingenuity
of modern humans. A century ago, when this theory first appeared, it
The usual assumption has been that humans developed the skills
enabling them to live under such conditions only after the Ice Age had ended. Recently, however,
Russian archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko reported the discovery of a small collection of tools associated with radiocarbon
dates of between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago, on the Yana River near the coast of Siberia at a latitude of greater than 70
north. At about the same time, and at a slightly lower latitude, early hunters may have been crossing the land bridge that
joined Siberia to Alaska during the Ice Age, to become the early ancestors of native American peoples. When the Ice Age
ended, about 11,000 years ago, it was as though a giant climatic switch had been thrown.We used to think that major
changes in the earths climate happen gradually, over centuries or millennia, but we now suspect that they can and do
occur in periods of a decade or less, and perhaps at times as abruptly as in a single year or a single season. For hunters in
the river valleys of Europe, on Asiatic plains or across North America, an exceptionally hot summer or a warm winter
followed by a prolonged change in the climate could mean that animal herds were not where they had always been before;
that rivers once easily forded had become impassable torrents of meltwater; or that ice failed to form on lakes where it had
always provided a platform for winter fishing and travel. A hunting peoples life depends on an intricate knowledge of the
animals they hunt and the environment in which they live, and climatic change would mean that their knowledge,
accumulated over dozens or hundreds of generations, was suddenly obsolete. Those families and bands that survived the
first few years of the postglacial found themselves in a new world of constant change. While the climate is capable of
altering virtually overnight, its effects on other elements of the environment proceed at a slower pace.The melting of
continental glaciers took a few millennia to complete, and during that time forests and grasslands moved northwards to
replace glacier-edge tundra as the biological zones of the northern hemisphere became established in something like their
current form.The mid-latitude tundras that were home to Ice Age hunters expanded northwards while their southern
boundaries were invaded by shrubby conifers, the pioneers of dense boreal forests that would themselves be replaced by
deciduous forests, parklands, grasslands and deserts. Melting glaciers drained southwards to form huge icy lakes, or into
mid-latitude inlets of the sea where walrus and whales swam among calving icebergs. As the earths crust rose from
beneath its burden of glacial ice these lakes and inlets drained, at times with terrifying suddenness as new channels
opened. By about 8,000 years ago the earth had been transformed into a semblance of its present state. Climates in most
regions were significantly warmer than at present, and most human groups had lost all contact with the icy world that had
been known to their ancestors, the world of snow, sea ice, walrus, reindeer, and the cold that sucked the life from humans
unprotected by fire, shelter and heavy clothing. The hunting way of life became increasingly demanding for most peoples
of the new postglacial age. Although the temperate and subtropical forests that advanced into their old homelands were
biologically rich, the great variety of animals they supported were dispersed across small and specialized niches. Making a
living from hunting such animals was a far more difficult enterprise than following the great herds of reindeer, muskoxen,
horses and elephants that had roamed the tundra and northern grasslands of the Ice Age. Some bands of hunters,
fortunate in their local circumstances or prepared to fight to maintain their ancestral livelihood, moved northwards with
the animals and the open treeless environments on which they depended. For these groups the past 10,000 years saw a
constant succession of adjustments, inventions, strife with changing neighbours, and adaptations to new home territories
as they evolved into the hunting and herding peoples of the Arctic world. Most human groups followed a different course.
Bands became dispersed across the changing environments, each concentrating on the particular resources of their new
and limited homelands. Certain bands began to think of themselves as river fishers, others as coastal shellfish collectors,
still others as forest hunters who snared deer and smaller game. The new environments also provided an array of food
resources that had been practically unknown to northern hunters: seeds, nuts and roots often became the staple of their
survival.Within a few millennia of the Ice Age, peoples living in southeastern Asian forests, the river valleys of western
Asia and the highland plateaus of Mexico had established a livelihood on the seeds of wild plants. Particularly useful forms
of plants were discovered and protected, and their favoured forms encouraged or replanted. This activity began the
process of genetic modification that resulted in ancestral varieties of rice, barley, wheat and maize. Other regions saw
practical experiments with tropical root-cropsyams, taro, maniocand elsewhere with legumes, squashes and fruits. By
about 8,000 years ago, while the last remnants of the continental ice sheets were still melting in northern Canada and
Scandinavia, people from Japan to Mesopotamia to Central America were living in small agricultural villages. This was the
first step in what seems to have been an inevitable chain of events leading to the establishment of ancient civilizations.
Many observers have characterized these developments as exemplifying the human spirits triumphant progress. However,
the development of civilization might more convincingly be described as a treadmill on which human groups found
themselves toiling whenever they occupied an environment that was rich enough to support a large population. At first,
plant foods provided a stable and secure resource in return for relatively little labour, and the new farming way of life
offered an easier existence without the constant travel and the discomforts of temporary camps that had been a part of
their ancestors lives for so long. More children survived in farming villages, but as populations began to grow rapidly it
became apparent that people would have to work harder than ever to avoid starvation. There were two ways to cope with
the problem: they could devote themselves to more intensive farming, which involved an ever-increasing burden of labour,
drudgery and stress on the local environment, or they could opt for the path of warfare, mounting attacks on neighbouring
groups to gain access to their land, their stored food or the labour that they could provide as slaves or tribute- paying
subjects. Most agricultural peoples followed some combination of these alternatives, with the result that by about 5,000
years ago the stage was set for the revolving cycle of empire- building, conquest and destruction that has affected most
humans living between the tropics and the temperate zones to the present day. Only during
Exploration
The deep sea is the next frontier of exploitation, as resource scarcity
increases from human depletion we turn to the ocean for a space to
settle, develop and exploit.
Barbier, 13
(Edward Barbier, John S Bugas Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Finance,
University of Wyoming, March 5, 2013, The Deep Sea is in Deep Trouble, Accessed: 6/26/14,
NC)
In my book, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource
Exploitation, I chronicle how, since the Agricultural Transition 10,000 years ago, a critical
driving force behind global economic development has been the discovery and
exploitation of new frontiers of natural resources. Natural resource scarcity
both drives this process as costs rise with scarcity we develop the
technologies to exploit new resource frontiers and it is a consequence
once frontiers are settled, developed and exploited, scarcity ensues
again.
Today, we are embarking on rapid exploitation of a vast new frontier,
the Deep Sea of the worlds oceans.
The Deep Sea begins at around 200 meters (m) depth, which is the limit at which sufficient
sunlight penetrates the sea for photosynthesis to occur, and extends to nearly 11,000 m. The
area comprising the Deep Sea is vast, covering around 90% of the ocean floor.
This region consists of many diverse and interconnecting ecosystems, including
abyssal plains, continental slopes, deep-sea canyons, manganese nodule fields,
seamounts, cold water coral reefs and gardens, cold seeps and hydrothermal
vents. The structure, functioning and dynamics of Deep Sea ecosystems are complex and shaped
by many factors, including the depth of the water column above them. In addition, it is still
poorly understood how these Deep Sea ecosystems interact with the rest of the
ocean on which humankind depends for food, climate and ocean regulation,
recreation and other ecosystem goods and services.
The Deep Sea is also rich in terms of natural resources, principally sources of
seafood, fossil fuels and minerals. As a result, the world is already embarking on the
industrialization of the Deep Sea. Trawling in this region has been increasing for decades,
pollution is already reaching the ocean depths and climate change is acidifying
the seas at global scale. Oil and gas exploration and extraction have started on
the shallower fringes of the Deep Sea, and the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has
pre-approved leases to mine the ocean floor. As Deep Sea ecosystems are extremely vulnerable to
these activities, the global community needs to develop strategies for ecosystem conservation,
restoration and overall management of the diverse habitats that constitute the deep-sea
environment.
beginning , when all of America was a frontier , the business of Americans was
business. And the metaphor of exploration on land and at sea was a utilitarian , an
expedient , and ultimately a martial one. Captain Smith who took his cue from John Hakluyt and
From the
from Adam
Moleyns before him (who told his fellows to cherish marchaundyes, keep th admiratee,/That we be
maysteres of the narrow see.5) wrote his A True Relation (1608) with alternating heroic and pastoral pens. But as
John Seelye has noted, in advocating exploration of Virginias inland waterways, Captain smith put both instruments in
the service of empire and self.6 And the
Puritan
sexual
metaphors and penetration and possession with the green and golden light of the
mystic dindem of the Lake of iroquoise.8 In short, in the journals and histories of our earliest writers, both in
Virginia and in New England, our waterways became thresholds of advance and the writing about
these waters is, as Seelye suggests, less apologia than acpocalypsis or even epcohalypsis and reflects the counterplay of
American epic .9 Our earliest maritme writers regard the oceans and our inland waterways as
avenues where they can transact John Gilpins untranscacted destiny , to subdue
the continent to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Oceanto animate the many
hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward, and to shed blessings around the
world.10
The con- cept and name change, according to its directors, reflected "our
new emphasis on conserving significant parts of our ocean as marine protected
areas and as ocean wilderness." Similarly, Leon Panctta, chair of the Pew Oceans Commis- sion,
elaborated on this theme in a zooz Earth Day address that took a page from Aldo Leopold, whose midtwentieth~ccntury call for a new "land ethic" helped raise awareness for the need
for a more humane and ethical treatment of the land. "After all," Panetta exclaimed, "whether
we live along the coast or in the heartland, the stewardship of our lands-and
oceans----is our common national bond. This Earth Day, let us look beyond our parks, past the forests, and
out into the sea with admiration and a new ocean ethic."-' The goal of these
statements was to extend the predominantly terrestrial nature of America's
"wilderness ethic", to the oceans. This mental processthe territorialization of the ocean
seems innocent enough. It comes as little surprise that humans make reference to
the familiar to help understand the unknown , and that Americans specifically make
refer- ence to the western frontier wilderness to understand other frontiers like
the ocean or outer space. American ocean explorers have been doing just this for at least the last century, and they are
Nature Conservancy.
the subject of this book. Contemporary readers are probably most familiar with Jacques Cousteau, but other explor- ers
figured prominently as well. From the start of the twentieth century, Roy chapman Andrews, Robert Cushman Murphy,
William Beebe, Rachel Carson. Eugenie Clark, and Thor Heyerdahl have also imagined the look, feel, sound, smell, uses,
and abuses of an American ocean and reported back to us with slide shows, public talks, museum dioramas, worlds fair
exhibits, articles in newspapers and magazines, books, radio shows, movies, and television pro- grams. Even today,
we
understand an ocean that has been shaped by explorers who have used the
landed western frontier wilderness as their point of refer- ence. Although it is important to
know a little about this history, it is vital to recognize that the territorialization of the ocean
may not be as innocent as it at first appears. But before we get to the moral of the story, we should
con- sider the story itself-a narrative that begins at the start of the twentieth cen- tury, a time when many Americans were
developing a new relationship with the ocean. Some Americans
capricious force of nature or the will of God. Many American explorers took to the oceans during the nineteenth century, but for the most part, the thrust of American exploration was aimed elsewhere.
Fishing
Fishing and frontier methodology are intertwined the way we try to
capture fish creates same damage we did on the frontier in west
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print. Pg 28-29)
The gaming of ocean fauna represented a move to extend America's frontier into
new space, namely the oceans surrounding the continent. Like western game, ocean fauna
promised a test of strength. The president of the Salt water Anglers of America noted, "He of faint heart
should not take up the sport of big game fishing, for the taking of large and stubborn sea monsters
presents thrills and problems that call for good generalship and a hefty brand of
stick-to-it-iveness." Sea fishing provided a new place for the contest between
civilization and the savage frontier. Moise N. Kaplan, one of the several authorities of south Florida Sea
fishing, claimed that "the marine assaulter . . . is equipped with inherited instinct, with crafty
reasoning powers and appropriate perception. Gifted in making sudden and
violent approach--contact with the enemy--silently, un-observed, he is able to harass and fatigue
the defensive element while guarding and shielding himself ." There is no greater
evidence of this movement from western frontier to ocean, from hunting to deepsea fishing, and the life trajectory of the great western novelist Zane Grey, also the holder of the yellowtail world
record--one hundred eleven pounds on light tackle--for over ten years. In the first three decades of the twentieth century,
Grey became one of the foremost my-thologizers of the American western frontier. Grey's
scores of novels
and short stories were among the most widely read representations of the West .
He in-troduced the beauty of the western landscape of eastern urbanites; his
stories are full of struggles and battles between different human cultures. He focused
on "cattle culture imbued with individualism, rustling, and justified violence." And
he glorified the virtues of hunting game. The overall moral of his stories was to describe how
remnants of frontier culture remained extant in the twen- tieth century." In the 19105 Grey could be
found deep-sea fishing off Florida's coasts, and in 1924 he purchased a three-masted schooner, rechristened it the
Fisherman, outfitted the vessel with ocean fishing gear, and sailed to the fertile waters off southern California. The
chronicle of this expedition was published in his Tales of Fishing Virgin Seas (1925), a book that codified his status as
America's most prominent spokesperson for ocean game fishing-a title that would pass to Ernest Hemingway in the
19305. For Grey, the Pacific was a virgin land, a frontier of adventure, sport, and abundant resources. The
frontier
themes that characterize his western fiction can all be found in his experiences
with tuna, yellowtail, and swordfish. And Grey was just one of the many hunters and
fish- ers who had cut their teeth in the frontier West before exchanging horse for
ship, gun for rod, and elk for marlin." Grey made even a more formidable
contribution to Andrews's world of metropolitan-based natural history display. In 1928 the American Museum
opened the doors to its new hall, Fishes of the World, an exhibit that would, according to naturalist
Mlliam Gregory. "keep our visitor fascinated with the wonders of the fish world on the
trip around the hall." The climax of the entire exhibition was the collection of big
game fishes. The background display of the sailfish group portrayed the rocky islands of Cape San Lucas and
featured a battle between a nine-foot sailfish breaching the ocean's surface and a deep-sea angler in a nearby boat who
"pits his quick hand and unflinching will against the plunging weight of the maddened fish." The
entire north
wall of the exhi- bition displayed the mounted specimens of ocean sunfish , tunas.
marlins, and swordfishes-all the trophies of Mr. Zane Grey, the well-known "Nimrod of the Seas." Indeed, the worlds of
hunting and natural history--of mounted tro- phy and preserved specimen---converged in both field and museum."
Clearly, to call Andrews an ocean fisherman would be foolhardy. His game was the whale, and his weapons were the
Generic Ocean
The ocean is the new east; in the same ways that we have made one
half of the globe the other, our relation to the ocean has been to
develop, explore, poke, prod and exploit it.
Montroso, 14
(Alan Montroso, Embedded Librarian at Wyle Information Systems, Kent State MLIS, Cleveland
State BS, March 23, 2014, Ocean is the New East: Contemporary Representations of Sea Life and
Mandevilles Monstrous Ecosystems,
http://bacchanalinthelibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/ocean-is-new-east-contemporary.html,
Accessed: 6/25/14, NC)
Thus as
migrating popula- tion grew in size, and by the end of the century , the
American consciousness entered a new phase. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 analysis of the
closing of the frontier was a mere flash point of a wider anxiety that a postfrontier
Amer-ica was doomed to social and economic turmoil. Such sentiments spawned
two important changes. First, a new ethic of scientific conservation sought to use
the expertise of technocratic elites to manage the dwindling natural resources of a still
Research
Science exploration of the ocean creates a frontier anxiety that makes
research into exploitation this allows us to colonize the ocean
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print.)
The ocean was as flat as a millpond when Andrews, clad in field khakis and campaign hat,
manned a cannon that contained a hundred-pound explosive-tipped harpoo n that
was backed by three hundred drains of gunpowder. Despite carefully studying the hunting techniques of his Norwegian
fellows. The
first harpoon grazed off one unlucky specimen's head. After a few minutes
passed, during which several of the crew scurried to reload the cannon, Andrews sent the second harpoon
to the mammal's lungs. This particular whale was flensed and converted into oil and fertilizer before
Andrews could pose with his trophy. but he would have other opportunities to stand next to whales
while a camera captured the image of hunter and game. This is a peculiar place to begin a story
about a naturalist who is largely remembered for his leadership of the Central Asiatic
Expedition of the 1920s a large-scale expedition that failed in its goal to uncover evidence
of human origins in central Asia, yet succeeded in discovering a large cache of dinosaur fossils in the dry sands of the Gobi
Desert.' But Andrews cut his teeth as a museum naturalist with his cetacean studies in the cold waters of the North Pacific.
The story may also seem to be a strange place to begin this
eastern establishment
was equally captivated by the practice of exploration. Many of them toured the
U.S. West as a kind of rite of passage; others became the source of funding for grand explorations and
expeditions into unknown territories.' Part of the animus that energized the
hunter's ideology was a spirit of "frontier anxiety," at widely shared concern that the
"closing of the frontier" presented serious challenges to American culture and
economics." Hunters of the eastern establishment reacted in a number of ways. They sought to preserve an ostensibly pristine and undeveloped fragment of the frontier West
through the establishment of parks and preserves. They also attempted to use the tools of science
and technology to efficiently conserve the nation's remain- ing natural resources.' The goal of efficiency
became something of a business credo in turn-of-the-century America . In this capacity,
the scientific bureau- crat became an instrumental tool for managing both
industry at the core and resources at the periphery.' Finally, the eastern
establishment hunter, anxious over the closing of the frontier and all that it portended, became an
instrument of the spirit of American imperialism in his search for new
extracontinental frontiers to conquer. The icons of this hunter ideology were, of course, Theo- dore
Roosevelt, the members of the Boone and Crockett Club, or--as was the case for Andrews-members of the New York-based Explorers Club.
Resource Exploitation
Resource extraction relies on frontierist ignorance
Molvar 12 M.Sc Wildlife Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Erik, WILL
DRILLING SPELL THE END OF A QUINTESSENTIAL AEMERICAN LANDSCAPE, 2012, pg. 1,
http://energy-reality.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/25_Will-Drilling-Spell-theEnd_R1_030813.pdf, RSpec)
The natural resource perhaps most important to the character of the West, yet given least weight in land-use planning, is
the regions wide-open spaces. For many years, a
prevailing
myth that open spaces are inexhaustible , that because spectacular landscapes shaped by
nature have been abundant here since time immemorial they will never disappear . But as public lands
and private ranches have been converted to industrial landscapes by
drilling , in increments ranging from thousands to millions of acres, westerners have been confronted by the reality
that, while open space may be considered a birthright, it is not limitless .
More evidence
Gramling 96 Ph.D. Sociology (Robert, Oil on the Edge: Offshore Development, Conflict,
Gridlock, 1996, Google Books, pg. 39, RSpec)
As sever and irrevocable as this damage is, it can only be understood in light of the environment (both physical and social)
in which it occurred. Movement into the Louisiana marsh in the 1920s and 1930s happened at a time when not only was
the idea of environmental protection nonexistent (Freudenburg and Gramling 1993, 1994a) but the concept of the marsh
as a valuable resource was literally unavailable. Resources
valued
by human cultures at a particular place and time (Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling 1995). Only a
scant seven decades before this period, petroleum itself was not a resource because no one considered it to have
social or economic worth. The same was true of the marsh in the 1930s, a hostile environment, which was seen
with a conquest of the frontier mentality . This was an exuberant age with almost
unlimited faith in technology (Catton and Dunlap 1980), and, as such, the exploration
and development of oil and gas occurred in state waters as ane environmental ignorant, not
malevolent, activity.
Oceanography
Oceanography is founded upon frontierist notions of the ocean
Eidenbach 8 (Kirstin, CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AND THE LAWLESS FRONTIER, The
Crit, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pgs. 103-104, http://thecritui.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/kirstin.pdf,
RSpec)
Oceanography represents a frontier spanning all three Ages with borders that ebb and flow
depending upon the predominant paradigm. Initially, exploration of the ocean was limited to its use as a means to trade.
At the onset of the Second Age, the ocean itself became the object of exploration . Oceanic exploration began at
the behest of Thomas Jefferson. In 1807, Jefferson founded the United States Coast Survey.36 The initial
explorations focused on the collection of empirical scientific data . Following Jeffersons commission of
coastal exploration, other voices began to join in the chorus of discovery . In 1842, Darwin publishes
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, in which he suggests that coral atolls are the final stage in the subsidence
and erosion of volcanicislands.37 In 1843, Sir James Clark Ross takes the first modern sounding in the deep sea at
Latitude 27 S Longitude 17 W.38 This chorus continued until the Third Age shifted the focus to issues of relativity rather
than empiricism. Under the current paradigm, or Third Age, oceanography focuses on physical oceanography
which includes coastal oceanography, numerical modeling, ocean acoustics, ocean mixing,
fisheries oceanography, laboratory fluid dynamics, ocean instrumentation and operational
oceanography.39 In keeping with the Third Age, modern oceanography allows for fluidity and relativity within its
paradigm. Without going into specific scientific details, oceanic exploration fully exemplifies a frontier that has shifted
according to Goetzmanns Ages of Discovery
Oil Drilling
Oil drilling is the epitome of violent, masculine, frontierst logic
Ives 11 M.A. Candidate in Sustainable International Development, Visiting Fellow at the
Institute of the North in Sustainable Development and Education (Christopher, 2011, The Effects
of Segregated Development Ideologies on the
Achievement of Sustainable Development: An Alaskan Case Study, pgs. 46-47,
http://www.institutenorth.org/assets/images/uploads/articles/Ives.MAthesis.pdf, RSpec)
Alaskan development thus far has been an attempt to establish a self-sustaining American
exploit ation of finite local resources. Inevitably, pragmatically, this system is flawed as long as the
means of development rest on limited supplies . The irony lies in the fact that the immigrant
settlers have spent billions of dollars to convince themselves and the world that Alaska is unique and can sustain itself
on its own terms, by doing business just like everyone else. For thousands of years prior, the residents of Alaska had
indeed sustained themselves in a vast and unique land, having adapted and developed in accordance with the
particularities of the land around them. Alaska has exchanged the wilderness for urban sprawl and shopping
malls;
the frontier for open pit mines and oil development ; the Alaska Natives for
corporate suits and homelessness. Was this their purpose? How has modern
industry caused such a retrograde in equity and resiliency? How can one speak to and appreciate the distinct
quality of the Alaskan experience, yet develop away from its inimitable grace? Robert Weeden described it best:
Frontierism
was a dream , and because people must dream, we should speak without bitterness of
yesterdays fantasies whose flaws seem so clear in retrospect. With honest nostalgia we can say goodbye to the best of it, which was the search: a vigorously masculine , outrageously
romantic search . What destroyed the frontier was the discovery of
[oil] . Ironically, it was discovered not by frontiersmen but by corporation men. The Big Rock Candy Mountain was
plumbed, and it was full of oil, and the crude taste of money killed the dream.
Pacific
History of the Pacific is not neutral it has created the mentality of
the new western frontier
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print.)
They calm the spirit and soothe the soul. They speak
but a paradise untrammeled by the destructive feet of western homo sapiens . Above
all, these exhibits exuded a profound fragility. The peculiar evo-lutionary histories of oceanic and
island seabirds had produced some of na-ture's most fantastic organisms , but just as
certainly, they were organisms that would easily fall victim to the heedless onslaught
of human history. Visitors who had toured the hall when it was completed in 1953 had ex-perienced quite a
different image of the Pacific during the previous decade. World War II introduced a Pacific theater
to the American consciousness that was sometimes at odds with the literary and artistic
representations of the Pa-cific as paradise. Far from the scene of beauty and tranquility
represented in the bird groups, the pacific was more often associated with war, death,
atomic bombs, forced migrations of indigenous islanders, and the terraforming
bull-dozers of the Fighting Seabees. The actual Pacific had undergone massive
ecological changes well before the 1940s, a consequence of the long history of European
and Asian colonization of the islands. This process was dramatically accelerated
as the Pacific became America's new western frontier and a post- war military buffer zone. A
visitor to the Hall of Pacific Birds wrote to Murphy that she was "amazed at the beauty of the settings. We felt as though
we had actually visited some of the spots that are in the headlines today, and now we can think of them in terms of their
real natural beauty and charm, instead of just devastation and death
Preservation
Criticism is just another way to extend the frontier mentality
conservatism has been a way to extend the history of the west to the
ocean
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print.)
the naturalist sort, devoting his life to the time-honored practice of observing nature, compiling life histories of various
aquatic organisms, and tilting them into the context of their natural surround- ings. But he was also one of the many
urban industrial professionals of Pro- gressive America who felt quite uneasy with the quick changes of the modern world.
Affiliated with this antimodernism was a kind of criticism, and other times outright hostility,
toward a modern world defined by technology and heedless development . This
sentiment was a vestige of a Romantic tradition that swept modern environmental thought beginning with the
Transcenden- talists and perhaps best represented by John Burroughs in Murphys day. The criticism, however, was not
doled out solely to the world of cities and sprawl- ing suburbs. His antimodernism also framed a certain
antireductionism--a desire to see connections between organisms, or rather, to view nature as a whole instead of an
assemblage of parts. In
Murphy came of age during the early days of ecology, a growing discipline at the turn of the
century that some commentators found different from "natu- ral history" only in name. "'Ecology' is erudite and
profound." noted the great American naturalist Marston Bates, "while 'natural history' is popular and su- perficial.
Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.''' Murphy's
particular
brand of ecology emphasized geo- graphical and evolutionary questions-practices
of science that were largely developed on land, and at times, in America's frontier
West. Murphy's antimodernism, rooted in his love for both nature and history, did not preclude a desire to use science
for addressing the thorny conservation and environmental issues that were so prevalent in early twentieth-century America. Indeed, his American Museum colleague, Dick Pough, once remarked that "conservation is little more than applied
natural history." Murphy couldnt' agree more, and consequently became one of New York's prominent conser-vation
leaders, always banging his drum to the beat of developing the practice of "conservation as scientific forecast."
His
conservation ideas were primarily influenced by the work of George Perkins Marsh, whose pathbreaking book,
Man and Nature (1864), criticized the heedless rush of advanced societies that put profit
and gain ahead of wise, and economically sustainable, resource use. Indeed, as Murphy's
conservation ethic evolved, it became more pointed and to a certain extent
Americanized in a way that evaded Marsh's scope. The key problem was not just big societies outstripping limited
resources, as Marsh would have it; rather, the fountain of America's problems, Murphy be-lieved, was the dangerous
frontier myth of inexhaustible resources. This
is the resiliency of a "free lunch" idealogy --the idea that a purported trove of
resources lay just beyond the civilized world . The ocean was as susceptible to this
myth as was the American West and, later, outer space. Murphy's movements across the oceans, his
scientific research, and his conservation efforts all demon-strate a sustained critique of his fundamental axiom. Speaking
at a luncheon of the Garden Club of America, he noted that "the idea behind the new term 'proper land use' must, of
course, extend its meaning to the sea. The wealth of life in the Sound and ocean, as it was described by our ancestors, is
almost incredible read-ing today." Here is clear evidence of Murphy's forethought; today, monographs on the emptying of
the oceans now issue forth with great regularity. But to stop here would be to miss a more important point. Murphy's
critique of the uses of the ocean, even the tools he used to investigate the ocean, drew from a history of terrestrial
exploitation, a history of exploration in the frontier West. To make sense of the problems, potentials, and very nature of
the world's oceans, Murphy
Cap/Consumpt Specific
Aquaculture
Aquaculture is the wrong answer to the wrong question. It subjects
fish to even more harsh environments than they would normally
suffer in the conditions of overfishing and then calls it the sustainable
solution for future generations.
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new elements of nature
that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote
in the Economist, the sea is a resource that must be preserved and harvested.To enhance its
uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen
must behave more like ranchers than hunters.33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks
temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or
environmental problems). Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue
Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution
of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by
transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal
feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic
division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine world. In order to
maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen.
Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a
food web and ecosystem. The fishs reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated
and raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest. Aquaculture interrupts the most
operations also increase the amount of bycatch. Three of the worlds five largest fisheries are now
exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these fisheries account for a quarter of the
total global catch. Rather than diminishing the demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist
aquaculture actually increases them, accelerating the fishing down the food chain process. The
environmental degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic levels
continues.38 Capitalist aquaculturewhich is really aquabusinessrepresents a parallel
Bottom Trawling
High seas fishing necessitates bottom trawling which devastates the
carbon sequestration possibilities of the ocean and kill local fisheries
profits.
Leahy, 14
(Stephen Leahy, independent journalist covers international environmental issues in the public
interest, Co-winner of the 2012 Prince Albert/United Nations Global Prize for reporting on
Climate Change, 6/10/14, Deep Sea Fishing Threatens to Wipe Out a $150 Billion Carbon Sink,
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/unregulated-deep-ocean-fishing-threatens-a-148billion-carbon-sink-report, Accessed: 6/29/14, NC)
services the high seas provide humanity, according to the study. The study was
commissioned by the Global Ocean Commission, an 18-month-old
organization comprised of former senior politicians and business
leaders concerned about threats to the oceans. The High Seas And Us report
will be officially launched at a meeting in New York City on June 24 along with the Commissions
short- and medium-term solutions. Last May scientists writing in the journal Science called for an
end to the frontier mentality of exploitation of the high seas, and recommended a ban on
trawling to protect the carbon-removal service and halt the decline in the productivity of the
oceans. The amount of wild fish caught peaked 25 years ago. About 70 percent of fish caught
inside EEZs spend some time in the high seas. If the high seas are protected from
fishing, those fish are likely to grow larger and become more numerous,
benefiting near-shore fisheries, Sumaila said. A number of studies of marine protected
zones where fishing is banned or very limited show that these become baby-fish incubators that
increase the numbers of fish outside of the protected areas. If fishing was banned in the
high seas, fisheries profits would soar more than 100 percent, the amount of fish
caught would exceed 30 percent and ocean fish stocks would increase 150
percent, according to estimates published in a study in PLOS Biology last March.
Fishing
Species extinction is the direct impact of overfishing driven by the
pursuit of capital accumulation and facilitated by technological
innovations
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
major alterations to marine food webs by predator removal suggest that effects of
fishing are ecologically substantial at large spatial scales. The major alteration
to marine food webs due to overexploitation provides the clearest example of
ecological degradation in the metabolic processes of the ocean.24
Overfishing has shortened the food chain and removed food chain
links, increasing the systems vulnerability to natural and human
induced stresses
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
Equally disrupting, but less apparent than species effects, are the
ecosystem effects caused by fishery exploitation, especially fishing down the
food chain.25 As overfishing depletes the most commercially viable top predators
(i.e., snapper, tuna, cod, and swordfish), competition drives commercial fishers to begin
harvesting species of lower trophic levels. The downward shift is global , according
to the model analysis of UN statistics describing worldwide catches of fish over a forty-year time
span.
chain erodes the base of marine biodiversity and undermines the biophysical cornerstone of
ocean fisheries. The recent discoveries of marine trophic interactions suggest that
the lower trophic levels of marine food webs provide an integral and complex
foundationdisrupting this base undermines the metabolic cycle of energy flows within marine
ecosystems. Overfishing of lower trophic levels has shortened the food
chain and sometimes has removed one or more of the links,
increasing the systems vulnerability to natural and human induced
stresses. For example, in the North Sea the cod population has been so depleted that
fishermen are now harvesting a lower trophic species called pout, which the cod
used to eat. The pout eat krill and copepods. Krill also eat copepods. As the pout
are commercially harvested, the krill population expands and the copepod
population declines drastically. (In other areas of the ocean, krill are captured and used as
an animal-feed additive, hindering the recovery of the whales that depend upon them for food.)
Because copepods are the main food of young cod, the cod population cannot recover from initial
fisheries exploitation.26
for lower trophic level species deceptively masks marine fish extraction, as millions of tons of fish
are harvested each year from the oceans. People continue to be provided with seafood on their
menus, never realizing the full impact of overfishing the top predators. Fishing down the food
chain, due to overfishing in the higher tropic levels, depletes the food resources on which
predatory fishes depend. As noted earlier, marine predatory species are extremely vulnerable to
losses of prey.
Oil
Big oil will never be held legally or fiscally accountable for the
humans lives they have taken or species extinction they have caused
Monbiot, 10
(George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political
activism, June 8, 2010, The Oil Firms' Profits Ignore the Real Costs,
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/08, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
The total costs imposed by the oil companies, which include the loss of human
lives and the extinction of species, cannot be accounted. But even if they could,
you shouldn't expect the companies to carry them. They might be incapable of
capping their leaks; they are adept at capping their liabilities. The Deepwater Horizon
rig, which is owned by Transocean, is registered in the Marshall Islands. Most oil companies pull
the same trick: they register their rigs and ships in small countries with weak governments and no
international reach. These nations are, in other words, incapable of regulating them. Flags of
convenience signify more than the place of registration: they're an unmistakable sign that
responsibilities are being offloaded. If powerful governments were serious about tackling
pollution, the first thing they would do would be to force oil companies to register their property
in the places where their major interests lie. US lawyers are drooling over the prospect of
what one of them called "the largest tort we've had in this country". Some financial
analysts are predicting the death of BP, as the fines and compensation it will have to pay outweigh
its earnings. I don't believe a word of it. ExxonMobil was initially fined $5bn for the
Exxon Valdez disaster, in 1989. But its record-breaking profits allowed it to pay
record-breaking legal fees: after 19 years of argument it got the fine reduced to $507m.
That's equivalent to the profit it made every 10 days last year. Yesterday, after 25 years of
deliberations, an Indian court triumphantly convicted Union Carbide India Ltd of causing death
by negligence through the Bhopal catastrophe. There was just one catch: Union Carbide India Ltd
ceased to exist many years ago. It wound itself up to avoid this outcome, and its liabilities
vanished in a puff of poisoned gas. BP's insurers will take a hit, as will the pension
funds which invested so heavily in it; but, though some people are proposing
costs of $40bn or even $60bn, I will bet the price of a barrel of crude that the
company is still in business 10 years from now. Everything else the
ecosystems it blights, the fishing and tourist industries, a habitable
climate might collapse around it, but BP, like the banks, will be
deemed too big to fail. Other people will pick up the costs.
Subsidies
Fishing subsidies motivate deep sea fishing, which directly
accelerates global warming by making carbon sequestration
impossible.
Leahy, 14
(Stephen Leahy, independent journalist covers international environmental issues in the public
interest, Co-winner of the 2012 Prince Albert/United Nations Global Prize for reporting on
Climate Change, 6/10/14, Deep Sea Fishing Threatens to Wipe Out a $150 Billion Carbon Sink,
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/unregulated-deep-ocean-fishing-threatens-a-148billion-carbon-sink-report, Accessed: 6/29/14, NC)
atmosphere and burying it in the seabed every year. The thing is, with fisheries
impacted worldwide, more governments are subsidizing fishing
operations on the high seas. More fishing activity could put a dent in the ocean's
sequestration effect, co-author Rashid Sumaila of the University of British Columbias Fisheries
Center said. Heres the kicker: The dollar value of all the fish caught way out there is
actually negative when costs of fishing like fuel and subsidies are subtracted. A
2009 analysis of 12 nations' bottom-trawling fleets on the high seas by Sumaila found that fleets
received $152 million a year in government subsidiessome 25 percent of the value of their catch.
Most would not be fishing the high seas without subsidies, Sumaila told me.
Surface Development
The surface centered approach that humanity takes to the ocean,
viewing it only as a means of transportation, ecology of the violetblack deep sea.
Alaimo, 13
(Stacy Alaimo, Ph.D. University of Illinois, Department of English, Certificate. The Unit for
Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Ilinois, 2013, Violet-Black: Ecologies of the
Abyssal Zone, Accessed: 6/26/14, NC)
A violet-black ecology hovers in the bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadal zones, the
three regions of the deep seas, 1000 meters down and much deeper, where sunlight
cannot descend. The violet-black depths--cold, dark regions under the crushing weight of
the water column--were long thought to be azoic, or devoid of life. It is not surprising
that Edward Forbes azoic theory of the 1840s (preceded by that of Henry de la Beche a decade
earlier) stood as the accepted doctrine for a quarter of a century, since it is difficult for terrestrial
creatures to imagine what could possibly survive in the unfathomable seas. William J. Broad
argues that generations of scientists dismissed the abyss (a dismissive word in some
respects) as inert and irrelevant, as geologically dead and having only a thin
population of bizarre fish1 Even as deep sea creatures have been brought to the surface, it
remains convenient to assume that the bathyl, abyssl, and hadal zones are empty, void, null--an
the animal abyss from an encounter with the gaze of a specific animal to the collective
composition (in Bruno Latours terms) of the vast abyssal zone and its surrounding territories,4
we discover the same sort of vertiginous recognition that there is, indeed, being rather than
nothing. But what does it mean for the abyssal being to be or become too much?
Impacts
Frontier Specific
Colonialism
The myth of the frontier causes endless colonialism
Eidenbach 8 (Kirstin, CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AND THE LAWLESS FRONTIER, The
Crit, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pg. 103, http://thecritui.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/kirstin.pdf,
RSpec)
the
relationship between Native Americans and foreign explorers, Frederick Jackson Turner notes that between the
aborigines and the Western whites others came, and went away, or else merged their blood and customs with the native
populations. None transformed vast expanses of the unknown into recognizable counterparts of their homelands.48
The frontier myth operates in four parts. As will be discussed throughout the paper, this temporal cycle will
appear and often will dominate intellectual and cultural paradigms as widely disparate as oceanic
exploration and patent and trademark law. The first phase of the frontier myth is the search. A search begins as
colonization ends. In other words, as soon as one frontier becomes fully colonized , the search for
new empty spaces begins. The second phase is the discovery of the new space. In many ways, this process
parallels the exploration of Lewis and Clark.25 The new spaces are explored, mapped out, described and
defined. The third phase is colonization. During the third phase, the
recognizable
Imperialism
Human control of the frontier creates imperial knowledge which
becomes problematized and exacerbates ecological problems
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print.)
Perhaps the most memorable ocean
public. Whether she was cataloging poisonous fish in Micronesia or modifying the behavior of nurse sharks at (jape Mote
Lab in Sarasota, Florida, Clark explored the ocean not as a conquering marauder but rather as a com- passionate and even
matronly nurturer. The
domestication of the ocean, in Clark's hands, had everything to do with her own
position as a naturalist in 21 held dominated by men, a fact made doubly complicated by
the cult of domes-ticity that saturated postwar American culture. Two of the most
important shapers of Americais postwar conception of the ocean were not themselves
American, but their impact on the popular imagination should not be underestimated.
Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 experi- ment to replicate the hypothesized migration of Native
Americans to Polyne- sia captured a postwar American audience whose conceptions of the
Pacific were products of death and destruction in the form of battleships and atomic
bombs. Heyerdahl's idyllic float on a balsam raft was a kind of anti-technologi- cal narrative that
emphasized the natural healing properties of nature and the ocean. Middle-class
Americans began experiencing the Pacific as paradise after the war as Hawaii became a
vac-ationer's destination; at a lesser cost, they could visit the Pacific at any one of the numerous
tiki restaurants and bars that pop- ulated the postwar Sunbelt. Heyerdal's experience with the
ocean promised a simpler move back to nature, Jacques Cousteau's ocean moved in the oppo- site
direction, one that embraced a technologically savy culture mediate humans and the ocean.
More than providing a window to undersea life, Cous- teau's books, articles, films, and television
series highlight an ocean populated by scuba-equipped man-fish, underwater scooters,
underwater flying saucers, and housing units. (Cousteau created an ocean that was easily explored and imminently
habitable through the genius of science and technology. As Cous- teau the explorer turned into Cousteau the
environmentalist in the 1970s, he
Psychic Desire
Frontierism causes endless crises we can never fulfill our desire for
more
Gouge 2 Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University, Ph.D. (Catherine, The
Great Storefront of American Nationalism: Narratives of Mars and the Outerspatial Frontier, The
Journal of American Popular Culture, Fall, 2002, Vol. 1, Issue 2,
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/gouge.htm, RSpec)
fictions suggest that on the "new" frontier we can be who we were not on
previous frontiers. The frontier fantasy is, thus, a prosthetic psychic fantasy of
wholeness and power that promises to render us psychically complete . The
Moreover, these
power the frontier affords us by rejuvenating our spirit or making us more "American" also
Racism
The logic of frontierism is rooted in gendered and racist conceptions
Ballv 11 Ph.D. Candidate Geography at University of California Berkeley, M.A. International
Affairs at the New School, B.A. Anthropology/History at Colorado College (Teo, States of
Violence, 8/7/11, http://territorialmasquerades.net/states-of-violence/, RSpec)
discoursesare also
deeply gendered . In the essays, the links between masculinity and violence are
particularly apparent. They show that both imperial states and anti-colonial nationalisms have linked
constructs of masculinity to the state in their efforts to
collective identity (22). Silvio Duncan Baretta and John Markoffs essay on the cattle frontier in
the making of Latin American centers and peripheries includes many of the trends cited aboveexcept for gender, though
an ideal
their mention of honor begs it. For them, frontiers are places where no one has a monopoly of violence. The
racial
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints
from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the
destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism
can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are
offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by
stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural
racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of
those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The
danger point of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near.
The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and
colonialism, of military buildups and violent aggression, of
overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a
point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of the global
population derives its power and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of
peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to
continue.
Securitization/Myth
Evaluate the affirmative as a mthyic story this form of critical
analysis accesses the only method for delinking hegemonic
epistemologies of control and colonization
Stoeltje 87 (Beverly, Making the Frontier Myth: Folklore Process in a Modern Nation,
Western Folklore, Vol. 46, No. 4, October, 1987, pgs. 238-241, RSpec)
we must utilize our special expertise and sensitivity to folklore materials at the
larger critical theory and larger units of communicative form, I want to argue
As Kenneth Burke has said, "a critic cannot get at the very core of a work except by specifying exactly what kind of work it
is."16 Epic, myth, legend, and history as well, have commonly featured heroes who investigate the unknown, assert control
over it, and appropriate its resources. The hero launches his adventure with an accompaniment of troops, sailors,
horsemen, or other supporters and a troubador or recorder who can memorialize his adventure. If and when our hero
returns, he regales the folks back home with stories of his exploits, which include the discovery and conquest of exotic
lands and people. Spices, gems, and beautiful artifacts are all available for the explorer and his troops, who exploit the
newly discovered territory by violence or guile and claim the land and the people for their native empire, country, or
kingdom. Brave pioneers will follow his route and settle the newly conquered land, bringing their idea of civilization with
them and imposing it in the name of some ideologically rationalized enterprise. Stories that follow this pattern are
pervasive in the mythology, history, and literature of Western civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, King Arthur, the
examine
in the same category with the classical, the religious, and the literary. Nevertheless, in the construct known as
Western Civilization each empire, kingdom or nation tells about itself some
story of the " bringing of civilization ," a formula we might consider the nucleus of a cultural
"formation" that has shaped large scale behavior from one era to another. 17 Large scale behavior of any period operates
with goals, strategies, and rhetoric directed by the politically powerful forces of the place and time. These
hegemonic forces implement their goals by utilizing some cultural formation which
coordinates the familiar and the strange with ideas and images easily identified by the
general populace , and by linking a plan for action to a compelling natural or
supernatural force that voices authority and provides the populace with the illusion that
the right forces are in control , that "we" are winning in a battle against
" them ." Akin to ideology, tradition, base metaphors, key symbols, religious systems, and other intellectual constructs,
the cultural formation has vague outlines and can change characters or position swiftly but subtly. It rests, however, on a
foundation of granite purpose. Created from, transmitted by, and effected through familiar
language as
symbolic action and incorporates devices, principles, and strategies from the domain of
poetics, all in the interest of organizing large scale behavior . Although this behavior,
its texts, and its heroes have captured the attention of scholars, all too often these studies fail to
distinguish between the literal and the rhetorical and to notice how the story repeats itself as if it
were the "beginning." Consequently, our familiar story, The Conquest and Transformation of the
Unknown, is repeated over and over again for each new generation as myth, epic, history, war,
art, novel, and film retell the story. We focus here upon a unique point in the telling of the story-the point at
which the story shifts from one setting to another and replaces old images with new ones.
America variant of the story , of course, is Frontier . The old story takes place in the last
period of Anglo-American settlement of the West and tells of exploration, conquest, new beginnings, and the
transplantation of civilization until it covered North America, validated by the belief in the progress of Western
civilization. The story remains popular today, but the act itself was concluded a century ago when Anglo-Saxon residents
settled on the land and their cities reached for the sky. As the last frontiersmen of the West put away their pistols and
placed their shotguns on their pick-up gun racks, science and technology gave birth to a new era-the Space Age-which
would explore and claim the space above the earth. Predictably, the term "High Frontier" was employed to validate the
exploration of space, and before our very eyes the covered wagon magically became a space rocket and the
pioneer/cowboy metamorphosed into the astronaut. Mythmaking and expansion, still running in tandem, have taken to
the skies for the twentieth-century version of the story. The space age myth appeals as new and different, but its
relationship to the western myth is closer than it appears on the surface. Not only does the space myth belong to the same
cultural formation as the western myth, but the Space Age Myth and the Old West Myth, both Frontier stories, were born
of the same social circumstances in the same period of history. When the attention, energy, and resources of the United
States switched from westward expansion to expansion into space, the western frontier myth easily became the space age
myth. But we might cast a glance behind the stage where myth is performed and look at the context from which these
myths emerged, keeping in mind Malinowski's observation that myth surfaces and flourishes in times of social and
historical change, and that myth replicates and validates social structure.
Try or Die
It is dangerous to deny the truth of environmental degradation
behind our relation to the ocean. We should take any and all action to
end our view of the ocean as a frontier to exploit.
Steinberg, 8
(Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State University, 2008, Its so Easy Being
Green: Overuse, Underexposure, and the Marine Environmentalist Consensus, Accessed:
6/26/14, NC)
War
Conquest of the frontier causes endless exterminatory violence
Slotkin 92 Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Ph.D. at Brown
University (Richard, Gunfighter Nation, 1992, book, pgs. 11-12, RSpec)
colonists emphasized the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure; Jeffersonian (and later, the
disciples of Turners Frontier Thesis) saw the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the
original social contract; while Jacksonian Americans saw the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of
personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue. But in each case, the Myth represented the redemption of
Cap/Consumpt Specific
Fishery Collapse
Capitalist industrialization is the root cause of fishery collapse
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
Capitalism and Marine Fishery Exploitation Humans have long been connected to the
industrial capture fisheries became the norm. Increased demands were placed on
the oceans and overfishing resulted in the severe depletion of wild fish stocks. In
Empty Ocean, Richard Ellis states, Throughout the worlds oceans, food fishes once believed to
be immeasurable in number are now recognized as greatly depleted and in some cases almost
extinct. A million vessels now fish the worlds oceans, twice as many as there were twenty-five
years ago. Are there twice as many fish as before? Hardly. How did this situation develop?10
captured fish meant more profit. The switch to trawling was complete by 1920, and the
consequences of the second industrial revolution organized under capitalist forces would soon
change the human-nature relationship to the ocean, extending the reach of capital. The
expanded geographic range and speed of fishing fleets allowed for increased
productivity of catch as well as increased diversity of captured species that were
deemed valuable on the market. Technological developments and improved
transportation routes allowed the fishing industry to grow, increasing its scale of
operations. Cold storage ensured that fish would be fresh, reducing spoilage and loss of capital.
In Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky explains, Freezing
[cod] also changed the relationship of seafood companies to fishing ports. Frozen fish could be
bought anywherewherever the fish was cheapest and most plentiful. With expanding markets,
local fleets could not keep up with the needs of the companies. Advances in the
expanding seafood market forced companies to look elsewhere for the most
traded animal commodity on the planet. African nationssuch as Senegal, Mauritania,
Angola, and Mozambiqueconfronting dire economic conditions sold fishing access to European
and Asian nations and companies. In the case of Mauritania, selling fishing access provided over
$140 million a year, which equaled a fifth of the governments budget. Few countries can
resist such bait, given the need for monetary resources. Industrialized trawlers
descended into African waters, combing their seas for the treasured fish
commodities. In the past three decades, Africas fish population in the ocean has
decreased by 50 percent and thousands of fishermen have become
unemployed.16 The expansion of capitalist fishing practices continues to
decimate fisheries and spread ecological degradation, as profits and food are
funneled back to core nations.
Unsustainable
Global development projects have disrupted the marine ecosystem in
every area of its existence. It is on the verge of total collapse from over
fishing, deadzones, acidification, biodiversity loss and more. If we do
not change our approach to the ocean we will take ourselves down
with it.
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
The world ocean covers approximately 70 percent of the earth. It has been an integral
part of human history, providing food and ecological services. Yet conservation
efforts and concerns with environmental degradation have mostly focused on
terrestrial issues. Marine scientists and oceanographers have recently made
remarkable discoveries in regard to the intricacies of marine food webs and
the richness of oceanic biodiversity. However, the excitement over these
discoveries is dampened due to an awareness of the rapidly accelerating threat
to the biological integrity of marine ecosystems. 1 At the start of the
twenty-first century marine scientists focused on the rapid depletion of marine
fish, revealing that 75 percent of major fisheries are fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. It
is estimated that the global ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes. The
depletion of ocean fish stock due to overfishing has disrupted
metabolic relations within the oceanic ecosystem at multiple trophic
and spatial scales.2 Despite warnings of impending collapse of fish
stock, the oceanic crisis has only worsened . The severity is made evident
in a recent effort to map the scale of human impact on the world ocean . A team of
scientists analyzed seventeen types of anthropogenic drivers of ecological
change (e.g., organic pollution from agricultural runoff, overfishing, carbon dioxide emissions,
etc.) for marine ecosystems. The findings are clear: No area of the world ocean
is unaffected by human influence, and over 40 percent of marine
ecosystems are heavily affected by multiple factors. Polar seas are on
the verge of significant change. Coral reefs and continental shelves
have suffered severe deterioration. Additionally, the world ocean is a crucial
factor in the carbon cycle, absorbing approximately a third to a half of the carbon
dioxide released into the atmosphere. The increase in the portion of carbon dioxide
has led to an increase in ocean temperature and a slow drop in the pH of surface
watersmaking them more acidicdisrupting shell-forming plankton and reef-
Rather
society and naturethat subsumes the world to the logic of accumulation. It is a system of selfexpanding value, which must reproduce itself on an ever-larger scale.4 Here we examine the
social metabolic order of capital and its relationship with the oceans to (a) examine the
anthropogenic causes of fish stock depletion, (b) detail the ecological consequences of ongoing
capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment, and (c) highlight the ecological
contradictions of capitalist aquaculture.5
Alt
Imagination
1NC
The alternative is to reject frontiersm and align the ballot with
universal harmony this avoids the illusion of control that makes
destruction inevitable
Farrer 87 Professor of Anthropology at California State Chico, Ph.D. Anthropology and
Folklore (Claire, On Parables, Questions, and Predictions, Western Folklore, Vol. 46, NO. 4,
October, 1987, JSTOR, pgs. 288-289, RSpec)
We are led to the conclusion that we must
construct a
heavily of the old mysticism. The new mythology for a new age suggests that control-by-technique is only
the
illusion of control . Is the natural world really subdued and made to perform when performance knows
no bounds? Those who point us toward the new mythology tell us it is hard to think the unimaginable, even
when it is manifest in its detritus. They tell us of new worlds in- side the formerly smallest units; these are worlds about
which most of us can scarcely dream. They imply that there may be larger worlds be- yond the bounds of
we think we know . They prepare us to kill the old king myth while
crying, "Long Live King Myth!" Young reminds us of the harmony inherent in the world-as-is
and the value some place on the harmony of the self within and with the universe rather
the world
than the mastery of the universe by the self. Ignoring this tenet was part of the motivation that allowed our
EuroAmerican ancestors to "open" the West, the old New Frontier. Seeing ourselves as masters or husbanders, the
EuroAmerican model, leads to very dif- ferent perceptions than does seeing ourselves as a portion of an or- ganic whole, as
becomes senseless to
own limbs to satisfy a growling stomach; perhaps it is satisfying in the short term but totally ruinous in the long one.
When God is displaced from Heaven by our habitations in the heav- ens, will we re-locate sacred space on Earth? Will we
all is
intimately connected and that we are simultaneously being connected
and a part of the connection as well ? Will we demon- strate the truth of many Native American
become more like the Indians of the American Southwest when we, too, come to the real- ization that
philosophies and cosmolo- gies that maintain we live in but a shadow of the real world of Power and the Supernatural?
Will we ever learn what the Zunis state to be true, that inner and outer realities are but segments of each other which we
parse in our minds? The heroine of my parable, Science, never sought to assume the burdens we place upon
her. She merely questioned and tried to ex- plain on the basis of her past knowledge and experience. Yet we deny her
2NC Ev
The way we think about the frontier mentality shapes reality
Kroll 08 Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, Specialization: History of Science (Gary, America's Ocean Wilderness: A
Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration, University Press of Kansas, 2008, Print.)
Frontiers, the wilderness, and the West are all highly ambiguous concepts to use
in systematic histories of space. At various times, and from different view- points, they could be
conceived as regions of extraordinary danger to avoid; places of peril for seekers
of adventure; lands to improve and settle; troves of natural resources and mineral
riches; wildernesses to tame or conquer; land- scapes in need of conservation for
economic growth; a paradise necessary to exploit for human recreation; and
ecosystems to preserve for the health of the natural environment. The definition of the frontier
can include any one or a combination of these objectives, depending on a person's social and
cultural identity. In the final analysis, it can only be said that the frontier is a mental
conception of space that may bear little resemblance to the physical landscape. But
that mental concept is important. It shapes policies such as military ma- neuvers,
settlement patterns, environmental reforms, exploitative industries, social
oppression. and racial inequity. How we think about frontiers can de- fine our
repertoire of behaviors toward these places and toward the organisms that
inhabit them. If we wish to understand the contemporary issues that will clearly
determine the fate of the ocean, then we must also understand how Americans have
come to think about the ocean.
Marx
The alternative is to reject frontierism and endorse a movement of
Marxism this is the only way to endorse true education and avoid
destruction
McLaren and Faramandpur 99 (Peter Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational
Studies, Chapman University, and Ramin, Critical Pedagogy, Postmodernism and the Retreat
from Class: Towards a Contraband Pedagogy, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory,
No. 93, Science and Civilisation, June, 1999, pgs. 89-90, JSTOR, RSpec)
Addicted to its own self-induced adrenaline rush, capitalism's reckless gun-slinging
financial assaults on vulnerable nations has brought
cannibalistic orgy of self-destruction . The collapse of the former Soviet Union and eastern
European state-sponsored bureaucratic socialism, following in the wake of a speeded-up process of globalisation and its
unholy alliance with neoliberalism,1 has fostered hostile conditions for progressive educators who wish to create
coalitions and social movements that speak to the urgent issues and needs inside and
outside our urban schools. These include growing poverty , racism , and jobless futures for generations of increasingly alienated youth . Confronted by the fancifully adorned avant-garde guises worn by
postmodernists as they enact their wine-and-cheese-party revolution, the education
make a case for Marx . It has become exceedingly more dif- ficult to mobilise against
capital, which is conscripting the school curriculum and culture into its project of
eternal accumulation . Postmodern theory has made significant contributions to the edu- cation field by
examining how schools participate in producing and reproducing asymmetrical relations of power, and how discourses,
systems of intelligibility, and representational practices continue to support gender inequality, racism, and class
advantage. For the most part, however, postmodernism has failed to develop alternative democratic social models. This is
partly due to its failure to mount a sophisticated and coherent opposition politics against economic exploitation, political
oppression, and cultural hegemony. In its celebration of the aleatory freeplay of signification,
postmodernism exhibits a profound cynicism - if not sustained intellectual contempt - towards what it
seventeenth- century European thinkers (Green 1994). Perry Anderson, para- phrasing Terry Eagleton, aptly describes the
phenomenon of post- modernism as follows: Advanced capitalism . . . requires two contradictory systems of justifica- tion:
a metaphysics of abiding impersonal verities - the discourse of sov- ereignty and law, contract and obligation - in the
political order, and a casuistic of individual preferences for perpetually shifting fashions and gratifications of consumption
in the economic order. Postmodernism gives paradoxical expression to this dualism, since while its dismissal of the
centered subject in favor of the erratic swarming of desire colludes with the amoral hedonism of the market, its denial of
any grounded val- ues or objective
truths undermines the prevailing legitimations of the state. (1998: 115)
Framework
Education
Modern relations to the ocean are mystified by a lack of material
relation with the sea. Rather than seeking to respect its importance to
our existence, we fetishize the ocean and remain ignorant to its
function.
Steinberg, 8
(Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State University, 2008, Its so Easy Being
Green: Overuse, Underexposure, and the Marine Environmentalist Consensus, Accessed:
6/26/14, NC)
In this article, I am proposing that the fascination with the ocean, expressed in arenas
acknowledged but
century Europe, the marine 'other' was a favored space of romantic writers and artists - different,
but proximate enough that one could gaze at its expanse from the safety of an urban harbor or a
beachside villa. The ocean was idealized as beyond society, where a 'pure' nature
Discourse Key
Rhetorical focus is key it underlies the motives for our actions
Farrer 87 Professor of Anthropology at California State Chico, Ph.D. Anthropology and
Folklore (Claire, On Parables, Questions, and Predictions, Western Folklore, Vol. 46, NO. 4,
October, 1987, JSTOR, pgs. 292-293, RSpec)
do busi- ness as usual in our next exploration? Must it also be exploitation? I, for one, want folklorists
and anthropologists, and even mytholo- gists and philosophers, to accompany the engineers and technocrats-not only on
shuttle flights and in those space colonies but also right now in NASA and the Congress. I want in positions of
to justify our actions . Anthropologists and philosophers can alert us to the value in examining the
different and the hypothetical, while folklorists and mythologists are essential to remind us that the Emperor's new
clothes, although surely cut from the finest fabric, are nonetheless brilliantly transparent. We cannot allow those
in
power to forget that Science has two hands: one holds fast to Technology; but the other, the other
is
extended ...
Prereq to Prag
Our investigation is critical understanding our anthropocentric
projections onto the ocean is a pre-requisite to all progressive change
Astro 77 Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, Ph.D. American Literature,
M.A. English, (Richard, VOYAGES INTO OCEAN SPACE: A VIEW FROM THE HUMANITIES,
1977, IEEXplore, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stamp/stamp.jsp?
tp=&arnumber=1154360, RSpec)
If, however, we face what happens when we, like Ahab, confront
save ourselves and our world . And here is where the humani- ties can be so useful. They
can help us internalize and understand our strengths and our weaknesses , our
designs and our actions . They can help us understand our place within the
"toto-picture " and our feelings of fellowship with all creation . And finally
can
and most specifically, they can help us understand and control the forces which have determined
our
Ontology
Critical evaluation of the ocean unlocks new critical locations from
which to evaluate Being
Blum 13 Associate Professor of English at Penn State University, Ph.D. English at University of
Pennsylvania (Hester, Introduction: oceanic studies, 2013, Atlantic Studies, pg. 152,
http://sites.psu.edu/hester/wp-content/uploads/sites/2509/2013/04/Blum-intro-AtlanticStudies.pdf, RSpec)
shoving off from land- and nation- based perspectives , we might find new
critical locations from which to investigate questions of affiliation , citizenship ,
economic exchange , mobility , rights , and sovereignty . If our perspectives have been
By
repositioned in recent decades to consider history from the bottom up, or the colonizer as seen by the colonized to gesture
new forms of relationality through attention to the seas properties, conditions, and shaping
or eroding forces.
Line By Line
perceptions of
Collapse of Coastal Marine Ecosystems The previous examples demonstrate how species
extinction decreases the resiliency of trophic level interactions. Even more problematic,
however, is the
atmosphere contributes to a warming and increase in the acidity of ocean water. As a result,
multicolored, healthy coral reefs filled with a rich abundance of biodiversity are being bleached
and turned into gray-white skeletons. Without radical changes to the social metabolic order, the
death of the worlds coral reefs could take place within a few decades. When coral reefs die, the
fauna dependent upon them also die.29 Natural conditions, everywhere, are being
AT: No Collapse
The biological functions of the ocean are just now being understood,
their evidence doesnt assume nuances in marine biodiversity.
Clark and Clausen, 8
(Brett Clark teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rebecca Clausen
teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, 2008, The Oceanic Crisis:
Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-ofmarine-ecosystem, Accessed: 7/29/14, NC)
Marine Metabolism: Biological Richness, Energy Cycles, and Trophic Levels Ecologists now
expressed among trophic levels are proving to be the underlying source of great
biological wealth and ocean resiliency. According to marine scientists, the genetic,
species, habitat, and ecosystem diversity of the oceans is believed to exceed that
of any other Earth system. For example, ocean environments contain seventeen different
taxa of life forms compared to eleven land-based taxa. Oceans account for 99 percent of the
volume that is known to sustain lifemost of which is still unknown. Scientists exploring the
Aff Answers
Impact Turns
American frontierism sets the foundation for global democracy
Monten 5 M.A. Security Studies at Georgetown University, (Johnathan, The Roots of the
Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy, International
Security, Volume 29, Number 4, Spring 2005, pgs. 112-156,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ins/summary/v029/29.4monten.html, RSpec)
Although a radical departure in many other respects, the current
much
government , as well as economic privation and civil strife.[18] Bad governance is a form of injustice that
must be corrected. Thus, one very broad type of social structural change is state reform and
democratization . State reform must involve more than just reorganization of the administrative system or the
system of resource allocation. These social
democratic development ,
nonviolent and just dispute resolution systems , the participation of
the population , and rule of law .[19] In some cases, parties are chiefly concerned with replacing or
altering existing legal and political institutions. Reform of government institutions typically involves measures aimed at
democratization and increased political participation.[20] Societies strive to develop a "workable political
system in which the multiple social groups can participate to their satisfaction. "[21] This sort of state
reform has the potential to mitigate and heal the effects of violent intrastate conflict , as well as
prevent future conflict. One type of structural change is the strengthening of civil society. Civil society involves various
sectors, including the business world, trade unions, women's groups, churches, and human rights activists.[22] In many
are
segregation . Various types of structural reform aim to strengthen community and civil society. These measures
strive to foster public participation and create institutions of governance that can "become vehicles not just for making
and enacting policy decisions but for fostering citizenship."[27] Such measures include forums for meaningful public
engagement, real opportunities for community members to communicate with public officials, and other forms of
inclusive governance.
Only our representations solve the casefrontier imagery is key to motivate space
exploration
GRAY 1999 (D.M., Space as a frontier - the role of human motivation, Space Policy, August)
Whether in the striking of a new vein of gold, the invention of a new process or the Imagineering of a new space-based communication
industry, the
threshold for primary frontier ignition is usually quite high. The sturdy
prospector/inventor must parlay sweat equity and knowledge of the new discovery into a debtfinanced second generation of development. The products of this effort, if successful, can then be used as collateral for
further investment. This process continues until the energy applied to the resource is of such a scale that the frontier wave becomes selfsustaining and the wealth generated is harvested by the controlling investors. With each successive successful generation of development,
the scale of investment becomes larger. At
Charisma,
the motivation that pulls men and women forward
institutions - whether formal or informal - and use the claim as collateral for the funds for further speculative development.
often overlooked in frontier histories and economic plans, is
into the wilderness to seek their fortunes. Reasons to participate in frontiers can be as numerous as participants - ranging
from personal desire for wealth to larger ideologies that shape the course of nations. Among the most common reasons to
participate in a frontier is the belief that frontiers offer opportunities no longer available in
civilization. It is this belief that sustains participants through unimaginable hardships and
failures. In the 1840s, families struggling to make a living on too small farms packed their possessions and crossed the North American
continent on the Oregon Trail. Businesses utilize the charisma of frontier to increase profits. From the 1870s through 1890s railroads
promoted rail travel to the American West in crowded cities in the American east and in Europe by advertising the cheap and fertile western
lands. Nations
also utilize frontier issues and ideologies to advance their own agendas. Manifest
Destiny which was a belief that the United States should stretch from sea to sea, was a rallying cry
for those promoting the settlement of Oregon. Without human motivations, there would be little
reason for a frontier participant to work the long hours, face the dangers and assume the risk of a
frontier when economic security can be more easily obtained in the comforts of civilization.
reasons for individuals to participate in frontiers are many, but in their basic forms they can be
listed as: freedom, opportunity and adventure. The call of the frontier brings meaning and
challenge to personal lives. It inspires. The chance to live and work in space is a motivator that
has inspired students for four decades. Homer Hickam in the autobiographical movie October Sky found a way out of a
dying West Virginia coal town by following his rocketry interests. Ultimately, he was able to attend college and work for NASA as an
engineer. The motivator is not exclusively American , Franklin ChangDiaz who grew up in Costa Rica followed his dreams
to the USA to graduate from MIT and become an astronaut. He has to date flown on six Shuttle missions.
WASHINGTON After these weeks of terrorist horror, it may seem odd to think back to a
little-celebrated event of 1893. Could something that happened 103 years ago possibly
be a source of understanding the travails that are tearing at our national sanity
this summer? I think so. For in 1893, the superintendent of the census duly announced that the
United States of America no longer had a continuous line of free, unsettled land visible on the
American horizon. Translated from the bureaucratese, that meant that the American Frontier was
declared "closed." And what a profoundly historic marker that announcement really was.
Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the end of "the first period of
American history." For the closing of the frontier--with all that meant in terms of free
land and limitless futures for the ambitious and the foolish alike-- marked the end of
America's age of innocence. Its escape valve for the aggressive impulses of its people and for
their creative energies was cranked shut; after that, we had to start struggling to live with
ourselves. But we didn't. Like many peoples facing changes that call for different character
traits than they are used to, we have never quite come to grips with that fact, much less
the reality that today our frontiers are instead closing in upon us. And so
when we have a series of catapulting events such as these that remind us that the world really is
very much with us--the Saudi bombing of American troops, the TWA crash, the Atlanta Olympic
bombing--we not at all unnaturally become unnerved and frightened. What in the world is the
immigration reform, much less discussing the crucial question of who belongs here. (In the past
few weeks, illegal aliens without papers were found working on the president's helicopter pad!).
We refuse to discuss national identity cards (even though every European country has them, and
it paradoxically makes people more free). Etc. Weaponry? This week,
it was revealed
how in March the endlessly creative Iranian government, still deep
into terrorism, was trying to ship a new kind of mortar for use in
Europe. Discovered in an Iranian ship in Belgium, supposedly
transporting cucumbers and garlic , the mortar was inventive because it
could be dismantled into three pieces that were much easier then to hide.
Meanwhile, every nation from Syria to China seems to be avidly getting into the "own your own
missile" business.
important, attitude. Is a change of attitude--toward terrorism, toward the world, toward ourselves
and even toward our principles--really going to affect these ominous new realities? Or are we in
truth helpless before this growing anarchization of the world, destined to respond in an ad hoc
fashion, without strategy or coherence, to whatever this newly assertive world decides to render
today, along with the idea that we are an untouchable nation protected by the arms of those two
great oceans, forever and ever, amen. Today, of course, we "know" that missiles can fly from
Beijing to Pasadena, and we "know" that information travels with the speed of light, but we know
those things intellectually, not psychologically and operationally. The sad thing is that, to begin to
confront terrorism and defeat, we don't really need to do much as a nation. We should be today
the single most successful and inspiring nation in history. Yet our definition of ourselves seems to
be the story of TV's "NYPD Blue," where victory is no longer in anybody's vocabulary and the good
guys are always in the corner, courageously fighting but never ever winning. Protecting America
from terrorism means long-term efforts--but also changes in that old frontier mentality. We need
to protect our borders, rationally regulate immigration and refugee status according to our needs,
be civil, and live together with care. We should also punish aggressors instead of sappily
"forgiving" them. We must stop play-acting at conflict (President Clinton and his "economic
wars," the wars of sports heroes, the posturing adversarialness of much of the media) and begin
seriously fighting the real wars.
Policy Action
The status quo is unacceptable and the oceans are at risk from
multiple extinction risks; however, the only way to reverse out
frontier mentality is through specific policy recommendations.
Kirby, 13
(Alex Kirby, Bernard William Alexander Kirby is a British journalist, specializing in
environmental issues. He worked in various capacities at the British Broadcasting Corporation for
nearly 20 years, June, 2003 US 'has frontier mentality' on oceans, Accessed: 6/29/14, NC)
country has lacked the imagination to care properly for its oceans. It has
undertaken the first review of US ocean policy since 1969. It paints a picture of
ignorance, neglect and short-term attempts at policy-making. And it presents a
detailed plan for protecting the seas long into the future. The group is the Pew Oceans
Commission, 18 independent and bi-partisan scientists, government and business leaders and
conservationists. Still time It is chaired by a former White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta, and
its members include Governor George Pataki of New York and Dr Charles Kennel, director of the
equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill Pew Oceans Commission The commission's report, the
fruit of a three-year study, is America's Living Oceans: Charting A Course For Sea Change. Mr
Panetta said: "For centuries, we have viewed the oceans as beyond our ability to harm and their
There is
consensus that our oceans are in crisis. The good news is that it is not too late
to act." The report says Americans "have reached a crossroads" because of overfishing, coastal
bounty beyond our ability to deplete. "We now know that this is not true...
development, pollution, nutrient runoff, and the ability of alien species to establish themselves off
US coasts. No option but change More than 175 alien invaders have now settled in San Francisco
Bay, and almost a million farmed Atlantic salmon have escaped to the wild off the US west coast
since 1988. Drowned diamondback terrapins NOAA Drowned diamondback terrapins (Image:
of the oceans as our largest public domain, to be managed holistically for the greater public good
in perpetuity... We have come too slowly to recognise the interdependence of land and sea."
Believing " the
wants funding for basic ocean science and research to be doubled. Alaskan harbour
Deb Antonini/Pew Oceans Commission The commissioners visit Alaska (Image: Deb
Antonini/Pew Oceans Commission) It says the principal US marine laws are "a hodgepodge of
narrow laws", many introduced 30 years ago "on a crisis-by-crisis, sector-by-sector basis" focused
on exploiting the oceans' resources. It says: "We have continued to approach our oceans
with a frontier mentality." The commission paints a vivid picture of the plight of the seas
surrounding the US. Of the fish populations that have been assessed, it says, 30% are overfished
or are being depleted unsustainably. The commissioners say: "Every eight months, nearly 11
million gallons of oil run off our streets and driveways into our waters - the equivalent of the
Exxon Valdez oil spill." They quote President Kennedy: "Knowledge of the oceans is more than a
matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it."
Perm
A shift in our relation to the ocean as a piece of humanity does not
preserve it from degredation.
Steinberg, 8
(Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State University, 2008, Its so Easy Being
Green: Overuse, Underexposure, and the Marine Environmentalist Consensus, Accessed:
6/26/14, NC)
Despite the analytical richness of this alternate perspective, a geographic approach to the
ocean will not, in itself, necessarily lead to attitudes, behaviors, or policies that
value its environmental system over the short-term services that it provides to
humans. There are many places on land that are univer sally recognized as
spaces within societies but that nonetheless are subjected to environmental
degradation, and there is no guarantee that a geographi cally informed analysis that views
the ocean as a space (as opposed to it being merely a set of geographically clustered resource
management challenges) will lead to enlightened stewardship. Indeed, one could easily
point to the sales figures for books and documentaries celebrating the mysteries
of the ocean, the attendance figures at attractions like Sea World, and the atten
tion paid to the environmental degradation of the ocean by institutions like
the US Commission on Ocean Policy and the Bush White House and argue that there is no
reason to veer from the present course. Twenty-first century marine environmentalism,
demic generations was a consolation prize. We might have lost politics but we won a lot of the
textbooks.
The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprece-dented victory in helping stop an appalling war,
it then proceeded to commit suicide. The left helped force the United States out of
Vietnam, where the country had no constructive work to doei- ther for Vietnam or for itselfbut did so at
the cost of discon-necting itself from the nation. Most U.S. intellectuals substituted the pleasures
of condemnation for the pursuit of improvement.
The orthodoxy was that the system precluded reformnever mind that the antiwar movement had
already demonstrated that reform was possible. Human rights, feminism, environmentalismthese worldwide initiatives, American in their inception, flowing not from the American Establishment
but from our own American movements, were noises off, not center stage. They
were outsider tastes, the stuff of protest, not national features, the real stuff. Thus when, in the nineties, the
Clinton administra-tion finally mobilized armed force in behalf of Bosnia and then
Kosovo against Milosevics genocidal Serbia, the hard left only could smell imperial motives, maintaining
that democratic, anti-genocidal intentions added up to a paper-thin mask.
In short, if the United States seemed fundamentally trapped in militarist imperialism, its
opposition was trapped in the mir-ror-image opposite. By the seventies the outsider stance had
be-come second nature. Even those who had entered the sixties in diapers came to maturity
thinking patriotism a threat or a bad joke. But anti-Americanism was, and remains, a mood and a
metaphysics more than a politics. It cannot help but see practical politics as an illusion, entangled
as it is and must be with a sys-tem fatally flawed by original sin. Viewing the ongoing politics of
the Americans as contemptibly shallow and compromised, the demonological attitude naturally
rules out patriotic attachment to those very Americans. Marooned (often self-marooned) on university
campuses, exiled in left-wing media and other cultural
outpostsall told, an archipelago of bitternesswhat sealed it- self off in the postsixties decades
was what Richard Rorty has called a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left
which dreams of achieving our country.
and thinking about how to defeat the jihadists, the fundamentalist left had little time, little interest, little hard-headed curiosity
as little as the all-or-nothing theology that justified war against
any evildoers decreed to be such by the forces of good.
Epistemology Correct
Our epistemology is correct we are wired to transcend boundaries
du Toit 11 Professor of Science and Religion at the University of South Africa (Cornelius,
Shifting frontiers of transcendence in theology, philosophy and science, Vol. 67, No.1, Pretoria,
2011, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0259-94222011000100045&script=sci_arttext,
RSpec)
A
revised version of transcendence not only affects the existence and nature of an absolutely transcendent
epistemologies . If crossing
frontiers is a hallmark of human nature , it means we are wired for
transcendence . We not only 'erect' frontiers but also cross them and shift them to accord
with the insights and challenges of our age. Crossing a frontier is not to demolish it but to
shift it after all, new frontiers keep materialising. To some people God must invariably come to
such as fresh insight into our thought processes, philosophies and
humankind perpendicularly from 'above' or from some 'beyond'. But we are only able to conceive of transcendence via our
biological equipment. And even when God is perceived as immanently active in this world, he remains transcendent and
the questions are no different from those asked by people who see him as descending from 'above' or 'beyond'. The
question raised by secular transcendence is not what has replaced transcendence that would mean asking what has
replaced human beings but how the frontiers of the transcendent have shifted in our global, techno-scientific
dispensation.
conglomerate' (Shaw 2000). I argue that 'global' ideas and institutions, whose
significance characterizes the new political era that has opened with the end of
the Cold War, depend largely - but not solely - on Western power. I hold no brief
and intend no apology for official Western ideas and behaviour. And yet I
propose that the idea of a new imperialism is a profoundly misleading,
indeed ideological concept that obscures the realities of power and
especially of empire in the twenty-first century. This notion is an obstacle to
understanding the significance, extent and limits of contemporary Western
power. It simultaneously serves to obscure many real causes of oppression,
suffering and struggle for transformation against the quasi-imperial
power of many regional states. I argue that in the global era, this separation
has finally become critical. This is for two related reasons. On the one hand,
Western power has moved into new territory, largely uncharted -- and I argue
unchartable -- with the critical tools of anti-imperialism. On the other hand, the
politics of empire remain all too real, in classic forms that recall both modern
imperialism and earlier empires, in many non-Western states, and they are
revived in many political struggles today. Thus the concept of a 'new
imperialism' fails to deal with both key post-imperial features of
Western power and the quasi-imperial character of many nonWestern states. The concept overstates Western power and
understates the dangers posed by other, more authoritarian and
imperial centres of power. Politically it identifies the West as the
principal enemy of the world's people, when for many of them there
are far more real and dangerous enemies closer to home. I shall return to
these political issues at the end of this paper.