Exploration/Neolib 1NCs

Coordinated Marine Spatial Planning – MS Lab

1NCSpatial planning reproduces neoliberalism – the aff’s mapping imposes neoliberal subjectivity on oceanic actors, reducing them to rational utility-maximizers – that erases recognition of existing oceanic inequality and prioritizes the zoning priorities of the socially privilegedOlson 10 (Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,” Geoforum, 2010)

These mappings and transformations happen within broader spatial imperatives that are fundamentally reshaping the ocean. The majority of the world’s fisheries are estimated to be fully exploited, overexploited or depleted (FAO, 2007). Political conflict over fisheries pit the many fishermen arguing that fisheries are rebounding against the many fisheries scientists and environmentalists arguing otherwise; many resource-users have demanded a greater voice in the very process of knowledge production, and efforts at co-management, cooperative research, and traditional ecological knowledge point to potential directions such involvement may produce. Yet conventional arguments about the

tragedy of the commons finger the rational, self-interested resource user —economic man of neoclassical economic theory—operating in a socio-ecological environment of incorrect institutional norms and economic incentives. With too many fishermen chasing too few fish in an open sea, such

understandings seek privatizing, neoliberal solutions to fisheries dilemmas —solutions many advocates fear destroy fishing communities and cultures. While this hegemony of bio-economics in fisheries management has been maintained, as St. Martin (2001) argues, through a geographic imagination that places the rationalist and self-interested “economic man” in a spatially homogenous commons,2 the increasing efforts to use area-specific forms of fisheries management signal the potential for a “paradigm shift” from individuals to communities and ecosystems, in which the “promise of GIS” hinges especially on the integration of social and biological data ( St. Martin, 2004). Though the actual practice of ecosystem-based management is still taking shape, its recognition of connections and multiple spatial scales, as well as its use for local knowledge in time and space, may be a way to involve people as members of social groups (rather than simply individuals) more integrally in the management process ( St. Martin et al., 2007 and Clay and Olson, 2008). The actual implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management, some argue, should happen through a planned system of “ocean zoning” that replaces the patchwork of ad hoc, uncoordinated regulations whose goals have been decoupled from a broader notion of the ecosystem that concerns itself as much with sustaining fisheries as “the non-fisheries benefits of marine ecosystems to society” (Babcock et al., 2005, p. 469). As marine biologist Elliot Norse has written, because the ocean has many competing users—“shipping, defense, energy production, telecommunications, commercial fishing, sportfishing, recreational diving, whale watching, pleasure boating, tourism and coastal real estate development”—whose conflicts can lead to resource degradation, zoning provides a solution for it “is a place-based ecosystem management system that reduces conflict, uncertainty and costs by separating incompatible uses and specifying how particular areas may be used” (2002, pp. 53–54). Such a comprehensive system

of zoning is envisioned as a more rational “system of finely specified spatial and temporal property

rights ” (Wilen, 2004). The 2003 Pew Report also mentions “implement[ing] ecosystem-based planning”

in the same breath as zoning, for fisheries management, it argues, should more fully consider context: “incompatible” user conflicts that affect target species (2003, p. 47). Economists who promote zoning

as a way to “account for spatial and intertemporal externalities” picture it reaching its rational

equilibrium through the market, rationing numbers of users in search of a “rent-maximizing equilibrium” (Sanchirico and Wilen, 2005, p. 25), and ultimately creating property rights (Holland, 2004) and stewardship (US Commission on Ocean Policy, 2004, p. 64). Yet while ocean zoning is seen as something of a new solution for marine conflicts, the model of terrestrial zoning upon which it is based is hardly without its critics. Proponents of smart growth, new urbanism, and mixed-use communities have pointed to the myriad problems—including sprawl, traffic, pollution, loss of farmland, and so on—created by separating the activities of daily life. The view that zoning will end conflict assumes that such conflicts center only on doing different things in the same place, while creating zones of “use-priority” areas begs the question of whose values will dictate a given zone’s “most important” activities. As such, conflict may simply be displaced from the ocean to places where

policies are crafted or where their impacts are lived. Indeed scholars have long noted how zoning laws

are colored by cultural ideas (for example, public versus private/domestic space) that are distinctly

bourgeois, raced and gendered and thus favor certain groups of people (Ritzdorf, 1994, Perin, 1977 and LiPuma and Meltzoff, 1997). Some economists have also been critical of marine zoning’s creation of “divided” property rights that do not fully consider “the opportunity costs of foregone production” that might otherwise “maximize joint wealth” ( Edwards, 2000, p. 4). In other words, the “economic benefits” of zoning cannot be assumed for “it is an empirical question whether ocean wealth would be improved”

(ibid, p. 7). A focus on aggregate wealth though leaves unanswered the effect of an initially unequal

distribution of wealth on the prices and outcomes in a market-based economy, as well as the changes in subjectivity and practices that the neoliberalization of resource economies and identities can engender.

The impact is massive environmental destruction and social inequality – imposition of neoliberal landscapes on local landscapes produces fast capitalist extraction and causes displacement and dehumanizationNixon ’11 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)

In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an

official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one ." A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out

there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official landscape -whether

governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those- is typically oblivious to such earlier

maps ; instead, it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner

that is often pitilessly instrumental . Lawrence Summers' scheme to export rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems

inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue, then, that the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted

largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their

official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside

the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales. In the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore resource rebellions

against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human

gain. Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate

deceased. The ensuing losses are consistent with John Berger's lament over capitalism's disdain for

interdependencies by foreshortening our sense of time , thereby rendering the deceased immaterial: The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective. Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of

egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living , who now think of the dead as the eliminated.40 Hence, one should add, our perspective on environmental asset stripping should include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the landscape of multiple generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that entails.

Against this backdrop, I consider in this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements involved in slow violence against the poor thus requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as well. In the chapters that follow, I track the socioenvironmental fallout from developmental agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis dwellers in the Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown destinations so that American petroleum engineers and their sheik collaborators can develop their "finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some dictatorial edict, the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or industrial need) displaces and disperses those who had developed through their vernacular landscapes their own

adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include conservation refugees. Too often in the

global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished communities who have been involuntarily moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision is largely through writers who have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects: either the threatened community capitulates and is scattered (across refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses to move but, as its world is undermined, effectively becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those

communities that are involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words, I

want to propose a more radical notion of displacement , one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and

resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very

characteristics that made it inhabitable .

Alternative text: the judge should vote negative to endorse an ethic of social fleshAn ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmakingBeasley & Bacchi 7

(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)

The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the

basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and

international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of

atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be

acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied

interdependence . By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people

across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-

liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a

politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse

oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently

reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts

into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for

‘altruism’ . Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.

Spatial Planning LinksSpatial planning is a neoliberal tool of the state to produce efficient capital – only reinforces state power over its subjects. Radcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Geo-graphics as a tool of neoliberal statehood: digitalisation and fugitive spaces Despite the transformations in the techniques and embodied knowledges of making maps, the IGM’s stance regarding its role in map-making remains remarkably consistent. The Institute and its supporting institutions project the state as a cartographic corpus serving the rest of the country, a theme that has been present since the IGM’s establishment (Radcliffe

2001). Rather than GIS and geo-information opening up new spaces of socialinteraction, contemporary geo-graphics and cartographic methods compound the national institutional landscape and cartographic authority. National mapping with geographical information systems (sometimes called statistical cartography) creates a

profoundly transformed environment within which national maps are produced and circulated. Moreover mapping is widely debated in the public sphere as national maps are strongly associated with identity and as territorial histories support nationalist narratives. Given GIS’s association with a promise of the expanding amount of information in the public sphere (Pickles 1995), Ecuadorian discourses around the availability of geographic information and cartographic representations has been layered into a discourse about maps’ beneficial purpose. In this setting political economic restructuring combines with the potential spread of national images via computer-based cartography and pedagogy, a widespread discourse around maps has arisen concerning maps’ utility in

management and planning activities. Under neoliberal statecraft, map making and geographical practices are important tools in making the state efficient and effective. Speaking at the Ministry of Environment, one professional

argued that GIS software, GPS and satellite information permitted the state to prioritise its work and spend effectively in the context of limited budgets, as well as guarantee financial transparency (interview

with Manuel Pallares, GIS expert at the Ministry of Environment monitoring unit July 2007).21 It is not only state actors who speak of the availability of geo-informatics as tools in good governance; such views are in fact widespread, being voiced by civil society organisations. As the state is ‘rolled back’ and non-governmental agencies become involved in territorial administration, a non-military set of actors use a wider range of (rapidly changing) technologies for the generation, analysis and cartographic representation of geographical information. What kinds of socio-technical practices and abstractions are

being generated around national maps given geography’s institutionality and neoliberal development? With the rise of NGOs and subcontracting of data collection and cartographic work, neoliberal policy influences national cartographics by demanding greater efficiency. However, this also generates debates around the staffing of GIS jobs, and new patterns of dissemination of spatial information, changes that contribute to a re-calibration of military, state and civil power. In the context of late twentieth-century political economic neoliberal

restructuring, geo-graphic practices are directly involved in state actions to provide monetary efficiency

and financial probity, just as they simultaneously co-produce the rolling-out of cost-cutting agendas.

State and non-governmental actors speak of how computer cartographic systems contribute to and alleviate environmental damage. In urban planning and management, computerbased GIS have all but replaced paper-based cartography and the use of other maps, as GIS offers the possibility of assisting in planning, promoting the ‘logic of [municipal] work for example in [mapping] everyday land-use, soil-cover, urban land-use and zoning etc.’ (interview with Nury Bermu´ dez, director of Research and Planning Unit, Quito Municipality 2007). Professional GIS users inside and outside the state point to the fact that GIS is now used to organise the electricity network (interviews with Pablo Almeida, Director of NGO CDC-Jatun Sacha; Reinaldo Cervantes, GIS expert at SIISE 2007). NGOs using computer-based cartographies of landownership and environmental characteristics view maps as an invaluable tool in devising management plans for territories (interview with Paulina Arroyo, The

Nature Conservancy, Quito 2007).22 Professionals view computer- based spatial information instrumentally, as a technically improved ‘modernised’ tool in the service of the state. For a low-income postcolonial country,

computer-based geo-graphics are positively associated with the possibility of meaningful coordination of public policy making and implementation. Neither the state nor the role of geographic information is questioned in this regard.

Ocean mapping reproduces a neoliberal approach towards oceans – the plan’s spatial mapping commodifies the marine environment, allowing statistical visualization of hidden ocean life to accelerate consumptionOlson 10 (Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,” Geoforum, 2010)

The inability to fix resources in space has been at the heart of many understandings of common property. Mobile resources such as fish have given rise to particularly intractable common-pool problems, for their mobility implies a lack of “excludability (or control of access). That is, the physical nature of the resource is such that controlling access by potential users may be costly and, in the extreme, virtually impossible” (Feeny et al., 1990, p. 3). Not only do fish move but, at least in conventional accounts, so do mobile fishermen, ever seeking highest profit in a rationalist movement through space (e.g. Sanchirico and Wilen, 1999). There are of course fissures in this story, even for such seemingly mobile resources as fish. While rotational management is argued particularly appropriate for semi-sedentary species such as scallops (e.g. Hart, 2003), others similarly contend that locally diverse sub-species, like populations of cod in Norway that follow the ebb and flow of particular fjords and inlets, necessitate more locally-based science and management (e.g. Jorde et al., 2007). Fishermen too, while often portrayed as opportunistically mobile, may have multiple rationalities that inform their fishing practices, including their spatial decision-making (Olson, 2006). My point here is not to counter movement with an equally mythical lack of movement, but rather to ask how forms of resource use—

here especially, fishing or farming the ocean—involve culturally constructed subjectivities , networks of social relations, and spatially grounded knowledge and practice. In the case of contemporary fisheries management, these subjectivities, relations, and knowledge and practice are now increasingly

mediated through technologies like GIS . While mapping and counter-mapping have become more intertwined with stories of common property in general, the case of fisheries poses a double sort of enigma, for not only is there the issue of mobility and excludability in space but there is also the question of visualization, or lack thereof. In Hardin’s classic account of the tragedy of the commons, for example, he asked that we “Picture a pasture open to all” (1968: 1244, italics added), where the herders, herds, and resource degradation are palpable and countable. For fisheries management

however, this has not been such an easy task. The inability to see what is happening has in part

structured the orientation of both fisheries management and biology: stock assessment is a statistical exercise in estimating hidden populations, while management tries to reconcile its strategies around fishermen who might cheat without being seen. Fisheries management, however, has recently begun to take a distinctly visual turn through the use of GIS and other spatial techniques for understanding and monitoring where different resources are and how they are used—not only supporting policy analyses from habitat classification and protection of essential fish habitat, to the social and economic impacts of closed areas ( Meaden, 2000, NOAA, 2004 and St. Martin, 2004), but also

coupled to increasing interest in spatially-based methods of management. What tends to be missing, however, is an appreciation of arguments raised within geography and other social sciences that critique the use of GIS as technologically or socially neutral, or which have conversely grappled with how to use GIS for qualitative and critical approaches to social knowledge.1 The presumed neutrality and objectivity of GIS in fisheries management has not only assumed a sense of “space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naïvely assumed sense of space as emptiness” (Smith and Katz,

1993, p. 75), but has also tended to privilege universal understandings . Thus while the fishery management process has begun to incorporate spatially sensitive analyses into its development of

area-based management, such incorporation has utilized neoliberal constructions of the typical

fisherman that are challenged by more nuanced notions of fishing and resource dependence . New directions in the mapping of scallops that focus on crucial habitat and life cycle issues, for example, promise changes both in the science underlying fisheries management and in management itself by better directing fishing effort to particular places and by better understanding the conditions for resource enhancement through seeding, which at first glance recalls the warnings from early GIS critics

that digital maps would serve to create or reinforce relations of power through the discovery of new

things or people to exploit (Schuurman, 2000, p. 580). Yet as this reframing of resources from fishing to farming intersects with an increasing interest in aquaculture (where the idea of farming is obviously more explicit), it becomes clear that while ideas about property can be more easily enrolled into neoliberal discourses that commodify resource relations, transformations from fishing to farming also enable alternative projects through their articulation with cultural practices and processes. This includes

the differential spatial practices of often smaller-scale fishermen as well as community-based

interests in scallop seeding, who have sought—quite literally—to sow the seeds of community stability and, in the process, resist and redefine the terms of neoliberal market logic. This paper thus considers the differing worldviews, practices, and spatialities among and between so-called highliners and small-scale fishermen, fishers and farmers of scallops, different resource-users and the scientists who map them, and the radically new forms of economic practice and sustainability that inhere, potentially, in different uses and forms of maps and spatial knowledge, looking in particular at US Federal management of Sea Scallops, a Canadian example of a private-state partnership, and community-based seeding efforts in Downeast Maine.

2NC FWMapping constructs our understanding of the world through the view of the enduring hegemonic nation state – only engaging in a postcolonial critical geography moves us out of reach of the state’s cartographic practicesRadcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Geography and mapping are now widely recognised to comprise a tool in statecraft (Anderson 1991; Hoosen 1994; Craib 2004). Maps’ social constructedness – and the naturalisation of their production – is now a commonplace in critical geography and cartography (Harley 2001; Pickles 2004). However, the connection between contemporary processes of mapping and maps’ naturalization in modern nationhood – that is, maps of national territory represented in outline without longitude, geophysical features or neighbouring countries, yet still ‘read’ as referring to national territory and evoking national sentiment (Anderson 1991) – has attracted surprisingly little attention (important exceptions are Hoosen 1994; Sparke 2005). Drawing on critical mapping studies and histories of geography as a science, this paper examines how the mapping of national space is bound up with and co-constitutes statehood and national identity. National maps exert a powerful hold over Ecuador’s understandings of development and statehood, despite neoliberal reforms and the digitalisation of geographical information. Although states tend to create distinctive geographical disciplines within their borders, the ways in which they do so and the global networks they appropriate ⁄ are appropriated by, speak to the possibility of a critical account of nationalist mapping that goes beyond a placeless disciplinary history, or an account of nation-states’ instrumental use of geography (Livingstone 1992; Harley 2001; Hoosen 1994). When conceived as a science, geography engages in the organisation of institutions such as a state through its mapping activities, personnel and institutions around claims to knowledge by differentiating between that which is represented and named, and what is excluded (Harley 2001). Accordingly, maps and map-makers work within a certain horizon of possibilities framed conceptually and institutionally by (largely) state institutions precisely in order to establish the nation-state and its territory as self-evident, hegemonic and enduring. Teodoro Wolf’s nineteenth-century map of independent Ecuador, for instance, represented a unitary territory, just as it silenced the profound regionalist tensions threatening to pull the newborn republic apart (Padro´n 1998; also Deler 1981). Poststructuralist accounts of national geographies ⁄ geographers that include the documentation and analysis of interweaving institutions, actors and techniques of national mapping assist our understanding of the explicit and implicit factors behind mapping’s selective uses and forms. Such approaches resonate with critical geographical approaches that view cartography ‘as processual rather than representational . . . emerging through practices (embodied, social, technical)’ (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 331). Mapping practices depend upon learned knowledge and skills for their production and in their reading as ‘maps are interpreted, translated and made to do work’ (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 335; also Dodge et al 2008; Crampton 2009). The paper offers an account of how national representation and ‘scientific’ criteria become entangled with rapidly shifting political economic and technological change to produce new cartographic practices and meanings.1 As a set of practices that incrementally accumulate particular types of spatially organised knowledge as the basis for the nation-

state’s power–knowledge relations, geography emerged during the nineteenth century as an increasingly disciplined and disciplinary enterprise. In postcolonial states, maps of not-quite national territories could be drawn and distributed in struggles for independence as an anticipatory claim to colonial and then postcolonial territorial sovereignty (Anderson 1991, 173–8; Craib 2000; Harley 1992; Scott 2006).2 In Latin America, early nineteenth-century independence entailed the establishment of geography as a discipline involving a set of individual and institutionalised actors, whose outputs were used to underpin state rule as well as inculcate national imaginative geographies in citizens’ minds (on Latin America, see Escude´ 1988; Escolar et al. 1994; Radcliffe 2001; Craib 2004). By means of their abstractions, national maps ‘help create the effect of the state as a reified apparatus’ while simultaneously concealing its precariousness (Sparke 2005, 10). Yet both geography and postcolonial nation-states continue to be continuously transformed, not least by changes in the forms of political and economic governance, the shifting nature of national identities, and the ongoing proliferation of geographical technologies. Connections between mapping and national geographies are neither static nor completely free-floating, suggesting the need for a contextualised analysis of geography’s practices, power and knowledges. Analytically, cartography has been re-cast ‘as a broad set of spatial practices’ beyond professional cartographers and their institutions (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 337). Although recognising that critical geographical studies of mapping are informed by various theoretical and epistemological traditions,3 my starting point in this paper is on the practice based approaches to mapping (Kitchen and Dodge 2007; Kitchen 2008) as a route into understanding the shifting nature of postcolonial statehood. In line with the ethnographic methods used, I focus here on how the practices of actors and institutions continuously cite previous maps, whereby particular geographical practices and their cartographic results become hegemonic through repetition. Conceiving of maps’ power in terms of how they relate to hegemonic relations, this paper also traces how new practices and agendas reorient the ties between national maps and state power, arising as they do out of the contested performative naturalisation and slippages associated with cartographic practices. What happens in a specific nation-state when ‘spatial practices’ are received and utilised by a group of actors and institutions beyond the reach of state-based cartographic institutions? Ecuador’s history of geography over the past two decades points to a specific shift in the configuration of technical, institutional and embodied relations between professional (military, state) geographies and citizens, between state and nation. Described as ‘a boom in geography’ and informed by a changing sense of geography’s practices, purposes and users, a shift has occurred in the production and representations of national maps. However, maps have retained the power to silence ⁄ make visible and remain couched in terms of territorial and cartographic nationalism. Understanding this context requires a postcolonial discussion of democratisation and the concomitant reduction in military state power, international development cooperation, and changing geographical tools (including GPS and GIS [for all acronyms, see Table I]).4

2NC Serial Policy FailureNeoliberal spatial planning ensures error replication because it reduces the ocean to human representations of it – be suspicious of their impacts because they reduce ecological relations to commodity relationsSteinberg 13 (Philip E. Steinberg 13 – PhD from Clark University & Professor of Critical Geography at Florida State University , “Of the seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions”, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Volume 10, Number 2, 4/29/2013)

Ocean region studies have their origins in an explicit questioning of the assumption that the land-based region is the appropriate scope for conducting social analysis. In History departments, in particular, where academic positions are routinely connected with a specific region and a specific era (e.g. nineteenth-century Latin Americanist), scholars who have sought to define regions by oceans of interaction rather than continents of settlement and governance have had to directly challenge the disciplinary establishment.36 And yet, the regionalization of the sea itself is rarely interrogated. As Martin Lewis demonstrates, the boundaries, definitions, and namings of ocean regions have been highly variable (and, at times, quite arbitrary).37 Likewise, the lines that divide ocean regions on a contemporary legal map of the sea defining territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic

zones, the High Seas, etc. hide as much as they obscure . From the Papal Bull of 1493 that purportedly divided the ocean between Spain and Portugal to the zones ascribed to the ocean by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the history of the ocean is filled with attempts to mark off

its spaces, if not as claimable territory then at least as zones where certain activities , by certain

actors, are permitted and others are prohibited . And yet, even when the locations of the lines are clear and communicated (which, in fact, is often not the case), their meanings are worked out only through social practices. In particular, because the ocean is characterized by overlapping zonations (from the legal regions prescribed by UNCLOS to cultural understandings of regional seas to zones of geophysical interactivity and animal migrations), efforts at understanding an ocean event or image by

‘‘locating’’ it in an ocean region are likely to rest on simplified notions of the relationship between

boundaries and events . More often than not, the definition and boundaries of an ocean region are defined by how it is practiced through the reproduction of a regional assemblage, and not the other way around.38 In short, just as ocean-region-based studies must take heed of the uniquely fluvial nature of the ocean that lies at the center of an ocean region, so they must also account for the fluidity of the lines that are drawn around and within the region. Again, this is not a problem unique to maritime regions; many pages in geography textbooks have been written that expound on where the boundaries of a specific region are (or where they should be), while more enlightened scholars have stressed that such questions cannot be answered objectively. Nonetheless, here too the ocean is an extreme case: lines drawn in and around ocean regions often take on an out- sized level of authority because they are so self-evidently divorced from the matter that is experienced by those who actually inhabit the environment. In the ocean, humans’ ability to physically transform space through line drawing is exceptionally limited.39 Therefore, lines in the ocean speak not with the authority of a geophysicality that cannot be fully grasped but with the authority of a juridical system that conceivably can.40 The danger, then, is that the maritime region, although born out of a critique of the idea that the world consists of stable, bounded places where ‘‘society’’ is an explanatory variable, could itself emerge as

an organizing trope that, through geographic shorthand, obscures the contested and dynamic nature

of social processes and functions . As an ‘‘inside-out’’ version of the continental region, such a maritime region, like the faux-heterotopic cruise ship critiqued by Harvey, would reverse our sense of the elements and highlight some social processes (connections, migrations) over others (state-formation, settlement), but it would fall short of a fundamental epistemological revolution. ‘‘And what,’’ to quote Harvey again, ‘‘is the critical, liberatory and emancipatory point of that?’’41 Geographers have long struggled with this problem: How can the region be employed as a concept for understanding interactions and processes (within and across its borders) without assigning it existential, pre-social properties of explana- tion? In their attempts at finding solutions, geographers have turned to a range of philosophical and mathematical approaches. Some have emphasized the ways in which space is co-constitutive with time while others have sought to adopt a topological perspective in which scale (and the attendant property of spatiality) is always both internal and external to the object being ‘‘located,’’ so that different scales cannot be ordered in a hierarchical, stable manner.42 There are potentially fruitful overlaps between this dynamic approach to space (and borders and regions) and the Lagrangian approach to fluid dynamics outlined in the previous section of this paper. In both instances, scholars abandon attempts at finding stable metrics that can fix and organize spaces and the activities that transpire within and instead turn their attention to the processes that are continually constructing spatial patterns, social institutions, and socio-natural hybrids. As I have 162 P.E. Steinberg Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 06:57 15 July 2014 discussed, this approach is particularly pertinent to the study of ocean regions. By turning to the fluidity of the ocean that lies in the middle of the ocean region, we can gain new perspectives not just on the space that unites the region but on space itself and how it is

produced (and reproduces itself) within the dynamics of spatial assemblages . Looking at the world from an ocean-region-based perspective thus becomes a means not just for highlighting a new series of

global processes and connections, but a means for transforming the way we view the world as a

whole .

2NC AltAlternative can result in decentralization of cartography – resolves the linksRadcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Whereas in previous decades, military cartography was established and maintained through the professional training and specialisation of staff who came to embody map skills and knowledge, the recent trend is for the reorganisation of training to involve a broader group in civil society.

Cartographic and GIS expertise in this sense has become one of a portfolio of skills held by individuals and organisations outside the IGM and its partner institutions. For example, Quito’s municipal employees receive

training in GIS because not many have relevant skills, as also occurs in non-metropolitan municipalities (interview with Bermu´ dez 2007). In the Ministry of Agriculture’s SIGAGRO, team members have to learn GIS and cartographic skills on the job from each other, although formal training is also available (interview with Herna´n Vela´squez, director of GIS, Ministry of

Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fishing, Quito 2007). The Ministry of Environment project required an extensive period of training, as the skills base was not available (interview with Pen˜ afiel 2007). The trend is towards establishing a broader

range of expertise in GIS among civil servants and NGO staff. The boom in non-military geographies encouraged in turn the creation of university courses. Recent years have seen the rise of public and private universities offering courses in GIS, geography and environment, including the post-1989 Catholic University programme in geography

and environment, and since the 1990s University San Francisco and Central University (also Lopez 2008).23 The embodied knowledge held by individuals thus becomes more diffusely distributed through Ecuadorian governance structures. For example, Quito municipality gives on-the-job training to university students (interview with

Bermu´ dez 2007). The proliferation of new circuits by which geographical and mapping information is passed on, circulated and deployed has created new challenges for the state in its efforts to retain its discursive and practice-based centrality in cartography. IGM uses a discourse of ‘outreach’ in attempts to create a

contingent coalition of actors and institutions (including civilians) in order to complete the national geospatial information database. Its

discourse highlights the need for ‘coordination’ between different actors who collect geo-referenced

data and create maps, so it has expressed a public interest in ‘exchanging data’ on place names and

geophysical features in order to keep its national base cartography up-to-date and correct (Workshop

Roundtable 2008). The Geographical Military Institute’s spatial data infrastructure is also presented as an enterprise that depends upon a broad social commitment. ‘It has to be a great political will, a strong disposition among all public and private institutions [for the geomatics project] to

succeed’, according to a representative (Workshop Roundtable 2008). Again such debates occur in relation to an implicit national space, with the emphasis on sharing among the Ecuadorian public. With democratisation and rapid technological change, the military-state cartographic institutions cannot be seen to block the creation of geographical knowledge in civil society. Yet the Institute retains a concern to be involved in these new

networks. The decentering of state-military cartographies and the expansion of civil geographical knowledges reorient debates about the circulation of map-related information in ways that reflect reworked relations of power and the demand from an increasingly assertive civil society. Whereas national maps would previously have passed through the Geographical Military Institute’s normalisation department, today the pressure is on to disseminate the results of its cartographic practices to civil society. Informed public discourse views geographical information and maps as goods that should be widely available. The Institute’s selective release of information is increasingly being questioned, as commentators

argue that the ‘IGM has to be a fundamental part of giving information to improve the country’ (Mario Bustos, map editor at the indigenous federation ECUARUNARI, at roundtable discussion 2008). Likewise, the GIS Director at the Ministry of Agriculture adopts a language of open

access: ‘this information [on our website] is free to any researcher to use’ (interview with Vela´squez, SIGAGRO 2007). Civil servants who use GIS and geographical information for making maps consistently speak in public and private about the urgency of getting geographical information onto the web, and into publications.24 Such views resonate with neoliberal precepts of good governance, which in their more technical guise transform state practices into procedural routines with a veneer of transparency and scrutiny. In this sense, the state discourse on dissemination is not so much a radical reorientation in policy but an alignment with good governance principles. By contrast, other users of geographical information articulate a more politically grounded account of the ways in which geo-graphics can circulate and what they mean.25 According to one civil society user of maps, the ‘state needs to coordinate and be more inclusive. We [Ecuadorians] are all participants, are part of the state’ (Workshop Roundtable 2008; similar points emerged in interviews with staff at Ministry of Environment and the state statistical service). Civil users of geographical information recently critiqued Ecuador’s institutionalised cartography, bringing into question its historic arrangements.26 Poor relations between state geographers and civil society have, according to commentators, broken down trust with the IGM standing accused of maintaining a highly centralised and inappropriately ‘territorialist’ attitude. One geographer who had to coordinate with IGM complained of the ‘worst possible relations’. Procedurally too, civil actors critique the overbureaucratic state

system. Civilian and indeed other state actors fault the IGM for its slow turnaround, and the bureaucratic hurdles in its geographical and cartographic divisions.27 Civilian administration of map-making would, critics argue, permit ‘the creation [of] not only geographical information but up-to-date products for all institutions in the country, public and private’ (Workshop Roundtable 2008; original emphasis).

Following a political agenda at odds with the state-centred system, certain geographers have opted to move into other mapping activities tied more to civil projects. For instance, a young geographer completing his ESPE thesis found it difficult to bridge the gap between ‘GIS and people and the environment’, so he did participatory mapping with local activists.28 Several professionals have left core institutions, citing a failure to engage critically with social issues and the overly technical training (interviews with Fabricio, an ESPE-trained geographer now working for FEPP 2007 and Andre´s Andrango, Kitu Kara representative on National Indigenous Development Council, Quito July 2007 [cf. Radcliffe 2007]). In one case a senior ESPE geographer resigned after 15 years, unhappy with its ‘sterile’ approach. Similarly, a geographer trained in remote sensing and GIS left CLIRSEN in 1995 because he wanted to ‘give more back to society’ (interview with Guevarra 2007).

AT PermThe permutation links or its severance – mapping is a cultural process and the aff’s justifications shape its direction and assumptions – force them to defend their justifications as an intrinsic part of the mapping processForest and Forest 12

(Benjamin Forest, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, McGill University, and Patrick Forest, Member, Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University, “Engineering the North American waterscape: The high modernist mapping of continental water transfer projects,” Political Geography, Volume 31, Issue 3, March 2012)

It is now a commonplace claim in critical cartography that maps both reflect and inform power relations (Black, 1997; Kitchin, 2010; Pickles, 1992, 2004). That is, maps are neither objective representations of knowledge, nor are they “objective form[s] of knowledge” (Harley, 1989, 1). Maps are texts that must be read, interpreted, and deconstructed in order to understand their discursive role. Maps are socially embedded, reflecting values, norms and judgments from the context from which they emerged (Kitchin & Dodge, 2007, 332). They help establish authority (Edsall, 2007, 36) and prioritize certain propositions or conceptions over others. This is not to say that maps are always “read” in the ways intended by their authors, or that they have the intended effects. Indeed, the illustration of a continental waterscape could provoke strong negative reactions from Canadians objecting to “their” water being diverted to the south. Negative reactions in particular, however, rely on the ability of the audience to “read” the political intent of a map. One might object, for example, to the ostensible purpose of a map illustrating the transfer of water from Canadian to U.S. territory, while at the same time accepting an implicit message about human control over nature. In short, maps form the major part of the water transfer proposals’ visual rhetoric, and, like many maps, are designed explicitly to advance their authors' agenda. More subtly, these maps exemplify a high modernist or engineering vision of space and nature, where actions and consequences can be controlled and predicted precisely.8 As Kirsch (2005, 2) observes about a map of the nuclear excavation of a proposed Central American canal, “The map’s greatest conceit…was the illusion of technical control that it evokes: the very idea that fallout sectors could be accurately drawn on a map before being produced in the landscape, and that evacuation areas….could be determined so precisely.” Similarly, a map illustrating the proposed nuclear excavation of a canal to link the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers in the U.S. omits the Mississippi River entirely (Kirsch, 2005, 164)! We develop these insights in detail for our own case study. The reports on continental water transfers and publications supporting them contain maps that constitute a visual rhetoric in support of the plans (Albery, 1966; Kierans, 1964; J. H. J. Smith, 1969; Special subcommittee on western water development of the committee on public works, 1964; The Ralph M. Parsons Company, 1964). These maps, above all, promoted a vision of nature and progress that is deeply entrenched in the perception of humans as engineers of the world, able to (re)shape and control the continental waterscape for their own benefit through technology. We argue that some of the features of these maps were deliberate decisions on the part of the mapmakers, e.g., the relative faintness of international boundaries. Other elements arose from the constraints of cartographic representation rather than strategic decisions per se, e.g., the representation of channels as unrealistically straight lines. In the former case, the political intent is relatively easy to infer, while

in the latter case, the logic of cartographic representation reinforces the hubristic assumptions necessary to attempt to re-engineer the continental waterscape.

Bio-D Advantage LinksConservation projects with alarmist justifications are ruses for neoliberal expansionism and control of the environment – guarantees that the aff fails.Büscher et al. 12 (Bram, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington, Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012)//rh

Among critics of the neoliberal “project,” however, there is a notable absence of this kind of analysis with regards to conservation. David

Harvey (2003, 166-168), for example, tends to view environmental conservation as providing alternatives that actively counter neoliberal capitalism. In The New Imperialism, his list of struggles against accumulation by dispossession is also a litany of

environmental protest. Yet he only glancingly acknowledges that peasants might be dispossessed from their land as effectively for a national park as by a new sheep run. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he describes a

“sprawling environmental movement hard at work 3 promoting alternative visions of how to better connect political and ecological projects” without tracing the complex politics that tie some elements of this movement firmly into mainstream political economy (Harvey 2005, 186; Dowie 2006). He does clearly recognize the role of NGOs in promoting neoliberalism but does not mention conservation NGOs among their number (Harvey 2005, 177). Indeed, conservation does not

appear in these books as a focus of interest. The casting of almost any form of conservation as progressively

opposed to the forces creating environmental crisis is especially problematic when an alarmist

language of crisis is used to justify policies and practices that are injurious to local livelihoods (often in the name of capturing landscapes for environmental conservation) (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Mearns

1996; Stott and Sullivan 2000).5 Crisis-driven critiques also often miss the larger point that environmental (and other) crises increasingly are themselves opportunities for capitalist expansion. Martin O’Connor thus writes in

1994 that “environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life. Now, through purporting to take in hand the saving of the environment, capitalism invents a new legitimation for itself: the sustainable and rational use of nature” (O’Connor 1994, 125- 126). So, while conservation conventionally is

conveyed as something different, as “saving the world” from the broader excesses of human impacts under capitalism, in actuality it functions to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic possibilities for capitalist expansion. Markets expand as the very resolution of environmental crises that other market forces

have produced. Capitalism may well be the Enemy of Nature, as Kovel so aptly put it. Conserving nature, paradoxically, seems

also to have become the friend of capitalism. Thus we see that 1) conservation is vitally important to capitalism; and 2) that this importance is often not recognized. These are compelling reasons for a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. In the next section we explain more clearly our emphasis on neoliberal conservation, before attempting to pull together the threads of critique in such a way as to clarify key concerns and positions. 2Why Focus on

Neoliberal Conservation? One of neoliberalism’s raison-d’être’s is to expand and intensify global capitalism

(Harvey 2005). Capitalism, in turn, is at the heart of the dramatic ecological changes and crises unleashed in the last two centuries (O’Connor 1998; Foster 2007; Kovel 2002; Burkett 2006).6 With the rise of capitalism, the means for, scale of,

and drive towards ecosystem transformation has grown dramatically. In dialectical interaction with technological developments and the intensification of colonial extraction (amongst other factors), emerging capitalist societies became more adept at “offsetting” local and regional ecological transformations extra-locally and extra-regionally, hence laying the foundations for ecological crisis on a world-scale, or a “crisis in the world-ecology,” as Moore (2010) puts it. Across space (extensification) and within spaces (intensification), capitalism has disrupted and changed the metabolism of ecological processes and connections (Kovel 2002, 82). Bearing in mind our comments on environmental crises

above, here we emphasize two key aspects of capitalism’s propensity to stimulate large-scale ecological crises. The first has to do with the

nature of ecological crisis. Diversity, connectivity and relationships are crucial for the resilience of ecosystems. Ecology 101 teaches students that “everything hangs together with everything else,” which is both the reason why studying

ecosystems is both such a joy and so complex. Capitalism’s drive to turn everything into exchange value (into commodities that can be traded) cuts up these connections and relationships in order to produce, sell and consume their constituent elements. Hence, as Kovel (2002, 130-131) shows, capitalism “separates,” “splits” and—because in principle everything can be bought and or sold—“alienates” and estranges. To further bring conservation into capitalism, then, is to lay bare the various ecosystemic threads and linkages so that they can be further subjected to separation, marketization and alienation, albeit in the service of conservation rhetoric. The second point has to do with the nature of capital, which, as Marx (1976, 256) pointed out, is “value in process, money in process: it comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation,

emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again.” Capital is always on the move; if it ceases to move and circulate, the whole system is threatened. The recent financial crisis has made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich countries were primarily concerned with making sure that banks would start lending again

in order to get money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, striving continuously to bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including natural worlds at multiple scales.7 Making

clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to

conserve its services, then, is not just about trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adagio “payments for environmental services” would have it. It is about finding new arenas for markets to

operate in and thus to expand the remit, and ultimately the circulation of capital. Payments go to those able

to capture them, rather than directly to nature, and this explains why conservation responses to ecological crises, although popularly understood as in contestation to the environmental effects of capitalism, now are providing such fruitful avenues for further capitalist expansion (Sullivan 2010). One of the key ways in which this has occurred has been through infusing conservation policy and practice with the analytical tools of neoliberal economics, without recognizing that these are themselves infused with, and reinforce, particular ideological positions regarding human relationships with each other as well as with non-human natures. It is to this point that we now turn.

Marine conservation ensures ecological destruction – it arbitrarily cordones off specific environmental spaces as intrinsically valuable, sacrificing all other ocean space as exploitable resourceSullivan 11 [Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, Bath Spa University, “Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation” July 2011 http://siansullivan.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cns-paper-final-july2011.pdf]//kevin

In this article we have sought to come to a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. We hope to have delineated neoliberal conservation both as inherent to broader capitalist processes, and as a particular set of governmentalities that seeks to extend and police profitable commodification processes based on artificial and arbitrary separations of human society from biodiverse-rich (non-human) natures. In thereby producing territories that are suitable for its own expansion, neoliberal conservation intervenes in diverse biocultural systems around the world, displacing, enclosing, commodifying, spectacularizing these into the idealized natures that are to be saved (Igoe 2010). In neoliberal conservation, then, globally diverse actors produce proliferating and profitable commodities that rely on surprisingly similar packages of ideologies and practices,

premised on constructed distinctions between human and non-human natures, while ironically

promising the opposite to (normally non-local) consumers in the form of closer contact and intimacy with nature. As extended in Bruno Latour’s recent work (2004; 2005; 2010), what concerns us here are the sorts of socionatures—the sorts of assemblages of human and non-human natures—that thereby are composed and brought forth. We are interested in what these tend to

include and enhance, and what these tend to demote and discard. Notwithstanding the generative and creative excitement of capitalist productive forms (as noted above), we maintain that significant alienations and socio-ecological degradations are thereby sustained. Non-human natures tend to be flattened and deadened into abstract and conveniently incommunicative and inanimate objects, primed for commodity capture in service to the creation of capitalist value. This extends a utilitarian construction of a passive nature as an object (of many objects) that is external and distant in relation to human presence and use. Similarly, the knowledge and value practices of diverse peoples frequently are displaced to make way for a neoliberal opening and pricing of land and “resources” as these are recomposed in service to neoliberalism via conservation. The peoples thereby affected become constrained to participate in and benefit from neoliberal conservation initiatives to the extent that they accept associated opportunities and compensation only in particular economic terms. The hegemonic edge of this contraction of possibilities is felt in both the biopolitical (self-)disciplining necessitated by participation in such neoliberal assemblages (Norgaard 2010); and in the suppression of alternative value practices and dissent experienced by those contesting the socionatures that tend to be assembled through neoliberal conservation. We maintain and hope, therefore, that this is an arena ripe for change in effecting transition to a world that, as Adams and Jeanrenaud (2008) put it, is both humane and diverse. We offer this consolidated critique as a gesture to affirm that such change requires nuanced understanding of the contexts and assumptions that are generating problems. As T.J. Laughlin wrote in 1892 in the introductory piece to the Journal of Political Economy: It becomes very clear that possibility of change implies a knowledge of the thing to be changed; that a knowledge of the existing economic system is a condition precedent to any ethical reforms. Certain impatient people find it difficult to wait to acquire the knowledge of what is; and,

unequipped, proceed rashly to say what ought to be. Any transformative alternatives to systemic socio-environmental problems, thus of necessity, will be mediated through the political economy from which they have emerged, and are not predisposed to “quick fix” solutions within the structural contexts that generate such apparently structural problems. We hope with this article to have drawn out some reasons why the

deployment of political economic structures that have produced such systemic problems may, in fact, not be the most logical means of solving these same problems. We also hope to have illuminated some of the ideological reasons as to why the neoliberalizing of environmental conservation is so opaque and seductive to those involved with conservation work. In thinking about future directions, we are inspired by Latour’s recent “Compositionist Manifesto” in which he proposes the concept of “composition” to represent the possibility for recycling critique and putting it to creative uses. To follow Latour’s (2010) metaphor, critique can be wielded like a sledge hammer, which can “break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices.” All of these things we have sought to achieve, and hopefully with some success. But the space we have opened in the process is sullied by the remnants of these things. Like broken bits of concrete and plaster on the floor, and dust in the air, all this makes it a difficult space to inhabit. How can we further clear the air and recycle this rubble? How can we also recycle the tools of critique, as Latour proposes, into ones that can “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, and stitch together.” How is it possible, in other words, to compose more equitable and ecologically healthy compositions of human and more-than-human nature(s) in a world characterized by Latour (2010, 485) as having “no future but many prospects?”

Methane Hyrdates Adv Link Securitizing against oil dependence is the product of hegemonic knowledge production and constructs the ocean space only in the terms of resourceMartens 11 (Emily - MA in Geography and Regional Studies – University of Miami, “The Discourses of Energy and Environmental Security in the Debate Over Offshore Oil Drilling Policy in Florida,” Open Access Theses, 5-10, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1253&context=oa_theses, JS)

I begin by looking at how ocean space is constructed as a result of perceptions about its utility to society. Social constructions of the ocean’s position in relation to the ¶ social sphere, as well as its perceived utility, serve as a prominent

point of departure for ¶ the security discourses analyzed later on. The dominant energy security discourse seeks to maintain the ocean as a source of resources and wealth accumulation external and resistant to socialization, while simultaneously promoting a sense of national security through attempts to reduce dependence on oil imports by increasing domestic production. ¶ On the other hand, offshore oil drilling opponents, who have adopted an environmental security discourse, have a negative reaction to expanded offshore oil drilling as it signifies a threat to the long-term environmental sustainability and commercial interests that depend on an ocean free of dangerous pollutants. The opposition attempts to reconstruct the ocean as a pristine environment, an essential element in the Earth’s ¶ ecosystem as well as coastal tourism and fishing industries, while simultaneously ¶ promoting a counter-hegemonic energy security by advocating for alternative fuels. The ¶ discussion regarding the construction of the ocean in Chapter 2 uses a historical optic ¶ through which one can view the

evolution of ocean space in its relationship with human ¶ society. More importantly it looks at how perceptions and representations of ocean space inform how policy is made and how States, as the sources of legitimate territorial jurisdiction, manage to acquire and secure ocean territory in order to utilize it for exclusive resource exploitation. ¶ Chapter 3 and 4 look at the historical evolution of energy security and ¶ environmental security in relation to offshore oil drilling first at the level of the federal ¶ state (chapter 3) and then at the level of the state of Florida (chapter 4), with the aim of ¶ deconstructing the discourses in the historical contexts from which they emanate. The ¶

1970s mark a key turning point for, if not the initial emergence in the United States of ¶ concerns about environmental

sustainability as well as concerns about the foreign oil ¶ supplies. The analysis focuses on the articulation of concerns

about oil dependence and environmental protection in the speeches of United States Presidents as a

representation of hegemonic policy discourse. This is important beyond the discursive level, at the level of policy making, because US presidents have the power to directly appoint key decision-makers, such as the Secretary of the Interior – the department which then appoints the ¶ head of the Minerals Management Service which is in charge of leasing, overseeing and ¶ collecting revenues from the oil industry – the Secretary of Energy, and the Director of ¶ the Environmental Protection Agency. These appointed officials are in charge of the agencies that implement policy and oversee compliance with regulations in the area of ¶ offshore oil drilling. Therefore, the sentiments towards offshore oil drilling that are held ¶ by the president tend to reflect those held by these appointed leaders and dictate ¶ regulations and how

strictly they will be enforced. The discourses of US presidents on energy and environmental security are what Wolford (2010: 8) calls “strategic essentialisms”, “intentional simplifications of an otherwise complex subject for the purposes of democratic engagement.” Engagement in what? Thus, the primary question ¶ behind the discursive analysis I exercise in chapters 3 and 4 is: in the discourse on energy ¶ and environmental security, what is it that needs to be made secure, why does it need to ¶ be secured, and what are the potential threats to its security?

The quest for oil turns oil into a security threat that has no impact on people. That securitization views the oil spills and results a separate process, divorceed from the drilling itself. Viewing it like that ignores the ways in which the oil affects people. Mayer, Maximilian, and Peer Schouten. "Energy Security and Climate Security under Conditions of

the Anthropocene." Energy Security in the Era of Climate Change (2011): 13-35.

Assembling environmental security Environmental security is qualitatively different from energy security in so far as it does not represent a single parsimonious global assemblage. Instead, it points to the competition between interest groups that are differently affected by energy production processes such as mining, drilling or energy-related development projects (Peluso and Watts, 2001). The many cases of environmental securitizations thus present us with a more diffuse and con-fused array of matters of concern, ranging from local and transnational competing interest groups to wildlife diversity and the preservation of the 'Gold Coast' of Califorg€1. They dissolve the rational language of resource supply and demand intera wide array of affected contradicting interests of humans, animals and whole ecosystems. By giving these actors a voice, envi-ronmental securitizations are assemblages revolving around different matters of concern. The US reactions to the huge underwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in May 2010 perfectly illustrate how energy and environmental security are at once linked and at odds. First, a draft climate bill which was to encourage oil drilling In US territory was hastily revised to take the opposing posi-tion (Broder, 2010b). Second, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger halted oil exploration projects along the Californian Coast stating his most pressing concerns on television: ¶ All of you have seen when you turn on the television the devastation in the Gulf. And I'm sure that they also were assured that it Is safe to drill. I see on TV the birds drenched in oil, the fishermen out of work, the massive oil spill, oil slick destroying our precious ecosystem. It will not happen here in California. (Rothfeld, 2010)¶ The sort of environmental security Schwarzenegger evokes here concerns oil, but it assembles it differently and draws in more elements than energy security does — including for instance birds, fisherman and the ecosystem. Instead of aggregate national concerns, it brings to the fore many of the con-sequences of oil production that are otherwise silenced. As such, it exposes matters of fact that are silenced by the energy security agenda and makes them matters of concern. Whereas the environmental security agenda is often treated as a separate concern from the energy security agenda, this example shows how environmental security Is literally attached to the same assemblage of drilling platforms and submarine ecologies as energy security —an assemblage that Is differently enrolled by invoking environmental con-cerns. To put it differently, the Whig off the Gulf Coast, which had previously been a smooth-functioning technical element in an energy security assem-blage, was revealed to be an unstable network of elements that could not simply be transposed to the Californian coast without possibly unacceptable environmental costs.¶ Where environmental securitisations gain in inclusiveness and symmetry vis-a-vis energy securitisations of related assemblages of elements, they point to much less straightforward policy agendas. The notion of 'security' under-pinning environmental security is much less wedded to the policy-ready state centrism underpinning energy security. For instance, an environmen-tal securitisation of the Arctic region extends the perspective from that of a single state to that of a hybrid referent object (consisting of biodiver-sity, indigenous people and mankind through potentially rising sea levels) threatened by crude oil production, industrial pollution and rising local temperatures (Martello, 2008; Kristoffersen and Young, 2010).

Renewable Energy Adv LinksRenewables production reproduces a neoliberal approach to ecology – energy efficiency savings ensure excess consumption and are re-invested to expand productionFoster et al 10

(John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett Clark, asst prof of sociology @ NC-State, Richard York, associate prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, The Ecological Rift, pgs. 183-191)

Eco-Efficiency of National Economies Stephen Bunker, an environmental sociologist, found that over a long stretch of recent history, the world economy as a whole showed substantial improvements in resource efficiency (economic output per unit of natural resource), but that the total resource consumption of the global economy continually escalated. Similarly, recent research has shown that at the national level, high levels of affluence are, counter intuitively, associated with both greater eco-efficiency—GDP output per unit of ecological footprint—of the economy as a whole and with a higher per capita ecological footprint, suggesting that empirical conditions characteristic of the Jevons Paradox often may be applicable to the generalized aggregate level. Indeed, this type of pattern appears to be quite common. Statistical analyses using elasticity models of the effect of economic development (GDP per capita) on environmental impacts, such as carbon dioxide emissions, have shed light on the relationship between efficiency and total environmental impact. With such a model, an elasticity coefficient for GDP per capita (which

indicates the percentage increase in the environmental impact of nations for a 1 percent increase in GDP per capita) of between 0 and 1 (indicating a positive inelastic relationship) implies a condition where the aggregate eco-efficiency of the economy improves with development but the expansion of the economy exceeds improvements in efficiency, leading to a net increase in

environmental impact. This type of research does not establish a causal link between efficiency and total environmental impact or resource consumption, but it does empirically demonstrate that an association between rising efficiency and rising environmental impacts may be common, at least at the national

level. These findings also suggest that improving eco-efficiency in a nation is not necessarily, or even

typically, indicative of a decline in resource consumption . Fuel Efficiency of Automobiles The fuel efficiency of automobiles is obviously an issue of substantial importance, since motor vehicles consume a large share of the world’s oil. It would seem reasonable to expect that improvements in the efficiency of engines and refinements in the aerodynamics of automobiles would help to curb motor fuel consumption. However, and examination of recent trends in the fuel consumption of motor vehicles suggests a paradoxical situation where improvements in efficiency are associated with increases in fuel consumption. For example, in the United States an examination of a reasonable indicator of fuel efficiency of automobiles stemming from overall engineering techniques, pound-miles per gallon (or kilogram-kilometers per liter) of fuel, supports the contention that the efficiency of the light-duty fleet (which includes passenger cars and light trucks) improved substantially between 1984 and 2001, whereas the total and average fuel consumption of the fleet increased . For the purposes of calculating CAFE (corporate average

fuel economy) performance of the nation’s automobile fleet, the light-duty fleet is divided into two categories, passenger cars and light trucks (which includes sports utility vehicles), each of which has a different legally enforced CAFE standard. In 1984 the total light-truck fleet CAFÉ miles per gallon (MPG) was 20.6 (~8.8 kilometers per liter; KPL) and the average equivalent test weight was 3,804 pounds (~1,725 kilograms), indicating that the average pound-miles per gallon was 78,362 (20.6 x 3,804) (~15,100 kilogram-KPL). By 2001, the total light truck fleet CAFÉ MPG had improved slightly to 21.0 (~8.9 KPL), while the average vehicle weight had increased substantially, to 4,501 pounds (~2,040 kilograms). Therefore the pound-miles per gallon had increased to 94,521 (21.0 x 4,501) (~18,200 kilogram-KPL), a 20.6 percent improvement in efficiency from 1984. A similar trend happened in passenger cars over this same period . In 1984 the total passenger car fleet CAFÉ was 29.6 MPG (~11.4 KPL) and the average equivalent test weight was 3,170 pounds (~1,440 kilograms), indicating that the pound-miles per gallon was 85,273 (26.9 x 3,170)(~16,400 kilogram-KPL). By 2001, the total passenger car fleet CAFÉ MPG had improved to 28.7 (~12.2 KPL) while the average vehicle weight had increased to 3,446 pounds (~1,560 kilograms), making the average fleet pound-miles per gallon 98,900 (28.7 x 2,446) (~19,070 kilogram-KPL)—a 16 percent improvement since 1984. Clearly engineering advances had substantially improved the efficiency of both light trucks and passenger cars in terms of pound-MPG (or kilogram-KPL) between 1984 and 2001. The observation of this fact in isolation might lead tone to expect that these improvements in efficiency were associated with a reduction in the fuel consumption of the total light-duty fleet. However, this is not what happened. Over this

period, light; trucks, which on average are heavier and consume more fuel than passenger cars, grew from 24.4 percent of the light truck duty fleet to 46.6 percent. Because of this shift in composition, the CAFÉ MPG for the combined light-duty fleet declined from 25.0 to 24.5 (~10.6 to ~10.4 KPL), a 2 percent decrease. Clearly, engineering advances had improved the efficiency of engines and other aspects of automobiles, but this did not lead to a less-fuel thirsty fleet since the size of vehicles increased substantially, particularly due to a shift from passenger cars to light trucks among a large segment of drivers. It is worth noting that even if the total fleet MPG had improved, a reduction in fuel consumption would have been unlikely to follow, since over this period the distance traveled by drivers per year increased from little more than 15,000 km (~9,300 miles) per car, on average, to over 19,000 km (~11,800 miles). And, finally, an increase in the number of drivers and cars on the road drove up fuel consumption even further. For example, between 1990 and 1999, the number of motor vehicles in the United States increased from

189 million to 217 million due to both population growth and a 2.8 percent increase in the number of motor vehicles per 1,000 people (from 758 to 779). It appears that technological advances that improved the engineering of cars were in large part implemented, at least in the United States, in expanding the size of vehicles, rather than reducing the fuel the average vehicle consumed. The causal explanations for this are likely complex, but the fact that, despite engineering improvements, the U.S. light-duty fleet increased its total and average fuel consumption

over the past two decades does suggest that technological refinements are unlikely in and of

themselves to lead to the conservation of natural resources . Furthermore, it is possible that

improvements in efficiency may actually contribute to the expansion of resource consumption , since it is at least plausible that success at improving the MPG/KPL of a nation’s automobile fleet may encourage drivers to travel more frequently by car, due to the reduction in fuel consumption per mile/kilometer—a situation directly analogous to the one Jevons observed regarding coal use by industry. The Paperless Office Paradox Paper is typically made from wood fiber, so paper consumption puts substantial pressure on the world’s forest ecosystems. It would seem on the face of it that the rise of the computer and the capacity for the storage of documents in electronic form would lead to a decline in paper consumption, and eventually, the emergence of the “paperless office”—which would be decidedly good news for forests. This, however, has not been the case, as Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper clearly document in their aptly titled book The Myth of the Paperless Office. Contrary to the expectations of some, computers, email, and the World Wide Web are associated with an increase in paper consumption. For example consumption of the most common type of office paper (uncoated free-sheet) increased by 14.7 percent in the United States between the years 1995 and 2000, embarrassing those who predicted the emergence of the paperless office. Sellen and Harper also point to research indicating that “the introduction of e-mail into an organization caused, on average, a 40% increase in paper consumption.” This observation suggests that there may be a direct causal link between the rise of electronic mediums of data storage and paper consumption, although further research is necessary to firmly establish the validity of this causal link. The failure of computers and electronic storage mediums to bring about the paperless office points to an interesting paradox, which

we label the Paperless Office Paradox: the development of a substitute for a natural resource is

sometimes associated with an increase in consumption of that resource . This paradox has potentially profound implications for efforts to conserve natural resources. One prominent method advocated for

reducing consumption of a particular resource is to develop substitutes for it. For example, the

development of renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar power, are commonly

identified as a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, based on the assumption that the

development of alternative sources of energy will displace , at least to some extent, fossil fuel

consumption . However, just as the Jevons Paradox points to the fact that efficiency not lead to a reduction in resource consumption, the Paperless Office Paradox points to the fact that the development of substitutes may not lead to a reduction in resource consumption. The reasons that computers led to a rise in paper consumption are not particularly surprising. Although computers allow for the electronic storage of documents, they also allow for ready access to innumerable documents

that can be easily printed using increasingly ubiquitous printers, which explains in large part the reason for escalating office paper consumption. Due to the particularistic reasons for the association between electronic storage mediums and paper consumption, the Paperless Office Paradox may not represent a generality about the development of substitutes and resource consumption. However, this paradox does emphasize the point that one should not assume that the development of substitutes for a natural resource will lead to a reduction in consumption of that resource. For example, over the past two centuries we have seen the rise of fossil fuel technologies and the development of nuclear power, so that whereas in the eighteenth century biomass was the principal source of energy in the world,

biomass now only provides a small proportion of global energy production. However , it is worth

noting that even though substitutes for biomass —such as fossil fuel and nuclear power— have

expanded dramatically, the absolute quantity of biomass consumed for energy in the world has

increased since the nineteenth century. This is likely due, at least in part, to the fact that new energy sources fostered economic and population growth, which in turn expanded the demand for energy sources of all types, including biomass. This observation raises the prospect that the expansion of

renewable energy production technologies, such as wind turbines and photovoltaic cells, may not

displace fossil fuel or other energy sources, but merely add a new source on top of them, and

potentially foster conditions that expand the demand for energy . Clearly, further theoretical development and empirical research aimed at assessing the extent to which substitutes actually lead to reductions in resource consumption is called for, and faith that technological developments will solve our natural resource challenges should at least be called into question. Coda Here, we have drawn attention to two ecological paradoxes in economics, the Jevons Paradox and the Paperless Office Paradox. The Jevons Paradox is a classical one, based on the Jevons observation that rising efficiency in the utilization of coal led to an escalation of coal consumption. We presented two examples, which suggest that the Jevons Paradox may have general applicability to a variety of circumstances. The Paperless Office Paradox is a new one, and draws attention to the fact that the development of computers and electronic storage mediums has not led to a decline in paper consumption, as some predicted, but rather to more paper consumption. It is important to note that these are empirically established paradoxes—they point to the correlation between efficiency or substitutes and resource consumption. Each paradox may actually house phenomenon that have a diversity of theoretical explanations. Therefore, underlying these two paradoxes may be many forces that need to be theorized. Together, these paradoxes suggest that improvements in the efficiency of use of a natural resource may not lead to reductions in consumption of that resource—in some circumstances they may even lead to an escalation of consumption of that resource. Although improvements in efficiency and utilization of

substitutes will reduce consumption of a resource all else being equal (if the scale of production remains constant), economies are complex and dynamic systems with innumerable interactions among factors. Changes in the type and efficiency of resource utilization will likely influence many other

conditions, thus ensuring that all else will rarely be equal. Relying on technological advances alone to

solve our environmental problems may have disastrous consequences . The two paradoxes we present here suggest that social and economic systems need to be modified if technological advances are to be translated into natural resource conservation.

Green entrepreneurship reproduces neoliberalism – the aff’s appeal to the innovative individual drives over-consumption and justifies economic inequalityPrudham (Department of Geography and Centre for Environment, University of Toronto) 9(Scott, Pimping climate change: Richard Branson, global warming, and the performance of green capitalism, Environment and Planning A 2009, volume 41, pages 1594 ^ 1613)

The paper features two interrelated arguments. First, Branson’s announcements (particularly the first one) point to a central contradiction in the green capitalist agenda. This agenda pivots in large measure on the problematic suggestion that more sustainable futures can be secured via capitalist investment and entrepreneurial innovation. Whatever truth there may be in particular cases, this obscures the relentless, restless, and growth-dependent character of capitalism’s distinct metabolism, an argument most closely associated with the work of Bellamy Foster (Clark and York, 2005; Foster, 2000), but which draws in turn on Karl Marx. The metabolism critique right- fully identifies a tendency in capitalist political economies for aggregate throughput of material and energy to grow, outstripping any efficiency gains (ie the so- called ‘Jevons paradox’). But accumulation for accumulation’s sake also entails dynamic confrontation, transformation, and redefinition of material, social, and cultural conditions in ways that confound coherent articulation of any notion of fixed ‘limits’ (including ecological ones) to continued expansion. This essentially qualitative problem originates in the microeconomics of the entrepreneurial subject who is compelled to accumulate on an expanded scale if only to reproduce himself or herself. What results is a systemic logic of the production of new natures ö integrally connected to the production of space and uneven development more generally (Smith, 2008 [1984]) ö by the anarchic, restless drive to accumulate capital as an end in and of itself. Thus, I argue that, when thinking of capitalism’s so- cal led ‘biospheric rift’ (Clark and York, 2005), it is crucial to attend not only to quantiti es of aggregate material and energy throughput, but also to issues of quality. Secondly, focus on the elite entrepreneurial or bourgeois subject points to the need for a politico-cultural perspective on green capitalism as a sort of ‘drama’ which must be performed. That is, the viability of green capitalism is not only an ‘objective’ question of whether or not entrepreneurial energy, unleashed by neoliberalized green markets, can give rise to sustainable technoeconomic trajectories. Rather, it is also a political agenda whose viability turns on whether or not capitalism and environmen- talism are seen ö subjectively ö to be compatible. Seen in this way, green capitalism has interwoven material ^ semiotic dimensions (Haraway, 1997), one central facet of which is the ‘performance’ of the entrepreneurial subject as environmental crusader. Perform- ances such as Branson’s not only stage the political and cultural fusion of capitalism and environmentalism as green capitalism; they also act to augment the economic foundations of bourgeois power by making the entrepreneur a central figure in climate policy, and, by extension, environmentalism.

Navy Advantage LinksCalls for an expanded naval presence are calls for more elite control and power of the maritime space – reducing environmental issues to a logic of warOliveira 12 (Gilberto Carvalho de - PhD candidate in international politics and conflict resolution at the School of Economics/Centre for Social Studies for the University of Coimbra in Portugal, “Naval Peacekeeping and Piracy: Time for a Critical Turn in the Debate”, International Peacekeeping, 17 Feb 2012, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13533312.2012.642154#tabModule, JS)

Through a securitization theory lens, something becomes a maritime security problem ‘when the

elites declare it to be so’, which means that ‘power holders can always try to use the instrument of

securitization’ of a maritime issue ‘to gain control over it’ .53 Within this process, some aspects are relevant

concerning security at sea. First, those who govern the order at sea ‘can easily use it for specific, self-serving purposes’, which means that this order is ‘clearly, systematically and institutionally linked to the survival of the system and its elites’.54 Second, to ensure the maintenance of this order, elites demand more security, exceptional measures aimed at defending objects whose survival is being threatened. From this perspective, to talk about security is to claim the defence of an object menaced in its existence, which means that

security, by definition, preserves the traditional ‘threat-defence’ logic of war.55¶ The move towards securitization of

maritime issues can be clearly observed in doctrinal developments made by Western naval powers

and regional organizations, as in the ‘Naval Operations Concept 2010’ of the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard:¶ Maritime security is a non-doctrinal term defined as those tasks and operations conducted to protect sovereignty and maritime resources, support free and open seaborne commerce, and to counter maritime related terrorism, weapons proliferation,

transnational crime, piracy, environmental destruction, and illegal seaborne immigration.56¶ Other doctrines and military forums have replicated this attempt at defining maritime security as an umbrella concept to accommodate ‘new threats’ and justify the use of naval forces in ‘operations aimed at enhancing and enforcing security at sea’.57 In general, these ‘new threats’ have been defined around the following main topics: terrorism at sea; transport of weapons of mass destruction; illegal movement of drugs, human beings and arms; flow of illegal immigrants; piracy; dangers to the oceanic environment (marine

pollution, illegal fishing and overfishing); and global warming. These doctrines' movements to incorporate new threats and to justify new roles for navies within a broader concept of maritime security, if integrated within a multilateral framework, do not differ significantly from the constabulary roles defended in the early debates on naval peacekeeping. Thus, the key point distinguishing both naval peacekeeping and maritime security operations lies, ultimately, in the multilateral character generally defended in the former and the national interest or collective defence implicated in the latter. Even if one recognizes the importance of this distinction and its implications in conceptualizing naval peacekeeping, this

does not significantly change the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying both conceptions: it is the classical vision of ‘good order at sea’ and the traditional problem-solving perspective that guide the way both naval peacekeeping and maritime security debates regard problems at sea. ¶ The critical point is

that attempts at widening maritime security and the proposal of an autonomous concept of peacekeeping at sea do not reflect an innocent position. Securitization processes at sea ultimately reduce to a logic of war such issues as criminality, piracy, maritime pollution, trade circulation, climate

change, fisheries and so on , which could be approached in more comprehensive, creative, peaceful and sustainable ways within de-securitized agendas.58 In other words, a maritime agenda committed to technical, scientific, legal, normative, social, cultural, economic and political aspects of the sea would be more effective in handling maritime problems in a transformative and self-sustainable way than a securitized agenda whose exceptionality and urgency tends to reduce and simplify those problems in order to manage them through exceptional measures in a problem-solving framework.

NOAA – SS Lab

Bio-D Adv. LinksMarine conservation ensures ecological destruction – it arbitrarily cordones off specific environmental spaces as intrinsically valuable, sacrificing all other ocean space as exploitable resourceSullivan 11 [Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, Bath Spa University, “Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation” July 2011 http://siansullivan.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cns-paper-final-july2011.pdf]//kevin

In this article we have sought to come to a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. We hope to have delineated neoliberal conservation both as inherent to broader capitalist processes, and as a particular set of governmentalities that seeks to extend and police profitable commodification processes based on artificial and arbitrary separations of human society from biodiverse-rich (non-human) natures. In thereby producing territories that are suitable for its own expansion, neoliberal conservation intervenes in diverse biocultural systems around the world, displacing, enclosing, commodifying, spectacularizing these into the idealized natures that are to be saved (Igoe 2010). In neoliberal conservation, then, globally diverse actors produce proliferating and profitable commodities that rely on surprisingly similar packages of ideologies and practices,

premised on constructed distinctions between human and non-human natures, while ironically promising the opposite to (normally non-local) consumers in the form of closer contact and intimacy with nature. As extended in Bruno Latour’s recent work (2004; 2005; 2010), what concerns us here are the sorts of socionatures—the sorts of assemblages of human and non-human natures—that thereby are composed and brought forth. We are interested in what these tend to

include and enhance, and what these tend to demote and discard. Notwithstanding the generative and creative excitement of capitalist productive forms (as noted above), we maintain that significant alienations and socio-ecological degradations are thereby sustained. Non-human natures tend to be flattened and deadened into abstract and conveniently incommunicative and inanimate objects, primed for commodity capture in service to the creation of capitalist value. This extends a utilitarian construction of a passive nature as an object (of many objects) that is external and distant in relation to human presence and use. Similarly, the knowledge and value practices of diverse peoples frequently are displaced to make way for a neoliberal opening and pricing of land and “resources” as these are recomposed in service to neoliberalism via conservation. The peoples thereby affected become constrained to participate in and benefit from neoliberal conservation initiatives to the extent that they accept associated opportunities and compensation only in particular economic terms. The hegemonic edge of this contraction of possibilities is felt in both the biopolitical (self-)disciplining necessitated by participation in such neoliberal assemblages (Norgaard 2010); and in the suppression of alternative value practices and dissent experienced by those contesting the socionatures that tend to be assembled through neoliberal conservation. We maintain and hope, therefore, that this is an arena ripe for change in effecting transition to a world that, as Adams and Jeanrenaud (2008) put it, is both humane and diverse. We offer this consolidated critique as a gesture to affirm that such change requires nuanced understanding of the contexts and assumptions that are generating problems. As T.J. Laughlin wrote in 1892 in the introductory piece to the Journal of Political Economy: It becomes very clear that possibility of change implies a knowledge of the thing to be changed; that a knowledge of the existing economic system is a condition precedent to any ethical reforms. Certain impatient people find it difficult to wait to acquire the knowledge of what is; and,

unequipped, proceed rashly to say what ought to be. Any transformative alternatives to systemic socio-environmental problems, thus of necessity, will be mediated through the political economy from which they have emerged, and are not predisposed to “quick fix” solutions within the structural contexts that generate such apparently structural problems. We hope with this article to have drawn out some reasons why the

deployment of political economic structures that have produced such systemic problems may, in fact, not be the most logical means of solving these same problems. We also hope to have illuminated some of the ideological reasons as to why the neoliberalizing of environmental conservation is so opaque and seductive to those involved with conservation work. In thinking about future directions, we are inspired by Latour’s recent “Compositionist Manifesto” in which he proposes the concept of “composition” to represent the possibility for recycling critique and putting it to creative uses. To follow Latour’s (2010) metaphor, critique can be wielded like a sledge hammer, which can “break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices.” All of these things we have sought to achieve, and hopefully with some success. But the space we have opened in the process is sullied by the remnants of these things. Like broken

bits of concrete and plaster on the floor, and dust in the air, all this makes it a difficult space to inhabit. How can we further clear the air and recycle this rubble? How can we also recycle the tools of critique, as Latour proposes, into ones that can “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, and stitch together.” How is it possible, in other words, to compose more equitable and ecologically healthy compositions of human and more-than-human nature(s) in a world characterized by Latour (2010, 485) as having “no future but many prospects?”

Conservation projects with alarmist justifications are ruses for neoliberal expansionism and control of the environment – guarantees that the aff fails.Büscher et al. 12 (Bram, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington, Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012)//rh

Among critics of the neoliberal “project,” however, there is a notable absence of this kind of analysis with regards to conservation. David

Harvey (2003, 166-168), for example, tends to view environmental conservation as providing alternatives that actively counter neoliberal capitalism. In The New Imperialism, his list of struggles against accumulation by dispossession is also a litany of

environmental protest. Yet he only glancingly acknowledges that peasants might be dispossessed from their land as effectively for a national park as by a new sheep run. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he describes a

“sprawling environmental movement hard at work 3 promoting alternative visions of how to better connect political and ecological projects” without tracing the complex politics that tie some elements of this movement firmly into mainstream political economy (Harvey 2005, 186; Dowie 2006). He does clearly recognize the role of NGOs in promoting neoliberalism but does not mention conservation NGOs among their number (Harvey 2005, 177). Indeed, conservation does not

appear in these books as a focus of interest. The casting of almost any form of conservation as progressively

opposed to the forces creating environmental crisis is especially problematic when an alarmist

language of crisis is used to justify policies and practices that are injurious to local livelihoods (often in the name of capturing landscapes for environmental conservation) (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Mearns

1996; Stott and Sullivan 2000).5 Crisis-driven critiques also often miss the larger point that environmental (and other) crises increasingly are themselves opportunities for capitalist expansion. Martin O’Connor thus writes in

1994 that “environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life. Now, through purporting to take in hand the saving of the environment, capitalism invents a new legitimation for itself: the sustainable and rational use of nature” (O’Connor 1994, 125- 126). So, while conservation conventionally is

conveyed as something different, as “saving the world” from the broader excesses of human impacts under capitalism, in actuality it functions to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic possibilities for capitalist expansion. Markets expand as the very resolution of environmental crises that other market forces

have produced. Capitalism may well be the Enemy of Nature, as Kovel so aptly put it. Conserving nature, paradoxically, seems

also to have become the friend of capitalism. Thus we see that 1) conservation is vitally important to capitalism; and 2) that this importance is often not recognized. These are compelling reasons for a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. In the next section we explain more clearly our emphasis on neoliberal conservation, before attempting to pull together the threads of critique in such a way as to clarify key concerns and positions. 2Why Focus on

Neoliberal Conservation? One of neoliberalism’s raison-d’être’s is to expand and intensify global capitalism

(Harvey 2005). Capitalism, in turn, is at the heart of the dramatic ecological changes and crises unleashed in the last two centuries (O’Connor 1998; Foster 2007; Kovel 2002; Burkett 2006).6 With the rise of capitalism, the means for, scale of,

and drive towards ecosystem transformation has grown dramatically. In dialectical interaction with technological developments and the intensification of colonial extraction (amongst other factors), emerging capitalist societies became more adept at “offsetting” local and regional ecological transformations extra-locally and extra-regionally, hence laying the foundations for ecological crisis on a world-scale, or a “crisis in

the world-ecology,” as Moore (2010) puts it. Across space (extensification) and within spaces (intensification), capitalism has disrupted and changed the metabolism of ecological processes and connections (Kovel 2002, 82). Bearing in mind our comments on environmental crises above, here we emphasize two key aspects of capitalism’s propensity to stimulate large-scale ecological crises. The first has to do with the

nature of ecological crisis. Diversity, connectivity and relationships are crucial for the resilience of ecosystems. Ecology 101 teaches students that “everything hangs together with everything else,” which is both the reason why studying

ecosystems is both such a joy and so complex. Capitalism’s drive to turn everything into exchange value (into commodities that can be traded) cuts up these connections and relationships in order to produce, sell and consume their constituent elements. Hence, as Kovel (2002, 130-131) shows, capitalism “separates,” “splits” and—because in principle everything can be bought and or sold—“alienates” and estranges. To further bring conservation into capitalism, then, is to lay bare the various ecosystemic threads and linkages so that they can be further subjected to separation, marketization and alienation, albeit in the service of conservation rhetoric. The second point has to do with the nature of capital, which, as Marx (1976, 256) pointed out, is “value in process, money in process: it comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation,

emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again.” Capital is always on the move; if it ceases to move and circulate, the whole system is threatened. The recent financial crisis has made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich countries were primarily concerned with making sure that banks would start lending again

in order to get money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, striving continuously to bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including natural worlds at multiple scales.7 Making

clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to

conserve its services, then, is not just about trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adagio “payments for environmental services” would have it. It is about finding new arenas for markets to

operate in and thus to expand the remit, and ultimately the circulation of capital. Payments go to those able

to capture them, rather than directly to nature, and this explains why conservation responses to ecological crises, although popularly understood as in contestation to the environmental effects of capitalism, now are providing such fruitful avenues for further capitalist expansion (Sullivan 2010). One of the key ways in which this has occurred has been through infusing conservation policy and practice with the analytical tools of neoliberal economics, without recognizing that these are themselves infused with, and reinforce, particular ideological positions regarding human relationships with each other as well as with non-human natures. It is to this point that we now turn.

Climate Change Adv. LinksGreen capitalism fails because companies are forced to answer economic concerns before ecological concerns—this means offshore wind farms will be built only insofar as they are profitable, and abandoned at the first cheap alternative—only replacing capitalism solves Smith 14 (Economic Historian w/ PhD from Rutgers in History writing for Real-World Economics Review, 2014, Richard, Truthout, “Green Capitalism: The God That Failed,” 1/9/14, http://truth-out.org/news/item/21060-green-capitalism-the-god-that-failed, accessed 7/8/14, bh @ ddi)

As soaring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions drove global CO2 concentrations past 400 parts per million in May 2013, shell-shocked climate scientists warned that unless we urgently adopt "radical" measures to suppress GHG emissions (50 percent cuts in emissions by 2020, 90 percent by 2050) we're headed for an average temperature rise of 3 degrees or 4 degrees Celsius before the end of the century. Four degrees might not seem like much, but make no mistake: Such an increase will be catastrophic for our species and most others. Humans have never experienced a rise of 4 degrees in average temperatures. But our ancestors experienced a four-degree cooler world. That was during the last ice age, the Wisconsin Stage (26,000 to 13,300 years ago). At that time, there were two miles of ice on top of where I'm sitting right now in New York City. In a four-degree warmer world "Heat waves of undreamt-of-ferocity will scorch the Earth's surface as the climate becomes hotter than anything humans have ever experienced. ... There will be "no ice at either pole." "Global warming of this magnitude would leave the whole planet without ice for the first time in nearly 40 million years." Sea levels will rise 25 meters - submerging Florida, Bangladesh, New York, Washington DC, London, Shanghai, the coastlines and cities where nearly half the world's people presently live. Freshwater aquifiers will dry up; snow caps and glaciers will evaporate - and with them, the rivers that feed the billions of Asia, South America and California. The "wholesale destruction of ecosystems" will bring on the collapse of agriculture around much of the world. "Russia's harsh cold will be a distant memory" as "temperatures in Europe will resemble the Middle East. ... The Sahara will have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and be working its way north into the heart of Spain and Portugal. ... With food supplies crashing, humanity's grip on its future will become ever more tentative." Yet long before the temperature increase hits four degrees, the melting will have begun thawing the permafrost of the Arctic, releasing vast quantities of methane buried under the Arctic seas and the Siberian and North American tundra, accelerating GHG concentrations beyond any human power to stop runaway

warming and sealing our fate as a species.(1)¶ Yet paradoxically, most climate scientists and even most climate activists have yet to grapple with the implications of their science: namely that GHG suppression on the order of 90 percent in less than 40 years would require a radical across-the-board economic contraction in the developed industrialized countries, and economic contraction is incompatible with a stable capitalism . On this point, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers would appear to be right and

pro-growth, pro-market environmentalists wrong: Under capitalism, growth and jobs are more often

than not at odds with environmental protection. There may be some win-wins here and there. But for the most part , given capitalism, imposing big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions means imposing big job cuts across industrialized economies around the world. That's why, regardless of protests, no capitalist government on the planet will accept mandatory cuts in GHG emissions. Since the Reagan

Revolution of the 1980s, when environmentalists began to turn to the market, "green growth" theorists and proponents have argued au contraire that "jobs and environment are not opposed," that economic growth is compatible with emissions reduction, that carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade schemes could suppress

GHG emissions while "green jobs" in new tech, especially renewable energy , would offset lost jobs in fossil fuel industries. Their strategy has failed completely, yet this remains the dominant view of leading climate scientists, including James Hansen, and of most environmental organizations.¶ All such market-based efforts are doomed to fail, and a sustainable economy is inconceivable without sweeping systemic economic change. The project of sustainable capitalism based on carbon taxes, green marketing , " dematerialization " and so forth was misconceived and doomed from the start because maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and

there, they might coincide for a moment . That's because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society; they're responsible to private shareholders. CEOs can embrace environmentalism so long as this increases profits. But saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be

systematically subordinated to ecological concerns: For example, the science tells us that to save the humans, we have to drastically suppress fossil fuel consumption, even close down industries like coal. But no corporate board can sacrifice earnings, let alone put themselves out of business, just to save humanity, and no government can suppress fossil fuel industries because to do so would precipitate

economic collapse. I claim that profit-maximization is an iron rule of capitalism , a rule that trumps all

else, and this sets the limits to ecological reform - not the other way around, as green capitalism theorists had supposed . ¶ And contrary to green capitalism proponents, across the spectrum from resource extraction to manufacturing, the practical possibilities for "greening" and "dematerializing" production are severely limited. This means the only way to prevent overshoot and collapse is to enforce a massive economic contraction in the industrialized economies , retrenching production across a broad

range of unnecessary, resource-hogging, wasteful and polluting industries, even virtually shutting down the worst. Yet this option is foreclosed under capitalism because this is not socialism: No one is promising new jobs to unemployed coal miners, oil drillers, automakers, airline pilots, chemists, plastic junk makers and others whose jobs would be lost because their industries would have to be retrenched - and unemployed workers don't pay taxes. So CEOs , workers and governments find that they all " need" to maximize growth ,

overconsumption, even pollution, to destroy their children's tomorrows to hang onto their jobs

today . If they don't, the system falls into crisis, or wors e. So we're all on board the TGV of ravenous and ever-growing

plunder and pollution. As our locomotive races toward the cliff of ecological collapse, the only thoughts on the minds of our CEOs, capitalist

economists, politicians and most labor leaders is how to stoke the locomotive to get us there faster. Corporations aren't

necessarily evil. They just can't help themselves. They're doing what they're supposed to do for the benefit of their owners. But this means that, s o long as the global economy is based on capitalism and private property and corporate property and competitive production for market, we're doomed to a

collective social suicide - and no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global

ecological collapse . We can't shop our way to sustainability, because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require local, reigional, national and international economic planning to reorganize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically planned eco-socialist economy.

Centering climate change trades off with focus on the neoliberal social forces driving it – the aff displaces non-warming environmental crises and the root causes of warmingCrist 7 (Eileen, has been teaching at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society since 1997, where she is advisor for the undergraduate program Humanities, Science, and Environment, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse”, Telos, 141 (Winter 2007): 29–55.)

While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in

representing it as the most urgent problem we face . Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planet’s ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for

reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy

sources , increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by “changing our whole style of living.”16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, “the one lifeline we can use immediately.”17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. “The Montreal protocol,” he submits, “marks a signal moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.”18 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were

restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the

ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed . The destructive patterns of production ,

trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption , coupled with population growth, would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to

its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.19 But questioning this

civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse , with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among numerous other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels

cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of

equally monumental issues . Climate change looms so huge on the environmental and political

agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological crisis : mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end

to—will barely address— the ongoing destruction of life on Earth .

*Generic Exploration Links

*Science Diplomacy Adv.

*STEM Education Adv.

EBSAs – MS Lab

1NCConservation projects with alarmist justifications are ruses for neoliberal expansionism and control of the environment – guarantees that the aff fails.Büscher et al. 12 (Bram, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington, Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012)//rh

Among critics of the neoliberal “project,” however, there is a notable absence of this kind of analysis with regards to conservation. David

Harvey (2003, 166-168), for example, tends to view environmental conservation as providing alternatives that actively counter neoliberal capitalism. In The New Imperialism, his list of struggles against accumulation by dispossession is also a litany of

environmental protest. Yet he only glancingly acknowledges that peasants might be dispossessed from their land as effectively for a national park as by a new sheep run. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he describes a

“sprawling environmental movement hard at work 3 promoting alternative visions of how to better connect political and ecological projects” without tracing the complex politics that tie some elements of this movement firmly into mainstream political economy (Harvey 2005, 186; Dowie 2006). He does clearly recognize the role of NGOs in promoting neoliberalism but does not mention conservation NGOs among their number (Harvey 2005, 177). Indeed, conservation does not

appear in these books as a focus of interest. The casting of almost any form of conservation as progressively

opposed to the forces creating environmental crisis is especially problematic when an alarmist

language of crisis is used to justify policies and practices that are injurious to local livelihoods (often in the name of capturing landscapes for environmental conservation) (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Mearns

1996; Stott and Sullivan 2000).5 Crisis-driven critiques also often miss the larger point that environmental (and other) crises increasingly are themselves opportunities for capitalist expansion. Martin O’Connor thus writes in

1994 that “environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life. Now, through purporting to take in hand the saving of the environment, capitalism invents a new legitimation for itself: the sustainable and rational use of nature” (O’Connor 1994, 125- 126). So, while conservation conventionally is

conveyed as something different, as “saving the world” from the broader excesses of human impacts under capitalism, in actuality it functions to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic possibilities for capitalist expansion. Markets expand as the very resolution of environmental crises that other market forces

have produced. Capitalism may well be the Enemy of Nature, as Kovel so aptly put it. Conserving nature, paradoxically, seems

also to have become the friend of capitalism. Thus we see that 1) conservation is vitally important to capitalism; and 2) that this importance is often not recognized. These are compelling reasons for a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. In the next section we explain more clearly our emphasis on neoliberal conservation, before attempting to pull together the threads of critique in such a way as to clarify key concerns and positions. 2Why Focus on

Neoliberal Conservation? One of neoliberalism’s raison-d’être’s is to expand and intensify global capitalism

(Harvey 2005). Capitalism, in turn, is at the heart of the dramatic ecological changes and crises unleashed in the last two centuries (O’Connor 1998; Foster 2007; Kovel 2002; Burkett 2006).6 With the rise of capitalism, the means for, scale of,

and drive towards ecosystem transformation has grown dramatically. In dialectical interaction with technological developments and the intensification of colonial extraction (amongst other factors), emerging capitalist societies became more adept at “offsetting” local and regional ecological transformations extra-locally and extra-regionally, hence laying the foundations for ecological crisis on a world-scale, or a “crisis in the world-ecology,” as Moore (2010) puts it. Across space (extensification) and within spaces (intensification), capitalism has disrupted and changed the metabolism of ecological processes and connections (Kovel 2002, 82). Bearing in mind our comments on environmental crises

above, here we emphasize two key aspects of capitalism’s propensity to stimulate large-scale ecological crises. The first has to do with the

nature of ecological crisis. Diversity, connectivity and relationships are crucial for the resilience of ecosystems. Ecology 101 teaches students that “everything hangs together with everything else,” which is both the reason why studying

ecosystems is both such a joy and so complex. Capitalism’s drive to turn everything into exchange value (into commodities that can be traded) cuts up these connections and relationships in order to produce, sell and consume their constituent elements. Hence, as Kovel (2002, 130-131) shows, capitalism “separates,” “splits” and—because in principle everything can be bought and or sold—“alienates” and estranges. To further bring conservation into capitalism, then, is to lay bare the various ecosystemic threads and linkages so that they can be further subjected to separation, marketization and alienation, albeit in the service of conservation rhetoric. The second point has to do with the nature of capital, which, as Marx (1976, 256) pointed out, is “value in process, money in process: it comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation,

emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again.” Capital is always on the move; if it ceases to move and circulate, the whole system is threatened. The recent financial crisis has made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich countries were primarily concerned with making sure that banks would start lending again

in order to get money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, striving continuously to bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including natural worlds at multiple scales.7 Making

clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to

conserve its services, then, is not just about trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adagio “payments for environmental services” would have it. It is about finding new arenas for markets to

operate in and thus to expand the remit, and ultimately the circulation of capital. Payments go to those able

to capture them, rather than directly to nature, and this explains why conservation responses to ecological crises, although popularly understood as in contestation to the environmental effects of capitalism, now are providing such fruitful avenues for further capitalist expansion (Sullivan 2010). One of the key ways in which this has occurred has been through infusing conservation policy and practice with the analytical tools of neoliberal economics, without recognizing that these are themselves infused with, and reinforce, particular ideological positions regarding human relationships with each other as well as with non-human natures. It is to this point that we now turn.

The impact is extinction – neoliberalism drives collapse of ocean ecosystems – only alternative framings of social relations can solveClark and Clausen 8

(teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh; teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College)

(Brett and Rebecca, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, 2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August)

The world is at a crossroads in regard to the ecological crisis. Ecological degradation under global capitalism extends to the entire biosphere. Oceans that were teeming with abundance are being decimated by the continual intrusion of exploitive economic operations. At the same time that scientists are documenting the complexity and interdependency of marine species, we are witnessing an oceanic crisis as natural conditions, ecological processes, and nutrient cycles are being undermined through overfishing and transformed due to global warming. The expansion of the accumulation system, along with technological advances in fishing, have intensified the exploitation of the world

ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch); extended the spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market; and disrupted metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean. The quick-fix solution of aquaculture enhances capital’s control over production without resolving ecological contradictions. It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated, that “short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of natural wealth.”44 Capital is driven by the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term profits provide the immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature, which may entail time scales of a hundred or more years. Such requirements stand opposed to the immediate interests of profit. The qualitative relation between humans and nature is subsumed under the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-larger scale. Marx lamented that to capital, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.”45 Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs, and the circulation of capital—not the diminishing conditions of existence. Capital subjects natural cycles and processes (via controlled feeding and the use of growth hormones) to its economic cycle. The maintenance of natural conditions is not a concern. The bounty of nature is taken for granted and appropriated as a free gift. As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating: For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself….In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature itself].46 An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is being undermined. To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygen-poor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the loss of marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean. Coupled with industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year 2050.47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.

Alternative text: the judge should vote negative to endorse an ethic of social fleshAn ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmakingBeasley & Bacchi 7

(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)

The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the

basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and

international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of

atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be

acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied

interdependence . By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people

across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-

liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a

politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse

oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently

reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts

into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for

‘altruism’ . Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.

2NC Marine Conservation LinkConservation is an attempt to sustain neoliberal economic relations – the aff is a stop-gap to prevent more radical criticism of environmental destructionBϋscher & Arsel 12

(Bram and Murat, Buscher is a “postdoctoral fellow, Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg”. Both authors are a part of the Netherlands Institute of Social Studies. “INTRODUCTION: NEOLIBERAL CONSERVATION, UNEVEN GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE DYNAMICS OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM”, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 103.2 (2012): 129-135.)

The concepts of neoliberal conservation and uneven geographical development derive from rich, nuanced literatures that cannot be done justice to in a short introduction (see e.g. Braun & Castree, 1998; Smith, 2008; Arsel & Büscher, 2012; Büscher et al. forthcoming). The purpose of this section is therefore not to provide a full genealogy of the concepts but rather to explain their key characteristics with a view to paving the way for the contributions to the special dossier. Importantly, both concepts are rooted in critical political economy analyses that frame the interplay between interests and markets – and their social and environmental constitution and effects – within an explicit configuration of structural power (Arrighi 1994; O’Connor 1994; Heynen et al. 2007; Storm 2009). The historic configuration that is currently dominant is that of late capitalism. Hence these analyses have the critical study of capitalist structures of power and modes of production and value creation at their core. This is why the global financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2007 has been of particular interest, as it confirmed

once more the essential instability and contradictory nature of capitalism (Bellamy Foster & Magdoff 2009). Many of the central contradictions of capitalism derive from the nature of capital, defined as ‘value in process, money in process . . . It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation, emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again’ (Marx 1976: 256). Capital, as Harvey (2010) recently emphasised, is always on the move; it cannot stop but on penalty of the death of the system. The financial crisis again made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich and many poorer countries were, and are, primarily concerned with making sure that banks start lending again in order to get the economy out of the slump and money back

into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, and so cannot help but to seek and bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including the natural world (Castree 2008; Büscher 2010). Making clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to conserve its services, then, has only superficially to do with trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adage ‘payments for environmental services’ would have it. Rather, it should be looked at in Polanyian terms of capitalism trying to mediate its worst excesses while simultaneously trying to open up new avenues for ‘moving capital’ and securing profit (Igoe et al. 2010). It is here that we get to the concept of neoliberal conservation. McCarthy (2012), as well as Büscher (2012) show that one of the ways in which to conceptualise neoliberalism is as a particular ideology to subject social and political (and environmental!) affairs to capitalist (market) dynamics. Neoliberalism has been the globally dominant ideology since the early 1970s and has deeply influenced the issue of environmental conservation by trying to make it compatible with capital circulation (Neves & Igoe 2012). Of course, this is not to say that conservation has only recently become associated with capitalism. The literature (e.g. Brockington et al. 2008; Igoe et al. 2010), increasingly emphasises that conservation has played a vital role throughout the history and development of capitalism. In part, this relates to Polanyi’s ‘double movement’: conservation as a political backlash against the environmental effects of modernisation and capitalist industrialisation. But as Igoe et al. (2010) show, this is only a minor part of the story. Conservation has in actual fact been an essential part of capitalist expansion since the nineteenth century and was deeply dependent on elites and rising business tycoons (Adams 2008). Neoliberal conservation, then, is the contemporary push to making environmental conservation not only compatible with capitalism but also a source for economic growth (Arsel & Büscher 2012). Hence where after the Great Depression it was the automobile industry that led many of the technological changes that helped to generate economic growth for decades, many world leaders, including Barack Obama, have been pushing ‘green technologies’ to provide economic growth, development and environmental stewardship.1 Obviously, these (so-called) ‘green technologies’ have a longer history, but the financial crisis really catapulted them into the global political limelight, especially through the United Nations Environment Programme’s call for a ‘Global Green

New Deal’ and, more recently, the ‘Green Economy’ (UNEP 2011). In particular due to the pressing problems of climate change, loss of biological diversity and fresh water resources and pollution, the capitalist system is trying to find ways to cope with and incorporate these in order to safeguard future economic growth (Stern 2006). But what exactly are the consequences of further integrating conservation with contemporary capitalism? This is one of the issues that the contributors to the special dossier address. This question is extremely important yet oddly enough hardly discussed in mainstream discussions and policy environments. Everybody knows and recognises we live in a capitalist time, yet no policies on the environment ever start with ‘biodiversity conservation is highly influenced by capitalism’. As

Newell (2011, p. 4) put it succinctly for the realm of academia, ‘capitalism is ever present, yet largely unsaid, in many academic debates on global environmental change’. We believe that this recognition is desperately needed in the

mainstream debate because its view on how further integration of conservation with capitalism leads to multiple ‘wins’ is in fact based on a history of many environmentally harmful contradictions. Furthermore, it relates to the question of how the benefits and burdens of conservation are distributed across the globe (Brockington & Duffy 2010). This then brings us to the second main concept, that of uneven geographical development. Proponents of neoliberalism have been at pains to stress the specialness of this crisis – Greenspan called it a ‘once in a century credit tsunami’ (BBC 2008) – in order to buttress the perceived strength of the foundations of the global economic order. However, from a critical political economy perspective, such crises confirm that capitalism has progressed historically according to what Harvey (2006a, p. 71) terms ‘“uneven geographical development”: the extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes across and between spaces of the world economy (at all manner of different scales)’. Importantly, the benefits and burdens of the crisis, as well as the abilities and capabilities of states to deal with the crisis have also been extremely unevenly distributed. Büscher (2012) shows that the continent that least contributed to the crisis was nonetheless severely hit, while rich, Western nations at least had the ability and capacity to provide lavish bail-out packages.2 Such an ability is often missing within the context of developing nations, whose states not only lack the resources to undertake the protection of their citizens who suffer from myriad negative impacts of financial crises, but are also actively prevented by intergovernmental organisations from undertaking meaningful action lest these disrupt the workings of markets (Akyüz 2011). This unequal and differentiated ability of (and within) developing and developed nation states to respond to crises, forms another dimension of uneven geographical development. In this regard, it is important to remember that ‘ neoliberalism uses uneven geographical development as a means to promote the universality of its own world project, which has nothing to do with the well-being of the whole of humanity but everything to do with the enhancement of dominant forms of class power’ (Harvey 2009, p. 1276). To this end, Arsel (2012) demonstrates that even explicitly post-neoliberal leaders in Latin America, who are pursuing redistributionist policies, have to make use of the neoliberal toolkit in developing their policies. This seeming contradiction arises from the tension between the traditional logic of the developmental state, namely, to deliver socio-economic progress through economic growth, with its newly acquired, or at times imposed, role to protect the integrity of ecosystems not only for the benefit of local communities who depend on them but also for the parts of the global society at large who demand their preservation. Of course, to say, in general, that things develop unevenly does not seem to say much. This is why the addition ‘geographical’ is so important: not only do actors have uneven capabilities to deal with environment and development problematics, the benefits and burdens of these are also inherently unevenly distributed across and between spaces of the world economy (Smith 2008). In turn, capitalism, and especially capital circulation attribute uneven importance to different spaces, with specific geographical expressions . This was, of course, Smith’s (2008, p. 4) basic message: ‘uneven development is the systematic geographical expression of the contradictions inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital’. Crises, then, as Smith (2008, p. 170) also points out ‘can also be acutely functional for capital’ as it shakes up the playing field within which class interests can be rearticulated, and particularly, reinforced (as is what Harvey 2010 argues is what happened with the US$700 billion bailout package in the US). Crisis can also be an opportunity to question these dynamics and practices, and this is what the special dossier is all about: interrogating important issues like environmental conservation, poverty and development within an explicit configuration of structural power. This, as Newell (2011, p. 6) also stresses, is highly necessary and overdue: ‘the extension and deepening of the logics of capitalism to new geographical and ecological areas of the planet appears to

be unprecedented. This process needs to be adequately understood as a political and economic phenomenon with important social and environmental consequences of interest both to scholars of global environmental change and to all of us as citizens who, some more than others, will live with the benefits and problems it brings’. Exploring the issues of neoliberal conservation and uneven geographical geographical development can contribute to this understanding, and each of the contributors touches on different aspects. Let us briefly introduce their main concerns and arguments. CONNECTING THE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SPECIAL DOSSIER Just as there has been a ‘scramble’ in academic contributions trying to make sense of the crisis (Castree 2010), so the crisis signifies a scramble over resources and over how to appropriate and value these. In the various geographic spaces of concern, as well as on the various scales of the contributions, one can detect these dynamics at play, whereby struggles over resources and their value are played out against the background of variegated forms of capital accumulation – and thus uneven geographical development. In Büscher’s (2012) contribution about the place of the African continent within the world system, the unevenness is arguably starkest. Büscher shows how ‘Africa’s place in the global world order’ has long been signified by a seemingly paradoxical situation of intensive, one-sided and violent resource exploitation and equally intensive, one-sided and violent resource conservation . From his contribution, it is clear that the old ‘scramble for Africa’ has not only transitioned into the neoliberal era, but taken on distinct new forms of geographical unevenness, scales and intensities. Büscher argues that the financial crisis has given globally dominant actors renewed vigour to intensify familiar processes of neoliberal conservation and neoliberal exploitation behind a win-win façade: good for outsiders and good for Africa’s poor. These core dynamics are also evident in other parts of the world that are the focus of some of the contributions. Arsel (2012) focuses on Latin America and Ecuador in particular, and shows that the scramble there is to transfer the hold on vital resources, particularly oil, from foreign corporations to the ‘refounded’ state. Through a broader Latin American strategy of ‘Socialism of the twenty first century’ which reflects the driving force behind the ongoing ‘Left Turn’, President Correa of Ecuador saw only one way to lessen foreign influence, namely to strengthen state control over resources and environmental and developmental processes in the country. Paradoxically, one of the key ways of doing so for Correa proved to be a policy that strongly resembles neoliberal conservation. To the extent that the Yasuní-ITT (Ishpingo- Tambocoha-Tiputini) initiative is path breaking as an attempt to transcend the tension between the need for continued socioeconomic development in the South and the necessity of preserving ecosystems critical for the health of the planet, it too has succumbed to the dominant logic of the markets.

2NC Turns CaseMarine conservation ensures ecological destruction – it arbitrarily cordones off specific environmental spaces as intrinsically valuable, sacrificing all other ocean space as exploitable resourceSullivan 11 [Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, Bath Spa University, “Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation” July 2011 http://siansullivan.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cns-paper-final-july2011.pdf]//kevin

In this article we have sought to come to a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. We hope to have delineated neoliberal conservation both as inherent to broader capitalist processes, and as a particular set of governmentalities that seeks to extend and police profitable commodification processes based on artificial and arbitrary separations of human society from biodiverse-rich (non-human) natures. In thereby producing territories that are suitable for its own expansion, neoliberal conservation intervenes in diverse biocultural systems around the world, displacing, enclosing, commodifying, spectacularizing these into the idealized natures that are to be saved (Igoe 2010). In neoliberal conservation, then, globally diverse actors produce proliferating and profitable commodities that rely on surprisingly similar packages of ideologies and practices, premised on constructed distinctions between human and non-human natures, while ironically promising the opposite to (normally non-local) consumers in the form of closer contact and intimacy with nature. As extended in Bruno Latour’s recent work (2004; 2005; 2010), what concerns us here are the sorts of socionatures—the sorts of assemblages of human and non-human natures—that thereby are composed and brought forth. We are interested in what these tend to include and enhance, and what these tend to demote and discard. Notwithstanding the generative and creative excitement of capitalist productive forms (as noted above), we maintain that significant alienations and socio-ecological degradations are thereby sustained. Non-human natures tend to be flattened and deadened into abstract and conveniently incommunicative and inanimate objects, primed for commodity capture in service to the creation of capitalist value. This extends a utilitarian construction of a passive nature as an object (of many objects) that is external and distant in relation to human presence and use. Similarly, the knowledge and value practices of diverse peoples frequently are displaced to make way for a neoliberal opening and pricing of land and “resources” as these are recomposed in service to neoliberalism via conservation. The peoples thereby affected become constrained to participate in and benefit from neoliberal conservation initiatives to the extent that they accept associated opportunities and compensation only in particular economic terms. The hegemonic edge of this contraction of possibilities is felt in both the biopolitical (self-)disciplining necessitated by participation in such neoliberal assemblages (Norgaard 2010); and in the suppression of alternative value practices and dissent experienced by those contesting the socionatures that tend to be assembled through neoliberal conservation. We maintain and hope, therefore, that this is an arena ripe for change in effecting transition to a world that, as Adams and Jeanrenaud (2008) put it, is both humane and diverse. We offer this consolidated critique as a gesture to affirm that such change requires nuanced understanding of the contexts and assumptions that are generating problems. As T.J. Laughlin wrote in 1892 in the introductory piece to the Journal of Political Economy: It becomes very clear that possibility of change implies a knowledge of the thing to be changed; that a knowledge of the existing economic system is a condition precedent to any ethical reforms. Certain impatient people find it difficult to wait to acquire

the knowledge of what is; and, unequipped, proceed rashly to say what ought to be. Any transformative alternatives to systemic socio-environmental problems, thus of necessity, will be mediated through the political economy from which they have emerged, and are not predisposed to “quick fix” solutions within the structural contexts that generate such apparently structural problems. We hope with this article to have drawn out some reasons why the deployment of political economic structures that have produced such systemic problems may, in fact, not be the most logical means of solving these same problems. We also hope to have illuminated some of the ideological reasons as to why the neoliberalizing of environmental conservation is so opaque and seductive to those involved with conservation work. In thinking about future directions, we are inspired by Latour’s recent “Compositionist Manifesto” in which he proposes the concept of “composition” to represent the possibility for recycling critique and putting it to creative uses. To follow Latour’s (2010) metaphor, critique can be wielded like a sledge hammer, which can “break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices.” All of these things we have sought to achieve, and hopefully with some success. But the space we have opened in the process is sullied by the remnants of these things. Like broken bits of concrete and plaster on the floor, and dust in the air, all this makes it a difficult space to inhabit. How can we further clear the air and recycle this rubble? How can we also recycle the tools of critique, as Latour proposes, into ones that can “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, and stitch together.” How is it possible, in other words, to compose more equitable and ecologically healthy compositions of human and more-than-human nature(s) in a world characterized by Latour (2010, 485) as having “no future but many prospects?”

More ExplorationThe 1ac could have been an effective way to engage students in ocean research, until they started spewing all their scientific knowledge

The aff’s scientific justifications for knowing the ocean are an active displacement of individual epiphanies that will always make the aff’s exploration an unconscious desire to colonize the new, oceanic frontier—the 1ac is like Mandeville’s account of eastern adventures—in Mandeville’s world of colonialism and fantasy, voting negative is a refusal to sign the petition on endless scientific exploration

Voting negative invests in ocean exploration from the view of the abyssal alien – a radical imagination without the 1ac’s meta-level scientific justifications for KNOWING the ocean—this radical post-humanist thought experiment is the only way to counter technocracy and prevent environmental destruction (P) Montroso 14 (Alan, Graduate Teaching Assistant @ George Washington U, Ocean is the New East: Contemporary Representations of Sea Life and Mandeville’s Monstrous Ecosystems, March 23, 2014, http://bacchanalinthelibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/ocean-is-new-east-contemporary.html)//mm

Spring Break was, well, hardly a break at all, but I celebrated its conclusion with some friends from Ohio who were visiting for the weekend. We dined, we drank, we danced and we toured a few of the MUST SEE sights of DC. Our last stop was the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where I reveled in the gorgeous new exhibit: The Sant Ocean Hall. The only one of our cadre enamored of oceanic discoveries, I hurried from display to display, basking in bioluminescent beings, awe-struck at extremophiles and trembling before the model of Phoenix, the North Atlantic right whale . Deeply affected by these strange strangers, I stretched my imagination towards the inconceivable and wondered at the sheer breadth of possibilities for ways of living in these still-occult abyssopelagic regions. I found solace in the evidence that so many vast and heterogeneous lives can flourish without the intrusive light of the sun or human reason , and that such animacy is possible in the darkness, in a “world where the Copernican revolution is irrelevant.” (1) I attempted to think with and alongside such creatures, to make myself uncomfortable by imagining myself breathing without oxygen , thriving at thermal vents, manifesting light with my own body, an aqueous and somewhat amorphous body squeezed and strangled by the only just bearable pressures of the deep sea . I attempted a posthumanist thought project similar to what Stacy Alaimo describes in “Violet-Black,” her contribution to Prismatic Ecology, in which she insists that “Thinking with and through the electronic jellyfish , seeing through the prosthetic eye, playing open-ended , improvisational language games with deep-sea creatures , being transformed by astonishment and desire enact a posthumanist practice .” (2) Responding to the highly-stylized illustrations in books from the Census of Marine Life, Alaimo finds in such affective imagery an invitation to new ways of thinking life, and consequently the possibility for the dethronement of terrestrial ideas of sovereignty. Each Smithsonian display, like each vibrantly hued

illustration of marine life, defamiliarizes this planet and renders a world that simply will not surrender to humanity’s hubristic desire for authority . Each impossible way of being , now proven possible, works to dismantle what Mel Y. Chen calls the “animacy hierarchy” by begging us to reconsider just what the hell comprises an “animate” body anyway. (3) And yet, as I wandered from station to station examining these oceanic bodies summoned from the abysses of the sea, lifeless, entombed in glass jars and carefully arranged for an American viewing public, I could not forget the relation between

observers and observed, nor that human science and politicking still fashion a sovereign/subject

relation between humans and the myriad strangers that populate the seas . Thus as I wandered the Sant Ocean Hall, I thought about what it means to “wander,” who gets the privilege of wandering (Americans , human knowledge-seekers ), and what remains the stationary object of scrutiny (the nonhuman body, the foreign object, the subject of scientific knowledge ). These marvelous displays are discrete islands of monstrous creatures that underscore humanity’s desire to safely navigate strange waters. I chose the adjective “marvelous” very carefully, for my wandering about the various exhibits reminded me of a medieval journey to the marvels of the East and, more specifically, of Mandeville’s travels around the monstrous islands just past the Holy Lands and off the coasts of Africa and India. For the ocean, it seems, is the new East, compared against the way the medieval Western hegemony represented the East in its travel literature. The inhabitants of Earth’s oceans are put on display to be navigated , plundered, studied and represented by the sovereign powers of Western thought . Like Mandeville’s tale of fish that deliver themselves to the shore for human consumption, we expect the seas to divulge their mysteries for our ravenous desire to control by means of knowledge-making . In Chapter 13 of the Defective Version of The Book of John Mandeville (ed. Kohanski and Benson), the narrator announces that, having completed his tour of the Holy Lands, he intends to “telle of yles and diverse peple and bestes” (1380). This rather lengthy chapter is rich in peculiarity and marvel, a veritable encyclopedia of the monstrous. An allegory-generating female spirit grants riches and doles out commensurate consequences for her supplicants’ greed. Gendered diamonds mate and spawn resplendent

children, challenging notions about the inertness of lithic objects. Nudists, cannibals, blood drinkers, as well as pygmies, dog-headed creatures and headless bodies with ocular and oral orifices on their chests and shoulders roam these foreign shores. Mandeville fulfills the European desire to believe the East is wholly Other , a monstrous and invitingly dangerous land abundant in resources and passively awaiting representation by the Western imagination. Yet, although his descriptions of the diverse

beings of the East are certainly mythical, Mandeville also lends a certain scientific explanation for the

monstrous by repeatedly attending to the extreme heat of this region ; Mandeville offers a climatological cause for the wonders he claims to encounter. Ethiopians hide from the sun under feet large enough to shield their bodies; men on the isle of Ermes suffer their “ballockys hongeth doun to her shankes” (1557). In such intolerable climates precious stones spill from river banks, reptiles grow to enormous proportions and, as I mentioned above,

fish are so “plenteuous” that they offer themselves up for consumption. Heat is generative, and the corporeal peculiarities of the deserts as well as the fecundity of the tropical East are, in Mandeville, responses to extreme climate - much like the extremophiles surviving sulfuric blasts of scorching heat from deep sea vents. Each coastal country and island in The Book of John Mandeville is a unique ecology, an oikos or home to the various and varying creatures that inhabit these spaces, and like contemporary scientific attempts to understand the porosity between bodies and ecosystems once thought uninhabitable, Mandeville offered something like a medieval ecological justification for the diversity of beings he describes. Thus I wonder if we can assume that the imaginative spaces – and the marvelous creatures inhabiting those spaces – drawn by medieval travel literature generate d new ways of thinking about an environmentally a n d ecologically complex world . Can we not find in such texts an anxiety and

ambivalence about an earth more vast and verdant than God’s rubric allowed? Although giants erupt from Biblical origins, and blood drinkers, flesh eaters and necrophiliacs may mark anxieties about their obvious Catholic analogues– remember, Christians believe a man came back from the dead, a man whose actual body and blood Catholics consume at every Mass – what of the other strange strangers that emerge from the pages of Mandeville, the Cynocephales and headless figures with sensory organs in their chest? Are these curious beings the imagined consequences of

thinking through previously un-thought ecosystems? Although fictitious, these tropical creatures seems to signal the disorienting encounter with evidence that the Earth and its beings are more heterogeneous than previously believed. There is something disanthropocentric , then, to Mandeville’s imagining the wondrous creatures of the East, just as Alaimo insists that encountering the enchantingly strange creatures of the ocean’s depths is a sort of posthumanist practice . The Smithsonian’s website might argue that “It’s hard to imagine a more forbidding place than the icy cold, pitch black, crushing environment of the deep sea ocean. It’s even hard to imagine anything living there,” (4) yet, like Mandeville, we MUST imagine new possibilities of living on this Earth, we must see through the eyes of the abyssal aliens , feel the torturous heat with medieval monsters, if we are ever to dethrone Humanity from the heights of ecological sovereignty .

Satellites Kritik

1NC

Earth observation systems’ response to climate change creates a vision of the globe that recreates Eurocentrism and ensures that any response to warming will be managerial and reformist Yusoff (School of Geography, University of Exeter) 9 (Kathryn, Excess, catastrophe, and climate change, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 1010 ^ 1029)

Our knowledge of climate change as a harbinger of catastrophic and abrupt change would not be possible without the work of whole earth technologies and their `vision' of the world . This global vision, articulated by Serres, has implications for the formation of knowledge and acting on and in the world. The medium of climate change prediction is GCMs. As a form of science fiction or the will to science, GCMs propose possible futures based on current collections of data from ice cores, paleo sources, and other earth records (figure 4). The representational forms of GCMs animated in scientific visualisation are implicitly embedded in our understanding, inhabitation, and reception of these informational models, even though they are not always part of the initial data analysis. This perception applies to the rendering and visualisation methods of models, but also to the less visible registers of the parameters and concer ns that gover n the integration of datasets, computing capacities, and the very instrumentation that is used to procure the data themselves, they are what is in the world. In the case of climate change, the futurity of GCM's `vision' is a decisive part of its construction, both politically and in terms of the analysis of scientific data (as scientific visualisation). It is repeatedly intimated that scientific knowledge is the basis on which the responses to the climate change are configured, although we might argue there are broader desires for which this science provides space and political resources (degraded habitats, social injustice, extinction, etc). On the initial choice of models for climate change modelling, David Demeritt argues that, ``choice was influenced by scientific perceptions of political desirability which had been informed

by policy maker's belief in its technical ability'' (2001a, page 327). He argues that the construction of scientifically orientated responses is directed by social choices (2001a; Demeritt and Rothman, 1998; 1999). Clearly, responses that prioritise and reinstate forms of rational economic trading based on financial or other forms of accumulation ö carbon trading, insuring risk, economic security ö are privileged within this intimation over models that deal with uncertainty . Indeed, Demeritt argues that the abstractness of these

GCMs and their rationalisation of the global/universal viewpoint, `` can then be used to legitimate the specific political program of international emissions trading and other climate change mitigation mea- sures in the warm fuzzy glow of global citizenship'' (2001a, page 313). Here we might contend that responses to the IPCC climate models have depended on a business- as-usual approach, with appeals to a universalising physical world that produces a universalised citizen. These forms of response often draw on neoliberal understanding of the citizen as consumer and on neoliberal approaches to understanding ecosystems (see Robertson, 2006). However, this is not simply a theoretical problem. As scientists acknowledge, modelling led by political process has resulted in huge resources being channelled into securing certainty on a global scale that produces models that are useless at dealing with uncertainty and localised effects. The difficulties of incorporat- ing uncertainty or excess into the rationalisation of scientific modelling has several implications for knowledge at both technological and sociopolitical levels. As Serres outlines, the globalism of climate models has a history, which I will briefly attend to in order to situate how GCMs shape and predict the futurity of earth, followed by a discussion of what escapes, and is in excess of this machine vision of GCMs, and what the costs of this restricted economy of knowledge accounting might be. The Apollo images (photo 2272 and earthrise) produced a discourse of `one-world' and `whole earth', most notably articulated in James Lovelock's concept of Gaia in 1978 (see

Cosgrove, 2001; Ingold, 1993, pages 31 ^ 42; Szerszynski and Urry, 2006, pages 121 ^ 122). The `whole earth' globe-as-obj ect and the previous genealogy of global artifacts that allowed operative global gestures have governed discussions of geo- political imaginings (see Cosgrove, 2001) and points of departure for thinking about the role of images in environmental

thought (see Gold and Revill, 2004). Yet, the static rounded earth did much to calcify concepts of dynamic earth systems. If, for a moment, that little image of earth so fondly remembered on the front of the The Whole Earth catalogue was released into its prephotographic moment, we might see the contrast and question a little more closely how that image may have been some- what of a blind alley in environmental thought. If we remember the first human words in space: ``I see clouds!'' (preceded only by Leica's howls and monkey noises), we remember that the initial response to orbiting the globe was not to see it as artifact, but to see it as an atmosphere. Yet, we might ask how do we do approach sociopolitical problems of biospherical reach without resorting to globalism? Do we take on other biometaphors as models of political change such as atmospheres of democracy (Latour and Weibel, 2007) or engage in knowledge dispersal or action climates of change? Or do we think about the forms of ``geopolitical unconscious''

(Jameson, 1984) that reside in these respresentational models? Whole earth gave us the illusion of the earth as discrete artifact, which could be managed and encoded into systems or geo-engineered . For all the

image's championed universalism, Denis Cosgrove asks us to consider how whole earth is a form of knowl- edge that is produced and reinstated as an effect of national power. This `world-view' had no innocent occularity. Yet, as Cosgrove argues, the globe is an Enlightenment relic and the desire to make this whole earth globality existed long before the photo- graphs did (2001, pages 235 ^ 268). He argues, ``In their different but complimentary ways both one-world and whole-earth discourses inherit the most persistent and con- tradictory features of the Western global imagination, its sense of global mission'' (page 265). The drives to both author and universalise the globe use contradictory impulses implicit in the geopolitics of making global visions. As

Cosgrove states, global visions are implicitly imperial , he says: `` In projecting ideas and beliefs forged in one locale across space, the liberal mission of universal redemption is inescapably ethnocentric and imperial, able to admit `other' voices only if they speak and are spoken by the language of the (self-denying) centre. Desire for a perfect, universal language has been a persistent companion of Western globalism'' (page

265). Furthermore, ``Timothy Ingold has pointed out that all `global' thinking signals a replacement of cosmology by technology: `the relation between people and world is turned inside out' '' (Cosgrove, 2001, page 263). And external mastery

becomes a form of exile. The techno-imperial optic that Cosgrove and Ingold argue is recast in the new kinds of globalities built in and through GISs. As digital earth and scientific visual- isation reenergise the calcified `whole earth' environments through animated images, real-time visualisations and flyovers, they simultaneously mirror, in their construction and effect, the seemingly disinterested view from outside, what

Martin Dodge calls, ``the view from nowhere'' (2007).

This divide causes environmental degradation and erases difference – it’s universalizing gaze means that we can’t connect on an individual level to the earth or to others.Liftin 97 (Karen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls “person/planet politics,” Frontiers Journal of Women Studies Vol. 18 No. 2, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites,” http://faculty.washington.edu/litfin/research/gendered_eye.pdf, ND)

Such an examination, however, suggests that earth remote sensing, at least in the mainstream, is most likely to fit the interrogatory model of science as power. The ultimate goal of the undertaking is to predict, which, as

Francis Bacon recognized over four hundred years ago, is exactly how knowledge becomes power. Earth system science aims to uncover nature’s secrets in order to enable policymakers to “manage the earth.” The

celebratory discourse surrounding the undertaking reflects just such an uncritical acceptance of this ambition. Thus, we are told, with no

apparent sense of irony that: New space-based monitoring technologies backed by powerful information systems will make possible quantum leads in the ability to observe and understand Earth…. It is obvious that the key to the

secrets of the earth system lies in advanced organization, big science, big technology and, of course, big money. NASA, the principal recipient

of this big money, waxes eloquent on the cover of its colorful Earth System Science literature, quoting Goethe: “Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” There is surely an element of salesmanship here,

as NASA seeks to justify its budgetary requests in an era of fiscal conservatism, but in this case the salesman seem to have swallowed their own snake oil. Rather than standing back form modernity’s dream of power through knowledge, NASA embraces it

wholeheartedly in its grand vision of a comprehensive understanding of the earth as a system. How the power and magic will be manifested remains to be seen, but there is good reason to wonder whether the remote sensing project will be environmentally benign. Just as the assumptions about the nature of science implicit in satellite monitoring are

rooted in Baconian thinking, the assumptions about technology are rooted in the modernization paradigm. Even when information is made available at no cost to developing countries, which is by no means always the

case, remote sensing is still a technology that is likely to benefit industrialized countries the most. Research agendas are largely set in the West, the space and computer technology are owned by the North, and the results are published in English. When satellite data reveals mineral deposits in Third World countries, U.S. and European multinational corporations quickly arrive on the scene to “develop” the resources. Even Third World participation in remote sensing at a rudimentary level requires computer skills and technology that most developing countries lack. Full participation requires access to space technology. A few developing

countries, like India, Brazil, and Indonesia, have become space powers, although not necessarily in the best interests of the majority of their citizens since the elites generally seek to replicate the development of the North. Like so many technological projects in the past, global environmental monitoring by satellite runs the risk of providing a new arena for the world’s elite to dominate the poor. The remote sensing project seems to reinforce the drive to modernization that is itself the cause of global environmental change. The Global

Gaze Global corporatization is one of the dangers of the “global view” afforded by remote sensing, which brings us to the fifth assumption. At first glance, the assumption that a global perspective is necessary appears indisputable. After all, if problems like climate change, deforestation, desertification, and ozone depletion are global in scope, then we must take a global view in order to solve them. And if these environmental problems are simply the “negative externalities” of a

global economy, then a global view seems inescapable. To some extent, all of this is true, but it overlooks the dangers implicit in globalism—particularly the conceptual and pragmatic links between hegemony and globalism. In an unequal world,

globalism—including global science—is all too likely to mean white, affluent men universalizing their own experiences. Global problems are amenable to large data banks, to Big Science, to grand managerial schemes. As we saw earlier,

the view from space renders human beings invisible, both as agents and as victims of environmental destruction. It also erases difference, lending itself to a totalizing vision. The “global view” cannot adequately depict environmental problems because the impacts of these problems vary with class, gender, age, and race. The very abstractness of the global view may thwart efforts to heal natural systems. Charles Rubin echoes this sentiment, suggesting that the global view removes environmental problems from the realm of immediacy where meaningful action is possible and most likely to be effective. Rubin goes so

far as to reject the term “the environment” because, by essentially referring to “everything out there,” it simultaneously serves to distance people from the local places where they live even as it erects an artificial totalizing structure. Rubin’s claim about the concept of “environment” can be equally applied to “the global view”: Both seem to include

just about everything except the particularism of place. Ronnie Lipschurtz extends this line of reasoning, suggesting that is

place is a critical constitutive element of identity, then environmental degradation is not likely to be resolved by embracing the place-eradicating “Blue Planet” image. Rather, it is in the local realm, which is laden with cultural and personal meanings, where most women live their lives and where environmental healing is most likely to occur. According to Joni Seager, the “global view” is especially problematic for women: The experience of women on the front lines should help us change our notion of what environmental destruction looks like: it is not big, flashy, of global

proportions, or if global, manifests itself locally. Environmental degradation is pretty mundane—it occurs drop by drop,

tree by tree. This fact is discomfiting to big scientific and environmental organizations whose prestige depends on solving “big” problems in heroic ways. Ecofeminists who argue for the necessity of a “subsistence perspective”

on issues of environment and development echo Seager’s claim that women’s lives are especially entwined with the local and organic. Their general claims about the scientific method associated with “capitalist patriarchy” could be applied to the global gaze of Earth remote sensing: “But in order to be able to do violence to Mother Nature and other sister beings on Earth, homo scientificus had to set himself apart from, or rather above, nature.” While the explicit purpose of the earth remote sensing project is to rescue nature through monitoring and modeling it, ecofeminists would claim that the global gaze, by virtue of its position apart form and above nature, does violence to nature.

*MAKE THIS INTO 2NC PERM/ALT SOLVES CARD* The alternative is dynamic objectivity – rejecting the affs purely scientific approach and integrating subjective individual experience is the only way to solve environmental problemsLiftin 97 (Karen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls “person/planet politics,” Frontiers Journal of Women Studies Vol. 18 No. 2, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites,” http://faculty.washington.edu/litfin/research/gendered_eye.pdf, ND)

Remote sensing is not just Big Science; environmental groups and indigenous peoples are increasingly turning to satellite data in order to press their claims on behalf of nature and cultural survival. Perhaps most intriguing is the use of satellite data by indigenous groups for mapping their customary land rights and documenting the role of the state and multinational

corporations in ecological destruction. Environmental advocacy groups and indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and the Pacific Northwest are attempting to integrate their traditional knowledge into modern scientific methodologies through the use of satellite-generated data and mapping software. There examples suggest that there is an alternative to viewing the earth as alien Other, as an object of knowledge and an object of control. Evelyn Fox Keller’s work provides one example of the sort of reorientation that

might be involved in such an alternative: Rather that positing a basic adversarial relationship between subject and object, “dynamic objectivity” draws upon the commonality between mind and nature as a resource for understanding. Keller likens dynamic objectivity to empathy, a way of knowing others that draws upon a commonality of feelings and experience in order to enhance one’s understanding of another individual. But if the other is to retain his integrity as other, then empathy must not degenerate into projection; the knower must maintain an awareness of her own subjective assumptions and experiences and a conception of self that is distinct yet not disconnected. Informed by a sense of dynamic objectivity, Earth remote sensing could approach nature with a sense of empathy and respect, rather than as an object of planetary management. The global perspective afforded by satellites could honor

local cultures and the needs of those whose voices are not heard in the current discourse of global environmental management. Perhaps such an orientation would make it possible for the earth to speak to us through the satellites, “to declare its subjecthood.” Might the view from space, along with fourteen petabytes of data and computer-simulated

graphics, induce not only a state of awe—not so much of the earth itself but of human scientific and technological prowess—but also something resembling the sense of empathy that informs Keller’s notion of dynamic objectivity? Once the celebratory discourse surrounding satellite-based monitoring of the earth is seen for the masking mechanism that it is, and once the alienating discourse of the environment as a system to be managed is abandoned, such a possibility might be realized. A more postmodern feminist rehabilitation of Earth-observing satellites is also possible. Keller’s ideas, like those of ecofeminism, are rooted in a gender psychology of difference, although they clearly recognize the social construction of gender and are therefore less vulnerable to the charges of essentialism that have plagued

ecofeminism. Kathleen Ferguson’s notion of “mobile subjectivities” and Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborgs” catch some of the fascination ambiguity of indigenous peoples and environmental groups using satellite data to press their claims. Here, there is no pure and unitary conception of woman to counter patriarchal modernity; not is the line between humans and nature sharply drawn. Just as Christine Sylvester cites “the imaginative reworkings of seemingly fixed identities” in the “elephant-artist,” so might Earth remote sensing promote such identities as “ecological technician” or “indigenous multispectral analyst.” While a feminist rehabilitation of remote sensing is both intriguing and possible, we should not reject out of hand the interpretation of remote sensing as a manifestation of the will-to-power that lies at the root of humanity’s crisis in its relationship to nature. This much, however is clear. If knowledge-by-identity is to sever the knowledge/power nexus fostered by knowledge-by-distancing, then the “knowers,” including the scientists, the interpreters, and the managers, will need to become conscious of the deep cultural assumptions that they bring to their knowledge. This would require a far greater interdisciplinary leap than the ones

between physics, chemistry, and geology considered by Earth system science. To the extent that the social sciences are beset by the same notions of objectivity in knowledge/power nexus as the natural sciences, then what may be required is not so much an interdisciplinary leap but an extradisciplinary leap. An important corollary of this would be the dissolution of the gendered division of labor, whereby men think about the environment and women are about it, for dynamic objectivity would enable thinking and caring to become integrated as complementary aspects of knowledge. Another thing is certain: If the knowers, interpreters, and actors could embrace the stance of dynamic objectivity, the hubris implicit in the knowledge/power nexus could be replaced by an attitude of humility, for humility is what follows from a feeling of kinship with the object of study. This would have major implications, not only for knowledge about the earth, but for how we should live on the earth which, after all, is why programs like the

USGCRP are being established. In fact, coming to this humility may generate more practical knowledge about how to proceed in our relationship with the earth than we will gain from the fourteen petabytes of data. Perhaps then the knot of knowledge/power could be disentangled and the crucial links be made between data, knowledge, and wisdom.

Links

Plan Link

Earth observation satellites reinforce knowledge hierarchies – the elite claim everyone has equal access to information while ignoring the perspective of disempowered groups.Liftin 97 (Karen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls “person/planet politics,” Frontiers Journal of Women Studies Vol. 18 No. 2, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites,” http://faculty.washington.edu/litfin/research/gendered_eye.pdf, ND)

What do we expect to gain for space-based observation that justifies placing the earth’s climate systems at risk of unprecedented change as we await greater scientific certainty? The aim of “Earth system science,” built upon

satellite data, is “to build a comprehensive predictive model of the earth’s physical, chemical, and biological

processes.” No doubt, remote sensing and computerized data processing techniques will generate hitherto unknown quantities of information and “hitherto unknown power for the scientist,” as David Rhind has pointed out. In the absence of the Cold War threat, satellite monitoring accompanied by computer-based analytic techniques, will, according to Peter Thatcher, “prevent new, ecological and economic ‘falling dominoes’ and enhance global security.” The “global view” afforded from the vantage point of space is certainly conducive to notions of “global security,” but what might that mean in an unequal world? Not only will

remote sensing benefit poor countries, we are told, but it will simultaneously serve both US interests and global welfare.

But there is good reason to be wary of a celebratory discourse that stifles critical thinking about the nature of these technologies. Must we not be skeptical of a technology that promises so much? If celebratory discourses serve a making function, then what might be said of the shadow side of remote sensing? Feminist Perspectives on

Science and Technology Critical approaches to science and technology, including feminist critiques begin with the premise that these bastions of neutrality are not neutral, but rather originate from, express, and reinforce certain sets of power relations. A critical approach to remote sensing reveals some of the unquestioned

assumptions that undergird the celebratory discourse surround earth remote sensing, giving preference to those voices that are least likely to be heard. Because programs like EOS and EOSDIS, relying as they do upon aerospace and electronics technologies, are primarily the domain of white men in the wealthiest countries, that means looking at the matter from the perspectives of the women and the disempowered. From those

perspectives, six assumptions embedded in most discussions of satellite monitoring may be uncovered.

First, the scientists are assumed to be the neutral architects of this global view, despite the fact that they are

drawn from a rather narrow segment of the global population. Second, science, taken as a source of neutral information, is taken as a basis for rational policy making. Third, science is believed to generate the kind of certainty needed to guide action. Fourth, the same scientific and technological paradigms that have caused environmental problems on a global scale are thought to be capable of solving them. Fifth, a “global view” is assumed to be necessary, both scientifically and politically. Sixth, once scientists have an understanding of the “earth

system,” policymakers will have the capacity to “manage” the planet. All of these assumptions are rooted in a paradigm of rationality and control that has characterized patriarchal modernity.

Climate Adaptation Link

Framing climate adaptation as “development” reproduces a capitalist social imaginary -- the aff creates structural inequality that exacerbates climate vulnerability, only attacking background conditions of inequality solvesRoberts ’11 (David Robert, PhD in Politics and Environment, Neoliberalism and climate change adaptation, http://grist.org/politics/2011-08-24-how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-neoliberalism/)

Fieldman argues, in a nutshell, that “the neoliberal system produces vulnerability to climate-induced (and other)

changes and effectively incapacitates effective responses.” Adaptation policy is not something that can simply

be tacked onto, or absorbed into, neoliberal development policy more broadly, because “ development as presently

conceived and practised is itself maladaptive .” For one thing, Feildman argues, it has put workers in a perpetual state of insecurity: Economic insecurity does not refer just to the failure of the neoliberal system to dent global poverty substantially, but also to

the increasingly contingent nature of employment. Globally, surplus workers from all sectors are forced into competition for a limited number of jobs. As capital moves to exploit these surpluses, one day’s ‘winners’ may become the next day’s ‘losers’: maquiladora workers in Mexico lose jobs to China or Vietnam, while American information technology workers lose theirs to

India or Malaysia. Periods of unemployment mean that most people have few opportunities to accumulate assets that would enable them to take anticipatory adaptation measures such as strengthening a house, or to rebuild lives disrupted by a climate-induced disaster. Moreover, as Hoogvelt (2001) argues, hundreds of millions face a future of permanent social and economic exclusion as ‘afundamental cleavage has opened up between, on the one hand, networks of capital, labour, information and markets … and on the other, populations and territories deprived of interest and value to the dynamics of global capitalism’. Those at the bottom of the global income scale are likely to remain there; they are ‘economically irrelevant’; many will never find formal employment.

Despite the freedom of capital to move, the neoliberal order restricts the mobility of people . Even the option to migrate to escape climate-induced change is not available to those at the bottom of the

global income scale, since most lack the special skills that would permit them to relocate legally. For the state, the

story is similar. It’s clear that “ international climate funding ” is and probably always will be grossly inadequate to the needs states face, both for basic background services (e.g., infrastructure) and climate-specific measures (e.g., building sea walls, restoring coastal wetlands). States need to be able to marshal their own resources to spend on resilience that benefits local populations.

But neoliberalism, because it encourages capital mobility, leaves states in the position of competing for investment by lowering tax rates and removing tariffs, thus depriving themselves of revenue. “Neoliberalism,” Fieldman says, “has consequently put the social and much of the public-goods portions of state budgets on a strict, if not starvation, diet.” That includes climate-specific measures. To boot, states competing for corporate investment are loathe to constrain private-sector activities that increase

vulnerability, like logging in erosion-prone areas or overshrimping for export. Despite the fond dreams of some neoliberals, civil society is not going to be able to fill this gap. Resilience requires a robust, well-funded state and a citizenry that enjoys

some employment stability and asset ownership. Neoliberalism, Fieldman argues, works against that. In the end, big changes are necessary, but Fieldman’s handwaving on that front isn’t much more helpful than everyone else’s — something about Gramscian moments

and counter-hegemonic projects. She does make a good case, though, that the currently dominant model of global development is

pursuing macroeconomic efficiency at the expense of resilience . That doesn’t seem like a wise strategy heading into

an age of uncertainty and upheaval.

Arctic Mapping/Exploration 1nc LinkArctic mapping reproduces a neoliberal social imaginary – it stakes an advance claim to Western autonomy over northern indigenous resourcesMedalye and Foster (PhD Candidates at York University at the department of

Political Science) 12(Jacqueline and Ryan, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CAPITALIST STATE IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC: INTERROGATING CANADA’S “NORTHERN STRATEGY”, Studies in Political Economy 90 AUTUMN 2012)

The case exemplifies how geomapping by the state serves as a strategy for paving the way for transnational capital accumulation and export-oriented resource development of the North as the climate changes. It also demon- strates that such strategies may encounter local resistance to these forms of dispossession. In attempting to map the offshore oil reserves of Lancaster Sound, in the absence of devolution agreements over the ownership of sea resources, the Canadian state maintains its right to offer leases and licences and retain royalty revenues that may accrue from offshore oil, especially in the waters off of Nunavut. This strategy effectively robs the local community of formal mechanisms of governance to approve or disapprove of oil and gas projects as well as a direct share from offshore revenues. In other words, in the absence of any progress on devolution, geomapping is a project of laying federal claim to these resources and planning for their exploitation by transnational capital.

Marine Conservation 1nc LinkConservation is neoliberal – creates complacency that prevents critique of the structure of the economyBrockington and Duffy 10

(Dan and Rosaleen, Dan Brockington is a professor in Conservation and Devlopment at the University of Manchester and has conducted research in South Africa, India, Tanzania, New Zealand, and Australia. Rosaleen Duffy is a professor at the University of London, "Capitalism and conservation: the production and reproduction of biodiversity conservation." Antipode 42.3 (2010): 469-484.)

One of the central themes of this collection is that conservation is proving instrumental to capitalism’s growth and reproduction. It provides an “environmental fix” (as Harvey might put it). As Igoe and colleagues observe (this issue), where Green Marxists have predicted environmental impediments that would threaten capitalism’s prosperity (O’Connor 1988), in fact these very impediments are the source of new forms of accumulation. Consumers thrive on scarcity, anxiety, fear (all help create demand), so perhaps the flourishing of capitalism in conservation, which deals in similar currency, should not be such a surprise. It is still important, however, to understand how this union is being achieved. Tackling that question is one of the main achievements of the essay by Igoe and colleagues. Following Sklair and others they propose the existence of hegemonic “mainstream conservation” interests composed of an alliance of corporate, philanthropic and NGO interests (Sklair 2001). Mainstream conservation (one part of Sklair’s “sustainable development historic bloc”) proposes resolutions to environmental problems that hinge on heightened commodity production and consumption, particularly of newly commodified ecosystem services. Their views are promulgated through a mutually reinforcing collection of spectacularmedia productions circulated in advertisements and on the web. The power of these productions lies not in their robustness, logic or rigour, but rather because they are presented and consumed within societies dominated by spectacle (Debord 1995 [1967]). That is, these are societies where representations of, and connection to, places, people and causes have long been mediated through commodified images. In consuming these images people are given “the romantic illusion that they are adventurously saving the world” (p 502) while the deleterious ecological impacts of these very purchases, and the lifestyles they require, are neatly erased. By focusing consumers’ attention on distant and exotic locales, the spectacular productions . . . conceal the complex and proximate connections of people’s daily lives to environmental problems, while suggesting that the solutions to environmental problems lay in the consumption of the kinds of commodities that helped produce them in the first place (p 504).]

Marine Conservation 2nc LinkConservation is an attempt to sustain neoliberal economic relations – the aff is a stop-gap to prevent more radical criticism of environmental destructionBϋscher & Arsel 12

(Bram and Murat, Buscher is a “postdoctoral fellow, Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg”. Both authors are a part of the Netherlands Institute of Social Studies. “INTRODUCTION: NEOLIBERAL CONSERVATION, UNEVEN GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE DYNAMICS OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM”, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 103.2 (2012): 129-135.)

The concepts of neoliberal conservation and uneven geographical development derive from rich, nuanced literatures that cannot be done justice to in a short introduction (see e.g. Braun & Castree, 1998; Smith, 2008; Arsel & Büscher, 2012; Büscher et al. forthcoming). The purpose of this section is therefore not to provide a full genealogy of the concepts but rather to explain their key characteristics with a view to paving the way for the contributions to the special dossier. Importantly, both concepts are rooted in critical political economy analyses that frame the interplay between interests and markets – and their social and environmental constitution and effects – within an explicit configuration of structural power (Arrighi 1994; O’Connor 1994; Heynen et al. 2007; Storm 2009). The historic configuration that is currently dominant is that of late capitalism. Hence these analyses have the critical study of capitalist structures of power and modes of production and value creation at their core. This is why the global financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2007 has been of particular interest, as it confirmed once more the essential instability and

contradictory nature of capitalism (Bellamy Foster & Magdoff 2009). Many of the central contradictions of capitalism derive from the nature of capital, defined as ‘value in process, money in process . . . It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation, emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again’ (Marx 1976: 256). Capital, as Harvey (2010) recently emphasised, is always on the move; it cannot stop but on penalty of the death of the system. The financial crisis again made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich and many poorer countries were, and are, primarily concerned with making sure that banks start lending again in order to get the economy out of the slump and

money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, and so cannot help but to seek and bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including the natural world (Castree 2008; Büscher 2010). Making clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to conserve its services, then, has only superficially to do with trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adage ‘payments for environmental services’ would have it. Rather, it should be looked at in Polanyian terms of capitalism trying to mediate its worst excesses while simultaneously trying to open up new avenues for ‘moving capital’ and securing profit (Igoe et al. 2010). It is here that we get to the concept of neoliberal conservation. McCarthy (2012), as well as Büscher (2012) show that one of the ways in which to conceptualise neoliberalism is as a particular ideology to subject social and political (and environmental!) affairs to capitalist (market) dynamics. Neoliberalism has been the globally dominant ideology since the early 1970s and has deeply influenced the issue of environmental conservation by trying to make it compatible with capital circulation (Neves & Igoe 2012). Of course, this is not to say that conservation has only recently become associated with capitalism. The literature (e.g. Brockington et al. 2008; Igoe et al. 2010), increasingly emphasises that conservation has played a vital role throughout the history and development of capitalism. In part, this relates to Polanyi’s ‘double movement’: conservation as a political backlash against the environmental effects of modernisation and capitalist industrialisation. But as Igoe et al. (2010) show, this is only a minor part of the story. Conservation has in actual fact been an essential part of capitalist expansion since the nineteenth century and was deeply dependent on elites and rising business tycoons (Adams 2008). Neoliberal conservation, then, is the contemporary push to making environmental conservation not only compatible with capitalism but also a source for economic growth (Arsel & Büscher 2012). Hence where after the Great Depression it was the automobile industry that led many of the technological changes that helped to generate economic growth for decades, many world leaders, including Barack Obama, have been pushing ‘green technologies’ to provide economic growth, development and environmental stewardship.1 Obviously, these (so-called) ‘green technologies’ have a longer history, but the financial crisis really catapulted them into the global political limelight, especially through the United Nations Environment Programme’s call for a

‘Global Green New Deal’ and, more recently, the ‘Green Economy’ (UNEP 2011). In particular due to the pressing problems of climate change, loss of biological diversity and fresh

water resources and pollution, the capitalist system is trying to find ways to cope with and incorporate these in order to safeguard future economic growth (Stern 2006). But what exactly are the consequences of further integrating conservation with contemporary capitalism? This is one of the issues that the contributors to the special dossier address. This question is extremely important yet oddly enough hardly discussed in mainstream discussions and policy environments. Everybody knows and recognises we live in a capitalist time, yet no policies on the environment ever start with ‘biodiversity conservation is highly influenced by capitalism’. As Newell (2011, p.

4) put it succinctly for the realm of academia, ‘capitalism is ever present, yet largely unsaid, in many academic debates on global environmental change’. We believe that this recognition is desperately needed in the mainstream debate because its view on how further integration of conservation with capitalism leads to multiple ‘wins’ is in fact based on a history of many environmentally harmful contradictions. Furthermore, it relates to the question of how the benefits and burdens of conservation are distributed across the globe (Brockington & Duffy 2010). This then brings us to the second main concept, that of uneven geographical development. Proponents of neoliberalism have been at pains to stress the specialness of this crisis – Greenspan called it a ‘once in a century credit tsunami’ (BBC 2008) – in order to buttress the perceived strength of the foundations of the global economic order. However, from a critical political economy perspective, such crises confirm that capitalism has progressed historically according to what Harvey (2006a, p. 71) terms ‘“uneven geographical development”: the extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes across and between spaces of the world economy (at all manner of different scales)’. Importantly, the benefits and burdens of the crisis, as well as the abilities and capabilities of states to deal with the crisis have also been extremely unevenly distributed. Büscher (2012) shows that the continent that least contributed to the crisis was nonetheless severely hit, while rich, Western nations at least had the ability and capacity to provide lavish bail-out packages.2 Such an ability is often missing within the context of developing nations, whose states not only lack the resources to undertake the protection of their citizens who suffer from myriad negative impacts of financial crises, but are also actively prevented by intergovernmental organisations from undertaking meaningful action lest these disrupt the workings of markets (Akyüz 2011). This unequal and differentiated ability of (and within) developing and developed nation states to respond to crises, forms another dimension of uneven geographical development. In this regard, it is important to remember that ‘ neoliberalism uses uneven geographical development as a means to promote the universality of its own world project, which has nothing to do with the well-being of the whole of humanity but everything to do with the enhancement of dominant forms of class power’ (Harvey 2009, p. 1276). To this end, Arsel (2012) demonstrates that even explicitly post-neoliberal leaders in Latin America, who are pursuing redistributionist policies, have to make use of the neoliberal toolkit in developing their policies. This seeming contradiction arises from the tension between the traditional logic of the developmental state, namely, to deliver socio-economic progress through economic growth, with its newly acquired, or at times imposed, role to protect the integrity of ecosystems not only for the benefit of local communities who depend on them but also for the parts of the global society at large who demand their preservation. Of course, to say, in general, that things develop unevenly does not seem to say much. This is why the addition ‘geographical’ is so important: not only do actors have uneven capabilities to deal

with environment and development problematics, the benefits and burdens of these are also inherently unevenly distributed across and between spaces of the world economy (Smith 2008). In turn, capitalism, and especially capital circulation attribute uneven importance to different spaces, with specific geographical expressions . This was, of course, Smith’s (2008, p. 4) basic message: ‘uneven development is the systematic geographical expression of the contradictions inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital’. Crises, then, as Smith (2008, p. 170) also points out ‘can also be acutely functional for capital’ as it shakes up the playing field within which class interests can be rearticulated, and particularly, reinforced (as is what Harvey 2010 argues is what happened with the US$700 billion bailout package in the US). Crisis can also be an opportunity to question these dynamics and practices, and this is what the special dossier is all about: interrogating important issues like environmental conservation, poverty and development within an explicit configuration of structural power. This, as Newell (2011, p. 6) also stresses, is highly necessary and overdue: ‘the extension and deepening of the logics of capitalism to new geographical and ecological areas of the planet appears to be unprecedented. This process needs to be adequately understood as a political and economic phenomenon with important social and environmental consequences of interest both to scholars of global environmental change and to all of us as citizens who, some more than others, will live with the benefits and problems it brings’. Exploring the issues of neoliberal conservation and uneven geographical geographical development can contribute to this understanding, and each of the contributors touches on different aspects. Let us briefly introduce their main concerns and arguments. CONNECTING THE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SPECIAL DOSSIER Just as there has been a ‘scramble’ in academic contributions trying to make sense of the crisis (Castree 2010), so the crisis signifies a scramble over resources and over how to appropriate and value these. In the various geographic spaces of concern, as well as on the various scales of the contributions, one can detect these dynamics at play, whereby struggles over resources and their value are played out against the background of variegated forms of capital accumulation – and thus uneven geographical development. In Büscher’s (2012) contribution about the place of the African continent within the world system, the unevenness is arguably starkest. Büscher shows how ‘Africa’s place in the global world order’ has long been signified by a seemingly paradoxical situation of intensive, one-sided and violent resource exploitation and equally intensive, one-sided and violent resource conservation . From his contribution, it is clear that the old ‘scramble for Africa’ has not only transitioned into the neoliberal era, but taken on distinct new forms of geographical unevenness, scales and intensities. Büscher argues that the financial crisis has given globally dominant actors renewed vigour to intensify familiar processes of neoliberal conservation and neoliberal exploitation behind a win-win façade: good for outsiders and good for Africa’s poor. These core dynamics are also evident in other parts of the world that are the focus of some of the contributions. Arsel (2012) focuses on Latin America and Ecuador in particular, and shows that the scramble there is to transfer the hold on vital resources, particularly oil, from foreign corporations to the ‘refounded’ state. Through a broader Latin American strategy of ‘Socialism of the twenty first century’ which

reflects the driving force behind the ongoing ‘Left Turn’, President Correa of Ecuador saw only one way to lessen foreign influence, namely to strengthen state control over resources and environmental and developmental processes in the country. Paradoxically, one of the key ways of doing so for Correa proved to be a policy that strongly resembles neoliberal conservation. To the extent that the Yasuní-ITT (Ishpingo- Tambocoha-Tiputini) initiative is path breaking as an attempt to transcend the tension between the need for continued socioeconomic development in the South and the necessity of preserving ecosystems critical for the health of the planet, it too has succumbed to the dominant logic of the markets.

Marine Conservation 2nc Turns CaseMarine conservation ensures ecological destruction – it arbitrarily cordones off specific environmental spaces as intrinsically valuable, sacrificing all other ocean space as exploitable resourceSullivan 11 [Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, Bath Spa University, “Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation” July 2011 http://siansullivan.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cns-paper-final-july2011.pdf]//kevin

In this article we have sought to come to a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. We hope to have delineated neoliberal conservation both as inherent to broader capitalist processes, and as a particular set of governmentalities that seeks to extend and police profitable commodification processes based on artificial and arbitrary separations of human society from biodiverse-rich (non-human) natures. In thereby producing territories that are suitable for its own expansion, neoliberal conservation intervenes in diverse biocultural systems around the world, displacing, enclosing, commodifying, spectacularizing these into the idealized natures that are to be saved (Igoe 2010). In neoliberal conservation, then, globally diverse actors produce proliferating and profitable commodities that rely on surprisingly similar packages of ideologies and practices, premised on constructed distinctions between human and non-human natures, while ironically promising the opposite to (normally non-local) consumers in the form of closer contact and intimacy with nature. As extended in Bruno Latour’s recent work (2004; 2005; 2010), what concerns us here are the sorts of socionatures—the sorts of assemblages of human and non-human natures—that thereby are composed and brought forth. We are interested in what these tend to include and enhance, and what these tend to demote and discard. Notwithstanding the generative and creative excitement of capitalist productive forms (as noted above), we maintain that significant alienations and socio-ecological degradations are thereby sustained. Non-human natures tend to be flattened and deadened into abstract and conveniently incommunicative and inanimate objects, primed for commodity capture in service to the creation of capitalist value. This extends a utilitarian construction of a passive nature as an object (of many objects) that is external and distant in relation to human presence and use. Similarly, the knowledge and value practices of diverse peoples frequently are displaced to make way for a neoliberal opening and pricing of land and “resources” as these are recomposed in service to neoliberalism via conservation. The peoples thereby affected become constrained to participate in and benefit from neoliberal conservation initiatives to the extent that they accept associated opportunities and compensation only in particular economic terms. The hegemonic edge of this contraction of possibilities is felt in both the biopolitical (self-)disciplining necessitated by participation in such neoliberal assemblages (Norgaard 2010); and in the suppression of alternative value practices and dissent experienced by those

contesting the socionatures that tend to be assembled through neoliberal conservation. We maintain and hope, therefore, that this is an arena ripe for change in effecting transition to a world that, as Adams and Jeanrenaud (2008) put it, is both humane and diverse. We offer this consolidated critique as a gesture to affirm that such change requires nuanced understanding of the contexts and assumptions that are generating problems. As T.J. Laughlin wrote in 1892 in the introductory piece to the Journal of Political Economy: It becomes very clear that possibility of change implies a knowledge of the thing to be changed; that a knowledge of the existing economic system is a condition precedent to any ethical reforms. Certain impatient people find it difficult to wait to acquire the knowledge of what is; and, unequipped, proceed rashly to say what ought to be. Any transformative alternatives to systemic socio-environmental problems, thus of necessity, will be mediated through the political economy from which they have emerged, and are not predisposed to “quick fix” solutions within the structural contexts that generate such apparently structural problems. We hope with this article to have drawn out some reasons why the deployment of political economic structures that have produced such systemic problems may, in fact, not be the most logical means of solving these same problems. We also hope to have illuminated some of the ideological reasons as to why the neoliberalizing of environmental conservation is so opaque and seductive to those involved with conservation work. In thinking about future directions, we are inspired by Latour’s recent “Compositionist Manifesto” in which he proposes the concept of “composition” to represent the possibility for recycling critique and putting it to creative uses. To follow Latour’s (2010) metaphor, critique can be wielded like a sledge hammer, which can “break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices.” All of these things we have sought to achieve, and hopefully with some success. But the space we have opened in the process is sullied by the remnants of these things. Like broken bits of concrete and plaster on the floor, and dust in the air, all this makes it a difficult space to inhabit. How can we further clear the air and recycle this rubble? How can we also recycle the tools of critique, as Latour proposes, into ones that can “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, and stitch together.” How is it possible, in other words, to compose more equitable and ecologically healthy compositions of human and more-than-human nature(s) in a world characterized by Latour (2010, 485) as having “no future but many prospects?”

Ocean Mapping 1nc Link/ImpactSpatial planning reproduces neoliberalism – the aff’s mapping imposes neoliberal subjectivity on oceanic actors, reducing them to rational utility-maximizers – that erases recognition of existing oceanic inequality and prioritizes the zoning priorities of the socially privilegedOlson 10

(Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,” Geoforum, 2010)

These mappings and transformations happen within broader spatial imperatives that are fundamentally reshaping the ocean. The majority of the world’s fisheries are estimated to be fully exploited, overexploited or depleted (FAO, 2007). Political conflict over fisheries pit the many fishermen arguing that fisheries are rebounding against the many fisheries scientists and environmentalists arguing otherwise; many resource-users have demanded a greater voice in the very process of knowledge production, and efforts at co-management, cooperative research, and traditional ecological knowledge point to potential directions such involvement may produce. Yet conventional arguments about the tragedy of the commons finger

the rational, self-interested resource user —economic man of neoclassical

economic theory—operating in a socio-ecological environment of incorrect institutional norms and economic incentives. With too many fishermen chasing too few fish in an open sea, such understandings seek

privatizing, neoliberal solutions to fisheries dilemmas —solutions many

advocates fear destroy fishing communities and cultures. While this hegemony of bio-economics in fisheries management has been maintained, as St. Martin (2001) argues, through a geographic imagination that places the rationalist and self-interested “economic man” in a spatially homogenous commons,2 the increasing efforts to use area-specific forms of fisheries management signal the potential for a “paradigm shift” from individuals to communities and ecosystems, in which the “promise of GIS” hinges especially on the integration of social and biological data ( St. Martin, 2004). Though the actual practice of ecosystem-based management is still taking shape, its recognition of connections and multiple spatial scales, as well as its use for local knowledge in time and space, may be a way to involve people as members of social groups (rather than simply individuals) more integrally in the management process ( St. Martin et al., 2007 and Clay and Olson, 2008). The actual implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management, some argue, should happen through a planned system of “ocean zoning” that replaces the patchwork of ad hoc, uncoordinated regulations whose goals have been decoupled from a broader notion of the ecosystem that concerns itself as much with sustaining fisheries as “the non-fisheries benefits of marine ecosystems to society” (Babcock

et al., 2005, p. 469). As marine biologist Elliot Norse has written, because the ocean has many competing users—“shipping, defense, energy production, telecommunications, commercial fishing, sportfishing, recreational diving, whale watching, pleasure boating, tourism and coastal real estate development”—whose conflicts can lead to resource degradation, zoning provides a solution for it “is a place-based ecosystem management system that reduces conflict, uncertainty and costs by separating incompatible uses and specifying how particular areas may be used” (2002, pp. 53–54). Such a comprehensive system of zoning is

envisioned as a more rational “system of finely specified spatial and

temporal property rights ” (Wilen, 2004). The 2003 Pew Report also mentions

“implement[ing] ecosystem-based planning” in the same breath as zoning, for fisheries management, it argues, should more fully consider context: “incompatible” user conflicts that affect target species (2003, p. 47). Economists who promote zoning as a way to “account for spatial and

intertemporal externalities” picture it reaching its rational equilibrium

through the market, rationing numbers of users in search of a “rent-maximizing equilibrium” (Sanchirico and Wilen, 2005, p. 25), and ultimately creating property rights (Holland, 2004) and stewardship (US Commission on Ocean Policy, 2004, p. 64). Yet while ocean zoning is seen as something of a new solution for marine conflicts, the model of terrestrial zoning upon which it is based is hardly without its critics. Proponents of smart growth, new urbanism, and mixed-use communities have pointed to the myriad problems—including sprawl, traffic, pollution, loss of farmland, and so on—created by separating the activities of daily life. The view that zoning will end conflict assumes that such conflicts center only on doing different things in the same place, while creating zones of “use-priority” areas begs the question of whose values will dictate a given zone’s “most important” activities. As such, conflict may simply be displaced from the ocean to places where policies are crafted or where their impacts are lived. Indeed scholars have long noted how

zoning laws are colored by cultural ideas (for example, public versus

private/domestic space) that are distinctly bourgeois, raced and gendered

and thus favor certain groups of people (Ritzdorf, 1994, Perin, 1977 and

LiPuma and Meltzoff, 1997). Some economists have also been critical of marine zoning’s creation of “divided” property rights that do not fully consider “the opportunity costs of foregone production” that might otherwise “maximize joint wealth” ( Edwards, 2000, p. 4). In other words, the “economic benefits” of zoning cannot be assumed for “it is an empirical question whether ocean wealth would be improved” (ibid, p. 7). A focus on aggregate wealth though leaves

unanswered the effect of an initially unequal distribution of wealth on the

prices and outcomes in a market-based economy, as well as the changes in subjectivity and practices that the neoliberalization of resource economies and identities can engender.

The impact is massive environmental destruction and social inequality – imposition of neoliberal landscapes on local landscapes produces fast capitalist extraction and causes displacement and dehumanizationNixon ‘11

(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)

In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is

frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a

vernacular one ." A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective,

historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out

there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official

landscape -whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of

those- is typically oblivious to such earlier maps ; instead, it writes the

land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that

is often pitilessly instrumental . Lawrence Summers' scheme to export

rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems

inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue, then, that the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal

perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official

landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who

must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales. In

the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose

on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human gain. Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn,

and the animate deceased. The ensuing losses are consistent with John Berger's

lament over capitalism's disdain for interdependencies by

foreshortening our sense of time, thereby rendering the deceased immaterial: The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead

already include the living in their own great collective. Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this

interdependence. With disastrous results for the living , who now think of

the dead as the eliminated.40 Hence, one should add, our perspective on environmental asset stripping should include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the

landscape of multiple generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that entails. Against this backdrop, I consider in this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements involved in slow violence against the poor thus requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as well. In the chapters that follow, I track the socioenvironmental fallout from developmental agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis dwellers in the Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown destinations so that American petroleum engineers and their sheik collaborators can develop their "finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some dictatorial edict, the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or industrial need) displaces and disperses

those who had developed through their vernacular landscapes their own adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include conservation refugees. Too often in the global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished communities who have been involuntarily moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision is largely through writers who have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects: either the threatened community capitulates and is scattered (across refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses to move but, as its world is undermined, effectively becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call

displacement without moving. In other words, I want to propose a more radical notion of

displacement , one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of

people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the

land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities

stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it

inhabitable .

Ocean Mapping 2nc LinkOcean mapping reproduces a neoliberal approach towards oceans – the plan’s spatial mapping commodifies the marine environment, allowing statistical visualization of hidden ocean life to accelerate consumptionOlson 10

(Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,” Geoforum, 2010)

The inability to fix resources in space has been at the heart of many understandings of common property. Mobile resources such as fish have given rise to particularly intractable common-pool problems, for their mobility implies a lack of “excludability (or control of access). That is, the physical nature of the resource is such that controlling access by potential users may be costly and, in the extreme, virtually impossible” (Feeny et al., 1990, p. 3). Not only do fish move but, at least in conventional accounts, so do mobile fishermen, ever seeking highest profit in a rationalist movement through space (e.g. Sanchirico and Wilen, 1999). There are of course fissures in this story, even for such seemingly mobile resources as fish. While rotational management is argued particularly appropriate for semi-sedentary species such as scallops (e.g. Hart, 2003), others similarly contend that locally diverse sub-species, like populations of cod in Norway that follow the ebb and flow of particular fjords and inlets, necessitate more locally-based science and management (e.g. Jorde et al., 2007). Fishermen too, while often portrayed as opportunistically mobile, may have multiple rationalities that inform their fishing practices, including their spatial decision-making (Olson, 2006). My point here is not to counter movement with an equally mythical lack of movement, but rather to ask how forms of resource use—here especially, fishing or farming

the ocean—involve culturally constructed subjectivities , networks of social

relations, and spatially grounded knowledge and practice. In the case of contemporary fisheries management, these subjectivities, relations, and knowledge and practice are now increasingly mediated through technologies

like GIS . While mapping and counter-mapping have become more

intertwined with stories of common property in general, the case of fisheries poses a double sort of enigma, for not only is there the issue of mobility and excludability in space but there is also the question of visualization, or lack thereof. In Hardin’s classic account of the tragedy of the commons, for example, he asked that we “Picture a pasture open to all” (1968: 1244, italics added), where the herders, herds, and resource degradation are palpable and countable. For

fisheries management however, this has not been such an easy task. The inability

to see what is happening has in part structured the orientation of both

fisheries management and biology: stock assessment is a statistical

exercise in estimating hidden populations, while management tries to reconcile its strategies around fishermen who might cheat without being seen. Fisheries management, however, has recently begun to take a distinctly visual turn through the use of GIS and other spatial techniques for understanding and monitoring where different resources are and how they are used—not only supporting policy analyses from habitat classification and protection of essential fish habitat, to the social and economic impacts of closed areas ( Meaden, 2000, NOAA, 2004 and St. Martin, 2004), but also coupled to increasing interest in spatially-based methods of management. What tends to be missing, however, is an appreciation of arguments raised within geography and other social sciences that critique the use of GIS as technologically or socially neutral, or which have conversely grappled with how to use GIS for qualitative and critical approaches to social knowledge.1 The presumed neutrality and objectivity of GIS in fisheries management has not only assumed a sense of “space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naïvely assumed sense of space as emptiness” (Smith and Katz,

1993, p. 75), but has also tended to privilege universal understandings .

Thus while the fishery management process has begun to incorporate spatially sensitive analyses into its development of area-based management,

such incorporation has utilized neoliberal constructions of the typical

fisherman that are challenged by more nuanced notions of fishing and

resource dependence. New directions in the mapping of scallops that focus on crucial habitat and life cycle issues, for example, promise changes both in the science underlying fisheries management and in management itself by better directing fishing effort to particular places and by better understanding the conditions for resource enhancement through seeding, which at first glance recalls

the warnings from early GIS critics that digital maps would serve to create or

reinforce relations of power through the discovery of new things or

people to exploit (Schuurman, 2000, p. 580). Yet as this reframing of resources

from fishing to farming intersects with an increasing interest in aquaculture (where the idea of farming is obviously more explicit), it becomes clear that while ideas about property can be more easily enrolled into neoliberal discourses that commodify resource relations, transformations from fishing to farming also enable alternative projects through their articulation with cultural practices and

processes. This includes the differential spatial practices of often smaller-

scale fishermen as well as community-based interests in scallop seeding,

who have sought—quite literally—to sow the seeds of community stability and, in the process, resist and redefine the terms of neoliberal market logic. This paper thus considers the differing worldviews, practices, and spatialities among and between so-called highliners and small-scale fishermen, fishers and farmers of scallops, different resource-users and the scientists who map them, and the radically new forms of economic practice and sustainability that inhere, potentially, in different uses and forms of maps and spatial knowledge, looking in particular at US Federal management of Sea Scallops, a Canadian example of a private-state partnership, and community-based seeding efforts in Downeast Maine.

Ocean Mapping – 2nc Ontology KNeoliberal spatial planning ensures error replication because it reduces the ocean to human representations of it – be suspicious of their impacts because they reduce ecological relations to commodity relationsSteinberg 13

(Philip E. Steinberg 13 – PhD from Clark University & Professor of Critical Geography at Florida State University , “Of the seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions”, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Volume 10, Number 2, 4/29/2013)

Ocean region studies have their origins in an explicit questioning of the assumption that the land-based region is the appropriate scope for conducting social analysis. In History departments, in particular, where academic positions are routinely connected with a specific region and a specific era (e.g. nineteenth-century Latin Americanist), scholars who have sought to define regions by oceans of interaction rather than continents of settlement and governance have had to directly challenge the disciplinary establishment.36 And yet, the regionalization of the sea itself is rarely interrogated. As Martin Lewis demonstrates, the boundaries, definitions, and namings of ocean regions have been highly variable (and, at times, quite arbitrary).37 Likewise, the lines that divide ocean regions on a contemporary legal map of the sea defining territorial waters, contiguous

zones, exclusive economic zones, the High Seas, etc. hide as much as

they obscure . From the Papal Bull of 1493 that purportedly divided the ocean

between Spain and Portugal to the zones ascribed to the ocean by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the history of the ocean is filled with attempts to mark off its spaces, if not as claimable territory

then at least as zones where certain activities , by certain actors, are

permitted and others are prohibited . And yet, even when the locations of

the lines are clear and communicated (which, in fact, is often not the case), their meanings are worked out only through social practices. In particular, because the ocean is characterized by overlapping zonations (from the legal regions prescribed by UNCLOS to cultural understandings of regional seas to zones of geophysical interactivity and animal migrations), efforts at understanding an ocean event or image by ‘‘locating’’ it in an ocean

region are likely to rest on simplified notions of the relationship between

boundaries and events . More often than not, the definition and

boundaries of an ocean region are defined by how it is practiced through the reproduction of a regional assemblage, and not the other way around.38 In short, just as ocean-region-based studies must take heed of the uniquely fluvial nature of the ocean that lies at the center of an ocean region, so they must also account for the fluidity of the lines that are drawn around and within the region. Again, this is not a problem unique to maritime regions; many pages in

geography textbooks have been written that expound on where the boundaries of a specific region are (or where they should be), while more enlightened scholars have stressed that such questions cannot be answered objectively. Nonetheless, here too the ocean is an extreme case: lines drawn in and around ocean regions often take on an out- sized level of authority because they are so self-evidently divorced from the matter that is experienced by those who actually inhabit the environment. In the ocean, humans’ ability to physically transform space through line drawing is exceptionally limited.39 Therefore, lines in the ocean speak not with the authority of a geophysicality that cannot be fully grasped but with the authority of a juridical system that conceivably can.40 The danger, then, is that the maritime region, although born out of a critique of the idea that the world consists of stable, bounded places where ‘‘society’’ is an explanatory variable, could itself emerge as an organizing trope that, through

geographic shorthand, obscures the contested and dynamic nature of

social processes and functions . As an ‘‘inside-out’’ version of the continental

region, such a maritime region, like the faux-heterotopic cruise ship critiqued by Harvey, would reverse our sense of the elements and highlight some social processes (connections, migrations) over others (state-formation, settlement), but it would fall short of a fundamental epistemological revolution. ‘‘And what,’’ to quote Harvey again, ‘‘is the critical, liberatory and emancipatory point of that?’’41 Geographers have long struggled with this problem: How can the region be employed as a concept for understanding interactions and processes (within and across its borders) without assigning it existential, pre-social properties of explana- tion? In their attempts at finding solutions, geographers have turned to a range of philosophical and mathematical approaches. Some have emphasized the ways in which space is co-constitutive with time while others have sought to adopt a topological perspective in which scale (and the attendant property of spatiality) is always both internal and external to the object being ‘‘located,’’ so that different scales cannot be ordered in a hierarchical, stable manner.42 There are potentially fruitful overlaps between this dynamic approach to space (and borders and regions) and the Lagrangian approach to fluid dynamics outlined in the previous section of this paper. In both instances, scholars abandon attempts at finding stable metrics that can fix and organize spaces and the activities that transpire within and instead turn their attention to the processes that are continually constructing spatial patterns, social institutions, and socio-natural hybrids. As I have 162 P.E. Steinberg Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 06:57 15 July 2014 discussed, this approach is particularly pertinent to the study of ocean regions. By turning to the fluidity of the ocean that lies in the middle of the ocean region, we can gain new perspectives not just on the space that unites the region but on space

itself and how it is produced (and reproduces itself) within the dynamics of

spatial assemblages . Looking at the world from an ocean-region-based

perspective thus becomes a means not just for highlighting a new series of

global processes and connections, but a means for transforming the way we

view the world as a whole .

Ocean Mapping AT Permutation/2nc FrameworkThe permutation links or its severance – mapping is a cultural process and the aff’s justifications shape its direction and assumptions – force them to defend their justifications as an intrinsic part of the mapping processForest and Forest 12

(Benjamin Forest, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, McGill University, and Patrick Forest, Member, Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University, “Engineering the North American waterscape: The high modernist mapping of continental water transfer projects,” Political Geography, Volume 31, Issue 3, March 2012)

It is now a commonplace claim in critical cartography that maps both reflect and inform power relations (Black, 1997; Kitchin, 2010; Pickles, 1992, 2004). That is, maps are neither objective representations of knowledge, nor are they “objective form[s] of knowledge” (Harley, 1989, 1). Maps are texts that must be read, interpreted, and deconstructed in order to understand their discursive role. Maps are socially embedded, reflecting values, norms and judgments from the context from which they emerged (Kitchin & Dodge, 2007, 332). They help establish authority (Edsall, 2007, 36) and prioritize certain propositions or conceptions over others. This is not to say that maps are always “read” in the ways intended by their authors, or that they have the intended effects. Indeed, the illustration of a continental waterscape could provoke strong negative reactions from Canadians objecting to “their” water being diverted to the south. Negative reactions in particular, however, rely on the ability of the audience to “read” the political intent of a map. One might object, for example, to the ostensible purpose of a map illustrating the transfer of water from Canadian to U.S. territory, while at the same time accepting an implicit message about human control over nature. In short, maps form the major part of the water transfer proposals’ visual rhetoric, and, like many maps, are designed explicitly to advance their authors' agenda. More subtly, these maps exemplify a high modernist or engineering vision of space and nature, where actions and consequences can be controlled and predicted precisely.8 As Kirsch (2005, 2) observes about a map of the nuclear excavation of a proposed Central American canal, “The map’s greatest conceit…was the illusion of technical control that it evokes: the very idea that fallout sectors could be accurately drawn on a map before being produced in the landscape, and that evacuation areas….could be determined so precisely.” Similarly, a map illustrating the proposed nuclear excavation of a canal to link the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers in the U.S. omits the Mississippi River entirely (Kirsch, 2005, 164)! We develop these insights in detail for our own case study. The reports on continental water transfers and publications supporting them contain maps that constitute a visual rhetoric in support of the plans (Albery, 1966; Kierans, 1964; J. H. J. Smith, 1969; Special subcommittee on western water development of the committee on public works, 1964; The Ralph M. Parsons Company, 1964). These maps, above all, promoted a vision of nature

and progress that is deeply entrenched in the perception of humans as engineers of the world, able to (re)shape and control the continental waterscape for their own benefit through technology. We argue that some of the features of these maps were deliberate decisions on the part of the mapmakers, e.g., the relative faintness of international boundaries. Other elements arose from the constraints of cartographic representation rather than strategic decisions per se, e.g., the representation of channels as unrealistically straight lines. In the former case, the political intent is relatively easy to infer, while in the latter case, the logic of cartographic representation reinforces the hubristic assumptions necessary to attempt to re-engineer the continental waterscape.

Ocean MappingMapping specific framework card? – Mapping constructs our understanding of the world through the view of the enduring hegemonic nation state – only engaging in a postcolonial critical geography moves us out of reach of the state’s cartographic practicesRadcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Geography and mapping are now widely recognised to comprise a tool in statecraft (Anderson 1991; Hoosen 1994; Craib 2004). Maps’ social constructedness – and the naturalisation of their production – is now a commonplace in critical geography and cartography (Harley 2001; Pickles 2004). However, the connection between contemporary processes of mapping and maps’ naturalization in modern nationhood – that is, maps of national territory represented in outline without longitude, geophysical features or neighbouring countries, yet still ‘read’ as referring to national territory and evoking national sentiment (Anderson 1991) – has attracted surprisingly little attention (important exceptions are Hoosen 1994; Sparke 2005). Drawing on critical mapping studies and histories of geography as a science, this paper examines how the mapping of national space is bound up with and co-constitutes statehood and national identity. National maps exert a powerful hold over Ecuador’s understandings of development and statehood, despite neoliberal reforms and the digitalisation of geographical information. Although states tend to create distinctive geographical disciplines within their borders, the ways in which they do so and the global networks they appropriate ⁄ are appropriated by, speak to the possibility of a critical account of nationalist mapping that goes beyond a placeless disciplinary history, or an account of nation-states’ instrumental use of geography (Livingstone 1992; Harley 2001; Hoosen 1994). When conceived as a science, geography engages in the organisation of institutions such as a state through its mapping activities, personnel and institutions around claims to knowledge by differentiating between that which is represented and named, and what is excluded (Harley 2001). Accordingly, maps and map-makers work within a certain horizon of possibilities framed conceptually and institutionally by (largely) state institutions precisely in order to establish the nation-state and its territory as self-evident, hegemonic and enduring. Teodoro Wolf’s nineteenth-century map of independent Ecuador, for instance, represented a unitary territory, just as it silenced the profound regionalist tensions threatening to pull the newborn republic apart (Padro´n 1998; also Deler 1981). Poststructuralist accounts of national geographies ⁄ geographers that include the documentation and analysis of interweaving institutions, actors and techniques of national mapping assist our understanding of the explicit and implicit factors behind mapping’s selective uses and forms. Such approaches resonate with critical geographical approaches that view cartography ‘as processual rather than representational . . . emerging through practices (embodied, social, technical)’ (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 331). Mapping practices depend upon learned knowledge and skills for their production and in their reading as ‘maps are interpreted, translated and made to do work’ (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 335; also Dodge et al 2008; Crampton 2009). The paper offers an account of how national representation and ‘scientific’ criteria become entangled with rapidly shifting political economic and technological change to produce new cartographic practices and meanings.1 As a set of practices that

incrementally accumulate particular types of spatially organised knowledge as the basis for the nation-state’s power–knowledge relations, geography emerged during the nineteenth century as an increasingly disciplined and disciplinary enterprise. In postcolonial states, maps of not-quite national territories could be drawn and distributed in struggles for independence as an anticipatory claim to colonial and then postcolonial territorial sovereignty (Anderson 1991, 173–8; Craib 2000; Harley 1992; Scott 2006).2 In Latin America, early nineteenth-century independence entailed the establishment of geography as a discipline involving a set of individual and institutionalised actors, whose outputs were used to underpin state rule as well as inculcate national imaginative geographies in citizens’ minds (on Latin America, see Escude´ 1988; Escolar et al. 1994; Radcliffe 2001; Craib 2004). By means of their abstractions, national maps ‘help create the effect of the state as a reified apparatus’ while simultaneously concealing its precariousness (Sparke 2005, 10). Yet both geography and postcolonial nation-states continue to be continuously transformed, not least by changes in the forms of political and economic governance, the shifting nature of national identities, and the ongoing proliferation of geographical technologies. Connections between mapping and national geographies are neither static nor completely free-floating, suggesting the need for a contextualised analysis of geography’s practices, power and knowledges. Analytically, cartography has been re-cast ‘as a broad set of spatial practices’ beyond professional cartographers and their institutions (Kitchen and Dodge 2007, 337). Although recognising that critical geographical studies of mapping are informed by various theoretical and epistemological traditions,3 my starting point in this paper is on the practice based approaches to mapping (Kitchen and Dodge 2007; Kitchen 2008) as a route into understanding the shifting nature of postcolonial statehood. In line with the ethnographic methods used, I focus here on how the practices of actors and institutions continuously cite previous maps, whereby particular geographical practices and their cartographic results become hegemonic through repetition. Conceiving of maps’ power in terms of how they relate to hegemonic relations, this paper also traces how new practices and agendas reorient the ties between national maps and state power, arising as they do out of the contested performative naturalisation and slippages associated with cartographic practices. What happens in a specific nation-state when ‘spatial practices’ are received and utilised by a group of actors and institutions beyond the reach of state-based cartographic institutions? Ecuador’s history of geography over the past two decades points to a specific shift in the configuration of technical, institutional and embodied relations between professional (military, state) geographies and citizens, between state and nation. Described as ‘a boom in geography’ and informed by a changing sense of geography’s practices, purposes and users, a shift has occurred in the production and representations of national maps. However, maps have retained the power to silence ⁄ make visible and remain couched in terms of territorial and cartographic nationalism. Understanding this context requires a postcolonial discussion of democratisation and the concomitant reduction in military state power, international development cooperation, and changing geographical tools (including GPS and GIS [for all acronyms, see Table I]).4

Alt – decentralize cartographyRadcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Whereas in previous decades, military cartography was established and maintained through the professional training and specialisation of staff who came to embody map skills and knowledge, the recent trend is for the reorganisation of training to involve a broader group in civil society.

Cartographic and GIS expertise in this sense has become one of a portfolio of skills held by individuals and organisations outside the IGM and its partner institutions. For example, Quito’s municipal employees receive

training in GIS because not many have relevant skills, as also occurs in non-metropolitan municipalities (interview with Bermu´ dez 2007). In the Ministry of Agriculture’s SIGAGRO, team members have to learn GIS and cartographic skills on the job from each other, although formal training is also available (interview with Herna´n Vela´squez, director of GIS, Ministry of

Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fishing, Quito 2007). The Ministry of Environment project required an extensive period of training, as the skills base was not available (interview with Pen˜ afiel 2007). The trend is towards establishing a broader

range of expertise in GIS among civil servants and NGO staff. The boom in non-military geographies encouraged in turn the creation of university courses. Recent years have seen the rise of public and private universities offering courses in GIS, geography and environment, including the post-1989 Catholic University programme in geography

and environment, and since the 1990s University San Francisco and Central University (also Lopez 2008).23 The embodied knowledge held by individuals thus becomes more diffusely distributed through Ecuadorian governance structures. For example, Quito municipality gives on-the-job training to university students (interview with

Bermu´ dez 2007). The proliferation of new circuits by which geographical and mapping information is passed on, circulated and deployed has created new challenges for the state in its efforts to retain its discursive and practice-based centrality in cartography. IGM uses a discourse of ‘outreach’ in attempts to create a

contingent coalition of actors and institutions (including civilians) in order to complete the national geospatial information database. Its

discourse highlights the need for ‘coordination’ between different actors who collect geo-referenced

data and create maps, so it has expressed a public interest in ‘exchanging data’ on place names and

geophysical features in order to keep its national base cartography up-to-date and correct (Workshop

Roundtable 2008). The Geographical Military Institute’s spatial data infrastructure is also presented as an enterprise that depends upon a broad social commitment. ‘It has to be a great political will, a strong disposition among all public and private institutions [for the geomatics project] to

succeed’, according to a representative (Workshop Roundtable 2008). Again such debates occur in relation to an implicit national space, with the emphasis on sharing among the Ecuadorian public. With democratisation and rapid technological change, the military-state cartographic institutions cannot be seen to block the creation of geographical knowledge in civil society. Yet the Institute retains a concern to be involved in these new

networks. The decentering of state-military cartographies and the expansion of civil geographical knowledges reorient debates about the circulation of map-related information in ways that reflect reworked relations of power and the demand from an increasingly assertive civil society. Whereas national maps would previously have passed through the Geographical Military Institute’s normalisation department, today the pressure is on to disseminate the results of its cartographic practices to civil society. Informed public discourse views geographical information and maps as goods that should be widely available. The Institute’s selective release of information is increasingly being questioned, as commentators argue that the ‘IGM has to be a fundamental part of giving information to improve the country’ (Mario Bustos, map editor at the indigenous federation ECUARUNARI, at roundtable discussion 2008). Likewise, the GIS Director at the Ministry of Agriculture adopts a language of open

access: ‘this information [on our website] is free to any researcher to use’ (interview with Vela´squez, SIGAGRO 2007). Civil servants who use GIS and geographical information for making maps consistently speak in public and private about the urgency of getting geographical information onto the web, and into publications.24 Such views resonate with neoliberal precepts of good governance, which in their more technical guise transform state practices into procedural routines with a veneer of transparency and scrutiny. In this sense, the state discourse on dissemination is not so much a radical reorientation in policy but an alignment with good governance principles. By contrast, other users of geographical information articulate a more politically grounded account of the ways in which geo-graphics can circulate and what they mean.25 According to one civil society user of maps, the ‘state needs to coordinate and be more inclusive. We [Ecuadorians] are all participants, are part of the state’ (Workshop Roundtable 2008; similar points emerged in interviews with staff at Ministry of Environment and

the state statistical service). Civil users of geographical information recently critiqued Ecuador’s institutionalised cartography, bringing into question its historic arrangements.26 Poor relations between state geographers and civil society have, according to commentators, broken down trust with the IGM standing accused of maintaining a highly centralised and inappropriately ‘territorialist’ attitude. One geographer who had to coordinate with IGM complained of the ‘worst possible relations’. Procedurally too, civil actors critique the overbureaucratic state

system. Civilian and indeed other state actors fault the IGM for its slow turnaround, and the bureaucratic hurdles in its geographical and cartographic divisions.27 Civilian administration of map-making would, critics argue, permit ‘the creation [of] not only geographical information but up-to-date products for all institutions in the country, public and private’ (Workshop Roundtable 2008; original emphasis).

Following a political agenda at odds with the state-centred system, certain geographers have opted to move into other mapping activities tied more to civil projects. For instance, a young geographer completing his ESPE thesis found it difficult to bridge the gap between ‘GIS and people and the environment’, so he did participatory mapping with local activists.28 Several professionals have left core institutions, citing a failure to engage critically with social issues and the overly technical training (interviews with Fabricio, an ESPE-trained geographer now working for FEPP 2007 and Andre´s Andrango, Kitu Kara representative on National Indigenous Development Council, Quito July 2007 [cf. Radcliffe 2007]). In one case a senior ESPE geographer resigned after 15 years, unhappy with its ‘sterile’ approach. Similarly, a geographer trained in remote sensing and GIS left CLIRSEN in 1995 because he wanted to ‘give more back to society’ (interview with Guevarra 2007).

Spatial planning is a neoliberal tool of the state to produce efficient capital – only reinforces state power over its subjects. Radcliffe 9 (Sarah, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, National maps, digitalization and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 34, Issue 4, Article first published online: 8 SEP 2009, Royal Geographical Society)//rh

Geo-graphics as a tool of neoliberal statehood: digitalisation and fugitive spaces Despite the transformations in the techniques and embodied knowledges of making maps, the IGM’s stance regarding its role in map-making remains remarkably consistent. The Institute and its supporting institutions project the state as a cartographic corpus serving the rest of the country, a theme that has been present since the IGM’s establishment (Radcliffe

2001). Rather than GIS and geo-information opening up new spaces of socialinteraction, contemporary geo-graphics and cartographic methods compound the national institutional landscape and cartographic authority. National mapping with geographical information systems (sometimes called statistical cartography) creates a

profoundly transformed environment within which national maps are produced and circulated. Moreover mapping is widely debated in the public sphere as national maps are strongly associated with identity and as territorial histories support nationalist narratives. Given GIS’s association with a promise of the expanding amount of information in the public sphere (Pickles 1995), Ecuadorian discourses around the availability of geographic information and cartographic representations has been layered into a discourse about maps’ beneficial purpose. In this setting political economic restructuring combines with the potential spread of national images via computer-based cartography and pedagogy, a widespread discourse around maps has arisen concerning maps’ utility in

management and planning activities. Under neoliberal statecraft, map making and geographical practices are important tools in making the state efficient and effective. Speaking at the Ministry of Environment, one professional

argued that GIS software, GPS and satellite information permitted the state to prioritise its work and spend effectively in the context of limited budgets, as well as guarantee financial transparency (interview

with Manuel Pallares, GIS expert at the Ministry of Environment monitoring unit July 2007).21 It is not only state actors who speak of the availability of geo-informatics as tools in good governance; such views are in fact widespread, being voiced by civil society organisations. As the state is ‘rolled back’ and non-governmental agencies become involved in territorial administration, a non-military set of actors use a wider range of (rapidly changing) technologies for the generation, analysis and cartographic representation of geographical information. What kinds of socio-technical practices and abstractions are

being generated around national maps given geography’s institutionality and neoliberal development? With the rise of NGOs and subcontracting of data collection and cartographic work, neoliberal policy influences national

cartographics by demanding greater efficiency. However, this also generates debates around the staffing of GIS jobs, and new patterns of dissemination of spatial information, changes that contribute to a re-calibration of military, state and civil power. In the context of late twentieth-century political economic neoliberal

restructuring, geo-graphic practices are directly involved in state actions to provide monetary efficiency

and financial probity, just as they simultaneously co-produce the rolling-out of cost-cutting agendas.

State and non-governmental actors speak of how computer cartographic systems contribute to and alleviate environmental damage. In urban planning and management, computerbased GIS have all but replaced paper-based cartography and the use of other maps, as GIS offers the possibility of assisting in planning, promoting the ‘logic of [municipal] work for example in [mapping] everyday land-use, soil-cover, urban land-use and zoning etc.’ (interview with Nury Bermu´ dez, director of Research and Planning Unit, Quito Municipality 2007). Professional GIS users inside and outside the state point to the fact that GIS is now used to organise the electricity network (interviews with Pablo Almeida, Director of NGO CDC-Jatun Sacha; Reinaldo Cervantes, GIS expert at SIISE 2007). NGOs using computer-based cartographies of landownership and environmental characteristics view maps as an invaluable tool in devising management plans for territories (interview with Paulina Arroyo, The

Nature Conservancy, Quito 2007).22 Professionals view computer- based spatial information instrumentally, as a technically improved ‘modernised’ tool in the service of the state. For a low-income postcolonial country,

computer-based geo-graphics are positively associated with the possibility of meaningful coordination of public policy making and implementation. Neither the state nor the role of geographic information is questioned in this regard.

GIS/Satellites/FishingGIS bad for local fishers – treats them as pawns in the neoliberal systemOlson 9 (Julia, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS, Geoforum 41 (2010) 293–303, September 1, 2009)//rh

4. Mapping livelihood and resource use As Robbins (2003) has argued, rigid differences posited between local and scientific knowledge in the context of GIS and participatory counter-mapping are ‘‘epistemologically untenable”. Whatever differences in content, these different forms of environmental knowledge are all culturally inflected, practice based and ‘‘inevitably partial” forms of knowledge that refuse an easy correspondence of the cultural with the local and science with modernity. In the case of fisheries in the Northeast United States, while the narratives and visions of both fishermen and scientists are also partial and rooted in the cultural politics ‘‘of their respective communities” (ibid, p. 246), they are also deeply intertwined. Charles Goodwin, in his ethnographic study of scientists at sea, writes that the tools scientists used to measure temperature or salinity, for example, are part and parcel of an ‘‘architecture for perception, a history that is instantiated [. . .] in the tools built by anonymous ancestors that shape in quite detailed ways the life and activity of their successors” (1995, p. 254). So too the development of acoustic sounding techniques, over the time-consuming method of dropping lead-weighted line at solitary points, occurred along with what Rozwadowski (2005) has called a ‘‘cultural redefinition of the sea”: 19th century marine scientific technologies and explorations happened in tandem with commercial interests that redefined the ocean from threatening to a place safe for capitalist expansion. The further development of echo sounders—fish finders— for scientific work began in the 1920s, but took off and by the 1950s had transformed the fishing industry as well. GIS is thus not the first technique that has been employed to render the ocean more legible, for either fishermen or scientists. But developments in GIS and other technologies, in tandem with localized knowledge and practices of fishermen, are according to the economist James Wilen (2004, p. 8) behind a necessary expansion in area-based forms of management: ‘‘it is paradoxically likely that the accelerating scientific understanding of how the ocean works will bring the ‘race to fish’ to a new level”. Others argue that better mapping of ocean bottom and the spatially irregular distribution of resources can help to reduce negative impact on the seabed by focusing and reducing fishing effort, and create positive impacts by better protecting and enhancing seed areas in the case of scallops (Kostylev et al., 2003; Stokesbury et al., 2007). Yet despite these intertwined practices and dynamics, it is revealing to examine the ways in which GIS was used to support the development of area management in Amendment 10, for despite the recognition of spatial heterogeneity, the seascape is still notably flat and homogeneous in social terms. Moreover, what is increasingly the case, not just in the scallop fishery but also through the increasing interest in ocean zoning and in technologies that track and regulate movement, is that it is no longer just the fishery resources that are being managed but space and territory itself. In the case of Amendment 10, the bio-economic models that supported the development of area-based management did so through an implicit concentration on ‘‘highliners”, those fishermen accounting for the majority of scallop landings. Bio-economic models used to predict where fishermen would choose to fish (and hence how resource conditions would change through time) assumed that fishing location choice was primary determined by biomass and relative profitability, 4 modified to some degree by travel costs and broad regional variations in fishing effort. This affected the way that area management and its different regulatory alternatives

were discussed, with more concern about what percent of ocean bottom was kept open than their location, and with more concern about resource productivity and value overall than with its spatially differentiated social uses. Given this biomass-centric analysis, actual interest focused on just a few areas where fishing effort was highest,5 in part because of additional concern about impact to sea bottom and essential fish habitat. Nonetheless, this focus also homogenized different fishing practices since fishermen and fishing effort were taken as a single variable; that is to say, an analysis using summarized fishing effort does not necessarily concern itself with whether such effort comes from one boat or a thousand, but this distinction has obvious importance to social and economic understandings (cf. Brox, 1990). Moreover, these analyses were based upon VMS data, or data from vessel monitoring systems that track the location of a vessel as it fishes, which at the time included only the limited access fleet.6 Additionally, some areas important to small-scale fishermen, primarily around Downeast Maine and Cape Cod Bay, were not covered by the research vessel survey and thus not included in proposed rotational areas; indeed only 13% of the fishing activity of small scallop vessels was included in the rotational areas (NEFMC, 2003, Section 8.8). Thus a portion of the fleet, one that tends to have larger vessels and practice a more directed fishery, was taken to represent the whole of the scallop fishery. Since such models focus on fishing’s biological impact (and thus indirectly on the practices of the highliners when they account for the majority of landings), they are understandably of interest to short-term stock assessment. Yet because they do not necessarily reflect the practices of all fishermen, the question of social impacts, not to mention a more dynamic and nuanced sense of what produces particular kinds of resource use, remains. The role of spatial governance and technologies in this, as Robbins (2001, p. 175) has noted for satellite imagery, seems to offer an objective account of the environment but in fact can act ‘‘to justify an already settled dispute about the nature of that landscape” in favor of scientific expertise, and in the process can ‘‘reengineer” the environment ‘‘to suit technical means, rather than the other way around”. And when this emphasis on biomass and pounds landed slips into a focus on landed value and profit, as it can so easily, the naturalization of such conceptualizations has consequences for how area management, as well as other issues like zoning and aquaculture, play out.

Only aff resolves GIS and spacial zoningOlson 9 (Julia, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS, Geoforum 41 (2010) 293–303, September 1, 2009)//rh

In the case of contemporary fisheries management, these subjectivities, relations, and knowledge and practice are now increasingly mediated through technologies like GIS. While mapping and counter-mapping have become more intertwined with stories of common property in general, the case of fisheries poses a double sort of enigma, for not only is there the issue of mobility and excludability in space but there is also the question of visualization, or lack thereof. In Hardin’s classic account of the tragedy of the commons, for example, he asked that we ‘‘Picture a pasture open to all” (1968: 1244, italics added), where the herders, herds, and resource degradation are palpable and countable. For fisheries

management however, this has not been such an easy task. The inability to see what is happening has in part structured the orientation of both fisheries management and biology: stock assessment is a statistical exercise in estimating hidden populations, while management tries to reconcile its strategies around fishermen who might cheat without being seen. Fisheries management, however, has recently begun to take a distinctly visual turn through the use of GIS and other spatial techniques for understanding and monitoring where different resources are and how they are used—not only supporting policy analyses from habitat

classification and protection of essential fish habitat, to the social and economic impacts of closed areas (Meaden, 2000; NOAA, 2004; St.

Martin, 2004), but also coupled to increasing interest in spatially- based methods of management. What tends to be missing, however, is an appreciation of arguments raised within geography and other social sciences that critique the use of GIS as technologically or socially neutral, or which have conversely grappled with how to use GIS for qualitative and critical approaches to social knowledge.1

The presumed neutrality and objectivity of GIS in fisheries management has not only assumed a sense of ‘‘space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naïvely assumed sense of space as emptiness” (Smith and Katz, 1993, p. 75), but has also tended to privilege universal understandings. Thus

while the fishery management process has begun to incorporate spatially sensitive analyses into its development of area-based management, such incorporation has utilized neoliberal constructions of the typical fisherman that are challenged by more nuanced notions of fishing and resource dependence. New directions in the mapping of scallops that focus on crucial habitat and life cycle issues, for example, promise changes both in the science underlying fisheries management and in management itself by better directing fishing effort to particular places and by

better understanding the conditions for resource enhancement through seeding, which at first glance recalls the warnings from early GIS critics that digital maps would serve to create or reinforce relations of power through the discovery of new things or people to exploit (Schuurman, 2000, p. 580). Yet as this reframing of resources from fishing to farming intersects with an increasing interest in aquaculture (where the idea of farming is obviously more explicit), it becomes clear that

while ideas about property can be more easily enrolled into neoliberal discourses that commodify resource relations, transformations from fishing to farming also enable alternative projects through

their articulation with cultural practices and processes. This includes the differential spatial practices

of often smaller-scale fishermen as well as community-based interests in scallop seeding, who have

sought—quite literally—to sow the seeds of community stability and, in the process, resist and

redefine the terms of neoliberal market logic . This paper thus considers the differing worldviews, practices, and spatialities

among and between so-called highliners and small-scale fishermen, fishers and farmers of scallops, different resource-users and the scientists who map them, and the radically new forms of economic practice and sustainability that inhere, potentially, in different uses and forms of maps and spatial knowledge, looking in particular at US Federal management of Sea Scallops, a Canadian example of a private-state partnership, and community-based seeding efforts in Downeast Maine.

Resource ZoningResource Zoning doesn’t take into account neoliberal politics and effects on local people – guarantees policy failureOlson 9 (Julia, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS, Geoforum 41 (2010) 293–303, September 1, 2009)//rh

Yet while ocean zoning is seen as something of a new solution for marine conflicts, the model of terrestrial zoning upon which it is based is hardly without its critics. Proponents of smart growth, new urbanism, and mixed-use communities have pointed to the myriad problems—including sprawl, traffic, pollution, loss of farmland, and so on—created by separating the activities of daily life. The view that zoning will end conflict assumes that such conflicts center only on doing different things in the same place, while creating zones of ‘‘use-priority” areas begs the question of whose values will dictate a given zone’s ‘‘most important” activities. As such, conflict may simply be displaced from the ocean to places where policies are crafted or where their impacts are lived. Indeed scholars have long noted how zoning laws are colored by cultural ideas (for example, public versus private/domestic space) that are distinctly bourgeois, raced and gendered and thus favor certain groups of people (Ritzdorf, 1994; Perin, 1977; LiPuma and Meltzoff, 1997). Some economists have also been critical of marine zoning’s creation of ‘‘divided” property rights that do not fully consider ‘‘the opportunity costs of foregone production” that might otherwise ‘‘maximize joint wealth” (Edwards, 2000, p. 4). In other words, the ‘‘economic benefits” of zoning cannot be assumed for ‘‘it is an empirical question whether ocean wealth would be improved” (ibid, p. 7). A focus on aggregate wealth though leaves unanswered the effect of an initially unequal distribution of wealth on the prices and outcomes in a market-based economy, as well as the changes in subjectivity and practices that the neoliberalization of resource economies and identities can engender. These questions take on additional significance in the context of resource management, for as Agrawal (2003) has argued in his review of the literature on common property, attention to internal politics and power relations is crucial for understanding how marginalization may continue in management institutions, how resistance to enforcement may be engendered, and thus how resources come to be used. Inattention to difference and subjectivity has encouraged the assumption that community members share ideas of efficiency, environmental change, and modernization. ‘‘Institutional strategies to govern [common-pool resources]—to allocate, to monitor, to sanction, to enforce, to adjudicate—do not simply constrain the actions of already existing sovereign subjects”. Rather, he writes, ‘‘these strategies and their effects on flows of power shape human subjects, their interests, and their agency” (2003, p. 258). Agrawal’s writings have raised questions about the relations between governance and subjectivity, exploring the connections between techniques of self and differential social practices (Agrawal, 2005). Personal interests become redefined through environmental practices of intimate government, he argues, but in ways that do not predictably ally with pre-given categories of identity. Examples where this convergence of state and intimate government is less successful however, as Mathews (2008) has argued, redirect attention to the politics and co-production of knowledge involving official/state and scientific discourses and local subjects through power-mediated, culturally constructed modes of interaction. In the case of Atlantic Sea Scallops, some fishermen seem to partially share the goals of and reasoning behind area management but others fall outside its aims or purview, and new attempts at seeding scallops raise

different convergences and divergences. The following sections then explore the multiple ideas and practices through which processes such as spatial planning and resource management more generally are constituted, in order to understand more fully how spatial technologies and changing subjectivities both merge with and confront neoliberal governance in fisheries.

ConservationConservation projects with alarmist justifications are ruses for neoliberal expansionism and control of the environment – guarantees that the aff fails.Büscher et al. 12 (Bram, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington, Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012)//rh

Among critics of the neoliberal “project,” however, there is a notable absence of this kind of analysis with regards to conservation. David

Harvey (2003, 166-168), for example, tends to view environmental conservation as providing alternatives that actively counter neoliberal capitalism. In The New Imperialism, his list of struggles against accumulation by dispossession is also a litany of

environmental protest. Yet he only glancingly acknowledges that peasants might be dispossessed from their land as effectively for a national park as by a new sheep run. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he describes a

“sprawling environmental movement hard at work 3 promoting alternative visions of how to better connect political and ecological projects” without tracing the complex politics that tie some elements of this movement firmly into mainstream political economy (Harvey 2005, 186; Dowie 2006). He does clearly recognize the role of NGOs in promoting neoliberalism but does not mention conservation NGOs among their number (Harvey 2005, 177). Indeed, conservation does not

appear in these books as a focus of interest. The casting of almost any form of conservation as progressively

opposed to the forces creating environmental crisis is especially problematic when an alarmist

language of crisis is used to justify policies and practices that are injurious to local livelihoods (often in the name of capturing landscapes for environmental conservation) (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Mearns

1996; Stott and Sullivan 2000).5 Crisis-driven critiques also often miss the larger point that environmental (and other) crises increasingly are themselves opportunities for capitalist expansion. Martin O’Connor thus writes in

1994 that “environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life. Now, through purporting to take in hand the saving of the environment, capitalism invents a new legitimation for itself: the sustainable and rational use of nature” (O’Connor 1994, 125- 126). So, while conservation conventionally is

conveyed as something different, as “saving the world” from the broader excesses of human impacts under capitalism, in actuality it functions to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic possibilities for capitalist expansion. Markets expand as the very resolution of environmental crises that other market forces

have produced. Capitalism may well be the Enemy of Nature, as Kovel so aptly put it. Conserving nature, paradoxically, seems

also to have become the friend of capitalism. Thus we see that 1) conservation is vitally important to capitalism; and 2) that this importance is often not recognized. These are compelling reasons for a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. In the next section we explain more clearly our emphasis on neoliberal conservation, before attempting to pull together the threads of critique in such a way as to clarify key concerns and positions. 2Why Focus on

Neoliberal Conservation? One of neoliberalism’s raison-d’être’s is to expand and intensify global capitalism

(Harvey 2005). Capitalism, in turn, is at the heart of the dramatic ecological changes and crises unleashed in the last two centuries (O’Connor 1998; Foster 2007; Kovel 2002; Burkett 2006).6 With the rise of capitalism, the means for, scale of,

and drive towards ecosystem transformation has grown dramatically. In dialectical interaction with technological developments and the intensification of colonial extraction (amongst other factors), emerging capitalist societies became more adept at “offsetting” local and regional ecological transformations extra-locally and extra-regionally, hence laying the foundations for ecological crisis on a world-scale, or a “crisis in the world-ecology,” as Moore (2010) puts it. Across space (extensification) and within spaces (intensification), capitalism has disrupted and changed the metabolism of ecological processes and connections (Kovel 2002, 82). Bearing in mind our comments on environmental crises

above, here we emphasize two key aspects of capitalism’s propensity to stimulate large-scale ecological crises. The first has to do with the

nature of ecological crisis. Diversity, connectivity and relationships are crucial for the resilience of ecosystems. Ecology 101 teaches students that “everything hangs together with everything else,” which is both the reason why studying

ecosystems is both such a joy and so complex. Capitalism’s drive to turn everything into exchange value (into commodities that can be traded) cuts up these connections and relationships in order to produce, sell and consume their constituent elements. Hence, as Kovel (2002, 130-131) shows, capitalism “separates,” “splits” and—because in principle everything can be bought and or sold—“alienates” and estranges. To further bring conservation into capitalism, then, is to lay bare the various ecosystemic threads and linkages so that they can be further subjected to separation, marketization and alienation, albeit in the service of conservation rhetoric. The second point has to do with the nature of capital, which, as Marx (1976, 256) pointed out, is “value in process, money in process: it comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation,

emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again.” Capital is always on the move; if it ceases to move and circulate, the whole system is threatened. The recent financial crisis has made this abundantly clear. From Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich countries were primarily concerned with making sure that banks would start lending again

in order to get money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, striving continuously to bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including natural worlds at multiple scales.7 Making

clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to

conserve its services, then, is not just about trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular adagio “payments for environmental services” would have it. It is about finding new arenas for markets to

operate in and thus to expand the remit, and ultimately the circulation of capital. Payments go to those able

to capture them, rather than directly to nature, and this explains why conservation responses to ecological crises, although popularly understood as in contestation to the environmental effects of capitalism, now are providing such fruitful avenues for further capitalist expansion (Sullivan 2010). One of the key ways in which this has occurred has been through infusing conservation policy and practice with the analytical tools of neoliberal economics, without recognizing that these are themselves infused with, and reinforce, particular ideological positions regarding human relationships with each other as well as with non-human natures. It is to this point that we now turn.

Oil ProductionOffshore production is underpinned by a neoliberal logic of commodification that cannot reconcile or account for environmental degradation—the result is systemic destruction of ocean spaceMartens 11 (Emily, Master’s thesis in Geography and Regional Studies, at University of Miami, “THE DISCOURSES OF ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY IN THE DEBATE OVER OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING POLICY IN FLORIDA,” May 10, 2011, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1253&context=oa_theses)//rh

The fusion of energy security and environmental protection concerns has since the energy and environmental crises of the 1970s forged a policy aimed at creating environmentally safe extraction and production processes. The emphasis on cheap energy resources, however, has come into contradiction with requirements of costly regulation and oversight practices that are thought to better ensure environmental security. The attempt to reconcile offshore drilling with concerns about environmental protection during the Nixon and Carter years was torn asunder by the hostility to regulation during the Reagan and Clinton years. As a result, a heated debate developed between proponents of offshore oil drilling who argue that (unregulated) offshore oil drilling — and expanded domestic oil production in general — ensures energy security by making the United States energy independent and opponents of offshore oil drilling who do not contest the goal of energy independence but who argue that this should not be at the expense of the protection of marine ecosystems and coastal economies from the destructive effects of offshore drilling, regulated or not. The debate, in other words, developed into a debate between a dominant discourse of energy security and a counter discourse of environmental security — at the core of it were questions of regulation as well as competing commercial interests. Though there are various actors and interests within each of these discourses, the primary tension between proponents and opponents of offshore oil drilling tends to reproduce the tensions embodied in the larger discourses of energy security and environmental security at different geographical scales. One of the main arguments of this thesis is that the credence given to either one of these two security discourses at any given time is the result of broader socio-political forces and the changing ideologies within which they operate. Underlying both seemingly opposed discourses, however, is a common logic that informs the path they take and the language they use to establish legitimacy — the logic of the commodity — an abstract representation of space that supports this logic. This space, as Lefebvre (2007: 53) points out, “includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state”. As will be shown in the following chapters, each of these competing discourses has organized its arguments around the logics of capitalism to gain public support and federal and local state protections. This is not an arbitrary association but rather the result of specific political developments in the US that have shaped environmental concerns, and the environment, according to free market principles. Prior to the injection of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization into the environment and discourses on the environment under the Reagan Administration, the Nixon and Carter Administrations were caught between an environmental movement, which attempted to create a new perspective from which human activity could be viewed in light of its often negative impacts on the environment – especially offshore oil drilling as a result of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – and the volatility of the international oil market which threatened oil imports. The Nixon and Carter strategies attempted to balance the two agendas through the expansion

of domestic oil production in tandem with regulations and oversight that would monitor the offshore oil industry’s compliance with environmental standards. This was thought and presented as a temporary measure. Ultimately the aim was to create alternative fuels in the not too distant future to replace oil, in light of evidence and concern that both the production and consumption of oil were proving to be detrimental to the environment which humans depended on for their own survival. Neoliberal restructuring under the Reagan Administration, however, promoted a market-based discourse of energy security above, or more precisely against the discourse of environmental security, advocating reduction of state oversights and reliance on market signals instead as the more efficient means to regulate offshore drilling. Environmental security, in the form of government oversight, became a threat to the accumulation of wealth — a source of insecurity. Instead, environmental security could be entrusted to the multiple interests operating in the free market. The argument rested on the neoliberal mantra that the government was not as efficient as private owners and the market in managing and protecting the environment. As a result, offshore oil drilling activity has since enjoyed lax regulatory oversight, while day-to-day oil pollution continues to disrupt various ecological and economic activities that share ocean space. The fact that the question of environmental protection and regulation concerns productive activity in ocean space lends it additional complexity deriving both from the nature of ocean space itself, and how it has been historically perceived and constructed, and from the peculiar political system in the US that divides sovereignty between the federal government an the individual states. This shared sovereignty over ocean space has shaped the interaction of policy-makers at the state and Federal level in their attempt to promote policy reconciling economic imperatives and environmental concerns that differed across scale. This scalar tension finds its origin in the Submerged Lands Act that President Eisenhower signed in 1945, which gave coastal states sovereign rights over coastal territory extending three miles from the shore. In the case of Florida and Texas, where a rather extensive continental shelf exists on their gulf coasts, they were granted 10.3 miles of territory into the Gulf of Mexico, which was to acknowledge historical use claims. Complementary ocean laws between the state and federal government appear to acknowledge the uncontainable nature of the ocean environment which can carry pollutants horizontally across space, which exacerbates not only the tension between states and the federal government but also the varying interests of different coastal states with different economies and ecologies. Where the government of Florida, a state heavily dependent on revenues from tourism, has found it commercially necessary to keep the ocean territory free of oil pollutants, at least for now, the Federal government has implemented a moratorium that extends what can only be seen as a buffer surrounding the state of Florida in order to reduce the risk of oil pollutants washing ashore. In Texas 6 and Louisiana, on the other hand, whose economies are dependent on revenues from and employment in offshore oil drilling (despite some tourism, and fishing and shrimping interests in the latter), the coastal territory has developed into a site of extensive drilling and production, with an extensive network of pipelines strewn over the ocean floor. Florida’s coast, in contrast, is a protected area at both the state and Federal levels, with policy-makers at both levels acknowledging sensitive environments, such as the Everglades and a few marine sanctuaries that would be threatened by pollution from offshore oil activities and potential oil spills. But ocean space does not recognize political borders, and the shores of Florida are as susceptible to that ever present threat of a large oil spill as the spill from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig might come to prove.

Mapping LinkAttempts to gain spatial knowledge are projects of sovereign dominationSteinberg 9 (Phillip E. - Department of Geography at Florida State University, “Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside”, Annals of the Association of American Geographer, http://mailer.fsu.edu/~psteinbe/garnet-psteinbe/Annals%20Offprint2.pdf, JS)

A key concept here, as stressed by Sahlins (1989), is¶ that the rise of the territorial state is characterized not¶ simply by the construction of its bounded territory as¶ a homogenous administrative zone (as Sahlins charges¶ that Allies [1980] and Gottman

[1973] emphasize), but `¶ that the territorial state constructs its space as a differentiated set of points that are amenable to being plotted¶ (and thus manipulated and rationalized) against an abstract spatial grid (see also

T. Mitchell 1991). Historically, the development of technologies and institutions for performing cadastral mapping and land surveying stand out as mechanisms through which the state has achieved a “bird’s-eye” view over territory as a means toward achieving social control over people (Bohannan¶ 1964; Kain and

Baigent 1992; Vandergeest and Peluso¶ 1995; Edney 1997; Scott 1998; Biggs 1999). Thus, Biggs¶ (1999) locates the origins of the territorial state in national surveying efforts of the seventeenth century. As surveyors mapped royal domains, they graphically noted each village’s affiliation. What had been thought of as a personal relationship came to be expressed as a territorial relationship, and, at the same time, surveyors¶

imposed a grid of abstract space over the domain to¶ facilitate mapping. Eventually, these two phenomena¶ associated with

surveying converged in an example of¶ what Pickles (2003) calls “overcoding”: The abstract, geometric space of the map came to define the lived in space of the state, and the territorial relationship between land and sovereign came to be seen as predicating the personal relationship between individual and sovereign. Other scholars have further illustrated the relationship between the way that we hierarchically map¶ space and the way that we

hierarchically organize social relationships. Knowledge of space is a crucial tool for control , and the

technologies of mapping (and the¶ underlying assumptions about society and space that enable modern mapping), joined

with hierarchical systems for drawing lines and assigning names, play a crucial role in constructing

instruments of sovereign domination ¶ (Akerman 1984, 1995; Carter 1987; Buisseret 1992;¶ Ryan 1996; Edney 1997;

Brotton 1998; Burnett 2000;¶ Craib 2000; Hakli 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2003; ¨¶ Jacob 2006).4 In short, these scholars emphasize the key role that¶ the ordering of space plays in the construction of state¶ territoriality. This is an important advance over a¶ perspective that simply looks at the bounding of space,¶ but, as Strandsbjerg (2008) notes, these scholars of the¶

cartographic origins of modern state sovereignty still¶ tend to analyze the state as an isolated unit. Given that¶ the modern institution of sovereignty necessarily exists¶ within a system of sovereign units, a study of the modern¶ state (or a story of its origins) that works only from the¶ perspective of the inward-looking aspect of sovereignty¶ cannot be complete. As Taylor (1995)

asserts, the starting point of political geography (and political history)¶ must be a theory of the states rather than a theory of the state. In a similar vein, geographies and histories of territoriality (or the ordering of

space) must examine not just the “emptiable” and “fillable” space constructed inside the territories of sovereign states but also the spaces on the outside that are designated as not being amenable¶ to this organization of space. Otherwise, any study of¶ state territoriality risks falling into the “territorial trap”¶ wherein states are viewed as internally coherent units,¶ existing ontologically prior to the overall ordering of¶ the state system, and wherein cross-border processes¶ can be viewed only as “international relations” among¶ these preexisting states (Agnew 1994; see also Sparke¶

2005).

Satellites LinksDependence on satellites creates a sense of security – satellites allow for calc thoughtHavercroft 7| I am a Senior Lecturer in Politics and IR at the University of Southampton. My research lies at the intersections of international relations and political theory. I have published work on the historical development and transformation of state sovereignty, 17th century and 20th century political philosophy, space weaponization and security, global dimensions of indigenous politics and hermeneutics. My current research projects include work on the ethical dimensions of international norms, theories of political affect, and the role of agreement in democratic theory and practice. My book Captives of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2011) looks at the historical origins of state sovereignty, critiques its philosophical assumptions and offers a way to move contemporary critiques of sovereignty beyond their current impasse.

China's apparent success on January 11, 2007 in destroying one of its own satellites with a ballistic missile is a rubicon moment in the weaponization of space. The technology used in the test is not new. The U.S. tested similar systems in the 1980s and the Soviet Union tested anti-satellite technology in the 1960s. What is significant about China's test is its timing. It comes just months after the Bush Administration released a new National Space Policy that opposed any international arms control agreements that would limit "the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing, and operations or other activities in space for U.S.

national interests." Within this context China's anti-satellite weapons test marks the first salvo in a space arms race.¶ While the U.S. has had military assets in space for decades, these have been satellites that have assisted the military in the surveillance and targeting of battlefields on earth. Space weaponization changes how militaries use space from simply assisting war fighting on the ground to actually waging war in, through and from space. China's test demonstrates its intention to the international community to begin developing weapons systems that can target enemy satellites. The U.S. has been conducting research and development into space weapons systems for decades. The most recent Pentagon Budget committed more than five hundred million dollars in public earmarks for space weapons systems. Most experts agree, however, that the classified portion of the budget pushes

total spending on space weapons development well past the billion-dollar mark.¶ With China's anti-satellite test, this race for military control of space can now go one of three ways. The first possibility would be a classical arms race with the U.S., China, Russia, and possibly other space powers such as Europe and Japan each developing space weapons to protect their assets and threaten the assets of their rivals. The risk with this scenario, as

with all arms races, is that the cycle of escalation will eventually lead to a shooting war. The destruction of even one satellite could cause complications for all the other satellites in its orbital path. Debris from destroyed satellites could collide with other satellites damaging or even destroying them.¶ The second scenario would see the U.S. respond to China's test by escalating its space weapons programs. The immediate beneficiaries of China's test may be the space hawks in Washington's defence establishment who have been calling for the U.S. to weaponize space for decades now. China's test gives these hawks evidence that the possibility of a space war is no longer confined to the domain of science fiction. By seizing military control of space the hawks reason that the U.S. would enhance its ability to project force to any point on earth on very short notice. Furthermore, space control – as the hawks call this strategy – would give the U.S. the power to decide which states could and could not have access to space. While the U.S. currently enjoys a significant advantage in space technologies, China's test demonstrates that this gap may be closing. As such space hawks will be pushing the Bush Administration to weaponize space now, while the U.S . still enjoys technological superiority in the area of space weapons.¶ The third scenario would involve both China and the U.S. taking a step back and realizing that a space arms race is in nobody's interest. All the space powers have scientific, commercial and military assets in space that would be seriously compromised by a space arms race. China's test demonstrates that any state with a reasonably sophisticated

ballistic missile system could destroy a satellite. The state that has the most to lose from such an arms race is the U.S. as it has the most commercial satellites in orbit and its conventional military forces are most dependent upon satellites to wage war. China's test could provide the opportunity for states to begin work on a serious arms control agreement that would ban all weapons from space. Existing international law only prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.¶ China's test raises serious questions for Canadian policy makers given Canada's assets in space range from telecommunications to weather to military satellites. While it is unlikely that Canada would ever become a major participant in a space arms race, such a race threatens these satellites. As such, the best possible scenario for Canada would be the development of a comprehensive space arms control treaty. With its history of leadership in arms control, Canada could play an important role in developing such a treaty. The question of course, is whether or not there is the political will in Ottawa to fight to keep space weapons free.

Satellites exemplify a violent securitized logicWarf 2005 (Barney, prof of Geography, Florida State University) GEOPOLITICS OF THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY. http://www2.ku.edu/~geography/Docs/Barney%20papers/satellite%20geopolitics.pdf

Third, the paper invokes post-structural analyses of spatial discourses and representations (Wood 1992; Gregory 1994; Cosgrove 2001; Pickles 2003), which underscore the multiple, complex and contingent ways in which spatial knowledge is simultaneously reflective and constitutive of social formations. Because the producers and users of satellite technology are concentrated in Europe and North America, the industry is inescapably intertwined with the Western domination of the global information infrastructur e . For example, the world’s largest media companies rely heavily on communications satellites to provide a largely standardised diet of television and video programmes around the world (Myers 1999), what Appadurai (1990) calls a global ‘mediascape’. Clark (1997, p. 126) maintains that globalised satellite broadcasting of television homogenises the viewing options of consumers: Irrespective of where they live, audiences around the world are fed a broadly similar diet of television. The same kind of programmes are scheduled at the same times of the day . . . Soap operas and quiz shows account for most of the daytime slots while children’s programmes predominate in the early evening. These are followed by family viewing, the mid-evening news, drama, sport and adult television. The significance of this standard format is that

it generates demand for particular types of programming, much of which is international in origin. Satellites images comprise what Lefebvre (1974) famously calls representations of space through which dominant ideologies are expressed and naturalised . Cosgrove (1994) argued that far from comprising politically neutral representations, satellite photography legitimated and sustained a discourse of ‘one earth’ effectively encompassed by one country, the United States . Finally, Litfin (1997)

maintains satellites are inherently masculinist in sustaining the view of a single, dispassionate, all-knowing Cartesian observer.

SatellitesSatellites have always fueled the ignorant drive for innovation—the desire to know every inch of the Earth cedes power to closed military circles and lowers the threshold for inevitable wars Masco 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ Univ. of Chicago, the End of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 85.4, Fall 2012, pgs 1107-1124)//mm

In 1960 the corona Project became the first space based reconnaissance system, providing the CIA with the first satellite photographs of soviet military installations

The corona system offers us, in benjamin’s terms, an important opportunity to “brush history against the grain” as it was both a technological marvel—a demonstration of the power of instrumental rationality—and a stark reality check on Us national security culture itself, offering a new optics on the

psychopolitics of cold War (Orr 2006). the first photographic survey of the soviet Union from outer

space showed that US policymakers took the world to the brink of nuclear war in response to their

fantasies of soviet power, not the reality of soviet capabilities . This well documented insight might have produced a fundamental rethinking of how threat, security, and nuclear power were organized in

the US, establishing a cautionary tale at the very least. but instead the corona photographs remained

a highly classified set of facts through the cold War. this secrecy enabled a system of nuclear

normalization to be reinforced rather than interrogated , securing the project of cold War for the next 30 years. In the end, the new optics offered by corona (on both soviet machines and American fanta- sies) were reduced simply to a push for new space technology—higher resolution photographs, better

real time transition of data, and so on. In other words, the structure of the security state did not

change even when confronted with evidence of its own fantasy projections and error . the “success” of corona ultimately produced an American cold War project even more focused on technological innovation and the projection of nu- clear power rather than one capable of re-thinking its own

cultural terms, expert logics , or institutional practices . The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and

failure are now well established in an American political culture. the cultural history of cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Derrida (1984), working with the long running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death (which links Kant, Freud, and benjamin), describes the problem of the nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly “remainderless event” or the “total end of the archive.” For him, nuclear war is “fabulously textual” because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about it, and because to write about it is to politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus performing a kind of counter-militarization and anti-nuclear practice. In the early 1960s, the Us nuclear war policy was officially known as “overkill,” referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy targets (rosenberg 1983). this “overkill” installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an obliteration of the other with collective suicide. the means to an end here constitutes an actual and total end, making the most immediate problem of the nuclear age the problem of differentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis. This seems to be a

fundamental problem in Us national security culture—an inability to differentiate the capacity for

war with the act itself , or alternatively to evaluate the logics of war from inside war. today, space is

filled with satellites offering near perfect resolution on the surface of the earth and able to transmit that data with great speed and precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning

systems, missiles, and drones. What we cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint on war itself —a perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the reality of conflict but also of the

motivations, fantasies, and desires that support and enable it . Indeed expert systems of all sorts—military, economic, political, and industrial—all seem unable to learn from failure and instead in the

face of crisis simply retrench and remobilize longstanding and obviously failed logics . War, for

example, is not the exception but the norm in the US today —which makes peace “extreme.” so what would it take for Americans to consider not only the means to an end—that is, the tactics, the surges, the preemptions, and surgical strikes—but also to reevaluate war itself? What would it take to consider an actual end to such ends?

Naval Power Link

Naval power transforms the ocean into an externalized object in the pursuit of economic and political dominance and creates a form of perpetual crisis managementDe Oliveira 12 (Gilberto, “Naval Peacekeeping and Pirace: Time for a Critical Turn in the Debate”, International Peacekeeping, 19:1, 48-61, ND)

Second, the debate did not reflect the last decade’s critical developments concerning the liberal interventionist project. This project has been severely questioned and has inspired a large research agenda that places international interventionism between two major poles of thinking. On one side a conservative and orthodox pole represents liberal and statist positions about peace. This position is strongly marked by ideas of ‘military security, sovereignty, territory, democracy, rule of law, human rights, neoliberal development’ and, in general, ‘offers rights, formulas and institutions’ as a recipe for peace. 47 On the other side, there is a reflexive and critical pole concerned with social justice, recognition of difference, local and regional dimensions of peace and conflict, and reduction of dependence on hard security in peacebuilding. Authors committed to this critical pole advocate an emancipatory perspective towards peace,

engaging in a broad spectrum of approaches from everyday life and indigenous agency to political economy of conflict and peace. 48 One can argue that the early debate on naval peacekeeping sticks to the more conservative pole, reflecting a statist, militarized and territorialized approach to peace on the oceans. The crucial problem with this positioning is that naval peacekeeping seems to become a mere instrument of governance and pacification of the periphery, a security mechanism for the mobilization of naval forces to act in ‘spaces open to policing operations’. 49

This problem-solving approach, as understood in the sense proposed by Robert Cox, leaves no margin for transformative action and produces, at most, an ephemeral negative peace that contributes little to a self-sustained peace in the maritime environment. 50 Thus, the challenge faced here is how to rethink the idea of peacekeeping at

sea with the aim of enhancing a positive peace on the oceans. In this respect, the Independent World Commission on the Oceans’ final report offers an important insight concerning the centrality of concepts such as ‘peaceful uses’ and ‘peaceful purposes’ of the oceans and the need to think

about these concepts in a positive way: The concept (of peaceful uses of the oceans) recognizes peace as being more than an absence of war, extending the notion of peace to include the idea of an equitable public order that governs all human activity. This broader notion of peace can be expressed differently by the insistence that the opposite of peace is not war but injustice. 51 This vision involves, for example, bringing into discussion questions related to more equitable access to the oceans’ benefits, the impact of maritime degradation in poverty and vice versa, demilitarization of the ocean, civil society’s role in managing problems at sea, and so on. A transformation also involves giving more weight to the question of how maritime problems affect the everyday lives of vulnerable people living in coastal communities dependent on fisheries or other maritime resources. From this perspective,

the notion of peacekeeping at sea gains new breadth and becomes more malleable, allowing it to be approached from a reflexive perspective closer to the emancipatory pole highlighted above. Third, the naval peacekeeping debate approaches threats at sea from an objective standpoint and does not consider the possibility of social construction of security at sea . One of the most important insights gained from the intervention against

piracy off the coast of Somalia is that any maritime topic can be constructed as a security problem. Piracy – an issue related to maritime commerce, usually

approached within legal and criminal spheres – has been converted, in the Somali case, into a threat to international peace and security. This shift in agenda, whose decisive moment was the UNSC’s interference in the piracy problem, can be understood as a securitization process. Following the work on securitization of Øle Waever et al., it is a process that construes piracy as a security threat through political discourse favoured by political elites. 52 From this point of view, it is because discursive politics labels Somali piracy as an existential threat to a series of referent objects that piracy becomes a security problem, and not because of piracy’s objective and material conditions. Thus the UNSC resolutions identify the following objects of reference threatened by Somali piracy: international peace and security, humanitarian aid, international maritime trade,

crew and passengers’ lives. Through a securitization theory lens, something becomes a maritime security problem ‘when the elites declare it to be so’, which means that ‘power holders can always try to use the

instrument of securitization’ of a maritime issue ‘to gain control over it’. 53 Within this process, some aspects are relevant concerning security at sea. First, those who govern the order at sea ‘can easily use it for specific, self-serving purposes’, which means that this order is ‘clearly, systematically and institutionally linked to the survival of the system and its elites’. 54 Second, to ensure the maintenance of this order, elites demand more security, exceptional measures aimed at defending objects whose survival is being threatened. From this perspective, to talk about security is to claim the defence of an object menaced in its existence, which means that security, by definition, preserves the traditional ‘threat-defence’ logic of

war. 55 The move towards securitization of maritime issues can be clearly observed in doctrinal developments made by Western naval powers and regional organizations, as in the ‘Naval Operations Concept 2010’ of the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard: Maritime security is a non-doctrinal term defined as those tasks and operations conducted to protect sovereignty and maritime resources, support free and open seaborne commerce, and to counter maritime related terrorism, weapons proliferation, transnational crime, piracy, environmental destruction, and illegal seaborne immigration. 56 Other doctrines and military forums have replicated this attempt at defining maritime security as an umbrella concept to accommodate ‘new threats’ and justify the use of naval forces in ‘operations aimed at enhancing and enforcing security at sea’. 57 In general, these ‘new threats’ have been defined around the following main topics: terrorism at sea; transport of weapons of mass destruction; illegal movement of drugs, human beings and arms; flow of illegal immigrants; piracy; dangers to the oceanic

environment (marine pollution, illegal fishing and overfishing); and global warming. These doctrines’ movements to incorporate new threats and to justify new roles for navies within a broader concept of maritime security, if integrated within a multilateral framework, do not differ significantly from the constabulary roles defended in the early debates on naval peacekeeping. Thus, the key point distinguishing both naval peacekeeping and maritime security operations lies, ultimately, in the multilateral character generally defended in the former and the national interest or collective defence implicated in the latter. Even if one recognizes the importance of this distinction and its implications in conceptualizing naval peacekeeping, this does not significantly change the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying both conceptions: it is the classical vision of ‘good order at sea’ and the traditional problem-solving perspective that guide the way both naval peacekeeping and maritime security debates regard problems at sea. The critical point is that attempts at widening maritime security and the proposal of an autonomous concept of peacekeeping at sea do not reflect an innocent position. Securitization processes at sea ultimately reduce to a logic of war such issues as criminality, piracy, maritime pollution, trade circulation, climate change, fisheries and so on, which could be approached in more comprehensive, creative, peaceful and sustainable ways within de-securitized agendas. 58 In other words, a maritime agenda committed to technical, scientific, legal, normative, social, cultural, economic and political aspects of the sea would be more effective in handling maritime problems in a transformative and self-sustainable way than a securitized agenda whose exceptionality and urgency tends to reduce and simplify those problems in order to manage them through exceptional measures in a problem-solving framework.

Impacts

Warming/Biod

The accumulation of more climate data will only be used to support the transformation of the Earth into money – these economistic responses to warming turn the caseYusoff (School of Geography, University of Exeter) 9 (Kathryn, Excess, catastrophe, and climate change, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 1010 ^ 1029)

A mapping system that attempts to translate earth processes into data needs not only to be constantly responsive to a changing flow of data, but to be able to perceive an abstract model of the earth from which those data come. Digital earth forms a new global concept and metaphor for conceiving of geographic information, and yet the form of those informational models (as a new kind of globe) has received little attention (see Roberts and Schein, 1995; Sui, 1995). While geographic information has been traditionally defined as information about the distribution of phenomena on the surface of the Earth ``as a commodity that is independent of the media on which it is stored, communicated, and used, and of the structures and models used to represent it'' (Goodchild, 2000, pages 344 ^ 345), Daniel Sui (1999) argues that GISs should now be viewed as a medium that imposes its own logic of exchange. There has been an increasing vigilance and reflexivity to representational and metaphoric practices in the constructions of environments (Castree, 2002; Castree and Braun, 2001; Hinchliffe, 1996; Massey, 2006) and a concentration on the practices rather than the representational modalities of environments (Demeritt, 1996; 2001b). However, Morgan Robertson, in his discussion of the metrical technology used for

the commodification of ecosystem services, suggests that the ``methods and techniques of ecosystem assessment must describe a nature that capital can `see' ö that has an uncontroversial measure ö in order for trade to occur'' (2006, page 367). In climate modelling this accumulation of seeing ö a mantle and atmosphere of data that

are in constant transmission ö is crucial to the accumulation of capital and the quantification of environmental risk as capital expenditure precisely because it is built through the architecture of accumulation. Indeed, as Michael Taussig comments in his study, The Nervous System, ``We are mindful of Nietzsche's notion of `the senses as bound to their object as much as to their organ of reception, a fluid bond to be sure in which', as he says, `seeing becomes seeing something' '' (1992, page 142). He argues that it is just this something that puts the study of discourse (or medium) in a new light

and raises doubts about the notion ``of `studying' [as] innocent in its unwinking ocularity'' (page 142). The accumulation of atmospheric data has two distinct effects. One is the progressive underwriting of scientific authority through increasingly assured models, and thus of political purchase in the debate around anthropogenic-induced climate change. Here we might cite the IPCC's change from uncertainty to 90% certainty from the Third to the Fourth IPCC

Report. Based on this 90% certainty the press finally reported that ``climate change was due to man'' (McKie, 2007). The other effect, that leads from this `assurance' of accumulation is the practice of what Theodor Adorno would call reification (every- thing quantified as if it were money) of atmospheres themselves through carbon emissions trading and the economic costings of climate change (Stern, 2007). As the biosphere continues to change, so too does the

construction of geopolitical and economic geographies of the atmosphere. Within the new geopolitical environ- ment, data have emerged as the crucial operative currency on which responses are mobilised and negotiated (that is, carbon credits). As Katrina Dean et al rightly comment, ``scientific data will operate as a kind of currency in negotiating the

geophysical politics of environmental management, cost, adaptation, prediction and response'' (2008, page 573). Thus the correlation between scientific certainty in the accumulation of data and the reification of the atmosphere is intimately linked as a form of seeing capital. Digitalisation of earth values on a global sphere inscribe index- ical marks of 0s and 1s into those earth values (this is a form of atomisation ö

CO2 becomes parts per million), which can be traded and operated on (this is the process of reification ö parts per million become millions of dollars). The political and economic appropriation of climate models into the reified sphere of global capital is the most rationalised form of accounting for environmental change. The more profound excess to that limited economy of commodified environments manifests itself within the images themselves, suggesting, as Blanchot argues, other ways that we might be attentive to this knowledge.

“Value to Life”

Attempting to understand the perceived non-human environment in this way destroys the value to life and culminates in extinctionWeiskel (Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values) 97 (Timothy C., 6 July 1997, Selling Pigeons in the Temple: The Danger of Market Metaphors in an Ecosystem, http://ecojustice.net/coffin/ops-008.htm)

The Union of Concerned Scientists has joined with the National Religious Partnership for the Environment to reiterate the prophetic message in churches, temples and mosques across the country and around the world. In a similar vein, research scientists at Harvard have provided strong support for the activities of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values convened by the University's Committee on Environment and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life in order specifically to explore the full range of valuation -- not just economic costs -- which can be drawn upon in developing public policy to protect the environment and biodiversity. The message from spiritual leaders and research scientists alike is as clear as it is forceful: we did not create the world; we cannot control it; we must not

destroy it. More precisely: we must not commodify and merchandise biodiversity merely because in the short run it may appear profitable for us to do so. Convinced that we know the price of everything we will soon have lost the ability to value anything that is priceless. The capacity to value some things and human experiences beyond all measure of worldly worth and to esteem

them without any thought of their exchange value or sale is surely one of the most cherished attributes that makes us human.

To forget this or deny it is to disavow our humanity, and down that road lies our swift and certain extinction. The capacity to appreciate intrinsic value is not a quality of humanity that it would be wise to

denigrate, dismiss or eliminate in formulating environmental public policy. On the contrary, it may well constitute our last, best hope for survival as a species.

Racism/Sexism

The view point of Earth observation causes a detachment that makes environmental destruction, racism, and sexism inevitableGaard 2010 Greta Gaard October 1, 2010 New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism

Ecofeminists have argued that NASA's whole earth image of the planet from space creates not only a physical distance, but a psychic detachment as well (Garb 264–78). In this image, we earthlings become mere

observers, not participants. This whole earth image depicts earth as an object of art, seen from such a distance that we do not see such simultaneously personal and political experiences as military occupation, death, sexual assault, deep sea oil drilling, aerial gunning of wolves, toxic waste, social injustice, human and inter-species oppression. In other words, this perspective does not provide a standpoint for understanding eco- justice problems, and thus cannot lead us to holistic eco-justice solutions , either: “the ‘global view’ cannot adequately depict environmental problems because the impacts of these problems vary with class, gender, age, and race” (Litfin 38). Perhaps the most dangerous implication of this“God's eye view” from space is its valorization of space exploration, and the idea that extraterrestrialism is viable: the whole earth view is “a rearward view of the earth, a view seen as we leave” (Garb 272). It supports the myth that we can live apart from the earth, that

we are not, in the most profound sense, earthlings. Seen from an ecofeminist perspective, the space program is “an oversized literalization of the masculine transcendent idea, an attempt to achieve selfhood freed not only from

gravity but from all it represents: the pull of the Earth, of mater, dependence on the mother, the body” (Garb 272). The resonant detachment of both ecoglobalism and the whole earth image offers fruitful ground for feminist ecocritical explorations.

Imperialism

Observing the Earth from space creates makes imperialistic wars inevitableLoos (International Studies Department researcher at Macalester College) 5/3/11, (Maxwell, “Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, and Global Imagination”, pg. 18-19, DA: 7/21/11, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=intlstudies_honors

In this way, global imagination does involve a global gaze. Going back to the image of the earth from space, Masahide Kato argues that it “manifested the totality of the globe eloquently to First World eyes,” marking the “triumph of an ‘absolute’ strategic gaze.”22 Though Kato makes his statements about the globe as part of a larger argument about discourses of nuclear politics, his comments are relevant

to the topic of global imagination. Kato argues that the image of the globe from space, endowed with the authority of

photography and mechanical reproduction, allows for the production of the “fiction of the globe as a unified whole,”23 which allows for the entire globe to be gazed upon by the First World in terms of economic and geopolitical strategy. This image and the fiction of the earth as a totality, Kato argues, coupled with the

logic of late capitalism, suppresses realities that cannot fit into this mode of representation,24 limiting possibilities, and essentially allowing the global North to constitute the world to its advantage.25 While Kato might be a bit

of a pessimist, his argument is useful insofar as it demonstrates how the process of imagining the globe as a cohesive whole with specific characteristics is inherently involved in power/knowledge dynamics, at least partially rooted in political economy. Global imagination truly does take on the form of a gaze, insofar as the process of seeing or imagining the globe is simultaneously a process of constituting it. This goes beyond fantasy; the phantasm of the globe, imagined from a set of images, is the global reality for the subject. Going back to Steger’s global political ideologies, Imperial Globalism and Jihadist Globalism appear as the only ways to act, the appropriate (even if contested) responses to the reality of the imagined globe.

The process of global imagination thus undergirds practices with real, constitutive material impacts on the world, from tourism to imperialistic warfare .

A2: Globalism Good/Overview Effect

The overview effect does not produce global unity, only a hollow narcissism bent on control and dominationDickens and Ormrod (University of Essex) 7 (Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod, Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe, Sociology 2007 41: 609, SAGE)

Experiencing weightlessness and seeing the Earth from space are other common fantasies. Both represent power, the ability to ‘break the bonds of gravity’, consuming the image of the Earth (Ingold, 1993; Szersynski and Urry, 2006) or ‘possessing’ it through gazing at it (Berger, 1972). They also represent a return to unity. Weightlessness represents the freedom from restraint experi-

enced in pre-oedipal childhood, and perhaps even a return to the womb (Bainbridge, 1976: 255). Seeing the Earth from space is an experience in which the observer witnesses a world without borders. This experience has been dubbed

‘the overview effect’ based on the reported life-changing experiences of astronauts (see White, 1987). Humans’ sense of power in the universe means our experience of the cos- mos and our selves is fundamentally changing: It really presents a different perspective on your life when you can think that you can actually throw yourself into another activity and transform it, and when we have a day when we look out in the sky and we see lights on the moon, something like that or you think that I know a friend who’s on the other side of the Sun right now. You know, it just changes the nature of looking at the sky too. (46-year-old space scientist

interviewed at ProSpace March Storm 2004) In the future, this form of subjectivity may well characterize more and more of Western society. A widespread cosmic narcissism of this kind might appear to have an almost spiritual nature, but the cosmic spirituality we are witnessing here is not about becoming immortal in the purity of the heavens. Rather,

it is spirituality taking the form of self-worship; further aggrandizing the atomized, self-seeking, 21st-

century individual (see Heelas, 1996). Indeed, the pro-space activists we interviewed are usually opposed to those who would keep outer space uncon- taminated, a couple suggesting we need to confront the pre-Copernican idea of a corrupt Earth and

ideal ‘Heaven’. For these cosmic narcissists, the universe is very much experienced as an object; something to be conquered, controlled and consumed as a reflection of the powers of the self. This vision is no different to the Baconian assumptions about the relationship between man and nature on Earth. This kind of thinking has its roots in Anaxagoras’ theory of a material and infinite universe, and was extended by theorists from Copernicus, through Kepler and Galileo to Newton. The idea that the universe orients around the self was quashed by Copernicus as he showed the Earth was not at the centre of the universe and that therefore neither were we (Freud, 1973: 326). However, science has offered us the promise that we can still understand and control it. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, trumpets Kepler’s role in developing the omniscient fantasy of science (it was Kepler who first calculated the elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun): Kepler did not describe a model of the universe that was merely appealing – he was investigating a universe whose causal relationships could be understood in terms of a nature knowable to man. In so doing, Kepler catapulted the status of humanity in the universe. Though no longer residing at the centre of the cosmos, humanity, Kepler showed, could comprehend it. Therefore […] not only was the universe within man’s intellectual reach, it was, in principle, within physical reach as well. (Zubrin with Wagner, 1996: 24)

The global imagination only serves to piece together more-dominant national primacies into a fragmented puzzle—it positions these nations like pieces on a chess board choosing when and where to call them into play—further inscribing internal differencesMaxwell Loos, International Studies Department researcher at Macalester College, 5/3/11, “Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, and Global Imagination”, pg. 15-16, DA: 7/21/11, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=intlstudies_honors--G.B.

I have thus far ignored the issue of subject-formation in the mirror stage, but there is an important element of subjectivity and positioning involved in the process of global imagination. The global imaginary is not, after all, the only social imaginary in existence; it is not even the dominant one of our moment. Thus, in a situation where multiple social imaginaries undergird various social articulations – some of them imagined communities, some of them imagined units – the process of imagining a globe, a unit uniquely able to subsume all of these in its imagined form, must involve an element of organizing and positioning. This is most easily demonstrated in relation to nations, still the

dominant social imaginary: global imagination not only creates the world as a cohesive globe, it also makes nations fit together as a part of that globe. More than that, though, it positions nations in relation to one another and in relation to the globe, so that the United States can articulate a

sense of global responsibility in bombing Libya,15 while Qatar flies jets over Libya as a regional actor, and Djibouti is not

part of the conversation.16 In other words, nations are imagined as parts of the globe with specific attributes and roles to play in the logical functioning of that globe. Global imagination, then, in addition to creating a cohesive globe, also does this job of positioning nations and other entities within the globe. The primacy of the nation as a unit of social imaginary, though, complicates this process of positioning entities within the imagined globe; for one, the process of imagining the globe does not actually take place from above the globe, as the photograph from space might imply, but from within a social situation, particularly from within a nation. This means that there is a “here/there” element to the process of global imagination; at least in the American context, the globe, despite being imagined as a closed and inclusive system-thing, is not “here,” it is part of “there,” not unlike the distinction between Self and Other that undergirds the Lacanian subject’s integration into the Symbolic Order.17 For evidence of this distinction, one need look no further than the structure of news media: almost every major newspaper has separate sections or subsections for world news, indicating that all of the other news, likely organized around local and national categories, is not world news. If it weren’t for some sort of here/there distinction in global imagination, all news would be world news. This means, then, that the process of “making whole” in global imagination does not erase

difference and otherness; rather, global imagination takes experiences and images of difference and otherness and arranges them symbolically to fit into a unit called the globe. It subsumes them into the globe, so that global imagination is a process by which the subject can imagine that he/she does understand difference and otherness (“there”) as part of a system-thing; a retail chain with a name like “Global Market” can sell the consumer commodities specifically engineered to dwell on cultural difference and otherness, because they are part of a system called the globe. In this instance, the term “global” can be seen as a means of managing cultural difference.

Satellites – Case

Solvency

The aff can’t solve. Their author concludes that massive improvements in technology are needed to solve – increased integration/data collection doesn’t account for this.Eakin et al 10 – C.M Eakin (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch) C.J Nim (Coral Reef Watch) “Monitoring coral reefs from Space”, The Official Magazine of the Oceanography Society, December 2010, Available at: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/23-4_eakin.pdf, Accessed on: 7/24/2014, ND)

Because coral reefs normally exist in shallow, clear waters, many optical bands can “see” the bottom. This attribute is good for habitat measurements, but it creates problems for separating changes in the benthos from changes in the water column. Both enhanced spatial and spectral resolution are essential to resolving these problems and will provide the quantitative data needed to answer many resource-monitoring challenges that currently exist for coral reef

ecosystems. None of these improvements are sufficient, however, without considerable work to

develop, calibrate, and validate new and improved algorithms. Because satellites can only measure a small set of parameters directly, most of what we monitor from satellites is the result of complex algorithms that derive the parameters of interest. This is also where the combination of multiple instruments and spectral bands show great promise in enhancing our scientific questions that inform management needs or may be a bridge until new sensors are

available. The development and launch of new satellite sensors is a slow process, and agencies involved need to better incorporate the needs of resource managers into their instrument and satellite development processes. At the same time, we need to identify key parameters that must be collected with high quality and continuously to understand long-term changes to coral reefs and the water quality and oceanographic conditions influencing them.

Spills

Weather conditions and severe spills undermine solvency – means they are in a double bind: either the spills will be small and have a small impact or too large and the satellites won’t work. This is their author’s data.Solberg 12 (Anne, professor of imaging at University of Oslo, “Remote Sensing of Ocean Oil-Spill Pollution”, writing in IEEE, 7/10/12, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6235983, accessed 7/24, ND)

An overview of remote sensing of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 is found in [12]. Innman et al. [48]

discuss in details the use of MODIS standard products to map the Deepwater Horizon accident in the period after the

accident. Due to cloud cover and a lack of sunglint the oil was difficult to see on visible bands. They found

that the sea surface temperature products were not well suited to consistently detect surface oil probably due to the thickness of the oil layer. With chlorophyll concentration products they found mixed results. Fig. 8 shows various satellite images from the Deepwater Horizon accident acquired in the weeks following the disaster. The upper part shows a MODIS image acquired in sunglint conditions, below that a high-resolution image from NASA Earth Observing-1 is shown, followed by an ENVISAT ASAR image, and the lower part shows a MISR false color composite.