Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Impact Defense

2AC – Environmental Resilience

The environment is resilient – species turnover is a function of resiliency

Bullock et al 15 — James M. Bullock, Ecologist at NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Visiting Professor at Liverpool and Bournemouth Universities, Felix Eigenbrod, Associate Professor Ecology , Principal Investigator (Spatial Ecology),Co-Chair of Sustainability Science at Southampton, Rob Freckleton, Professor and Director of Research and Innovation, Faculty of Science, University of Sheffield, Matthew S. Heard, Terrestrial Ecologist at NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, PhD at Imperial College, Andy Hector, Professor of Ecology at University of Oxford, Plants for the 21st Century, Nick J.B. Isaac, Macroecologist in the Biological Records Centre, NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, PhD in Evolutionary Biology, Imperial College Georgina M. Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems, and Head of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, Berta Martín-López, Junior Professor Leuphana University Lüneburg · Institute of Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Tom H. Oliver, Associate Professor in Landscape Ecology at the University of Reading, C. David L. Orme, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College Owen Petchey, Associate Professor, Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Visiting Researcher, University of Sheffield, Deborah Procter, Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, Member of the British Ecological Society, Fellow of the Linnean Society, Vânia Proença, Postdoc researcher, MARETEC, Instituto Superior Técnico Biodiversity, David Raffaelli, appointed to a chair in Environment in February 2001 and was Head of Department between 2004 and 2010 at University of York, David B. Roy, Head of the Biological Records Centre at NERC, K. Blake Suttle, Department of Earth and Planetary Science at University of California Berkeley, Ben A. Woodcock, Ecological Entomologist in the Community Ecology Group at CEH Wallingford, 2015 (“Biodiversity and resilience of ecosystem functions,” University of Reading, November 2015, Available Online at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/47800/3/TREE%20paper-%20Biodiversity%20and%20resilience%20of%20ecosystem%20functions%20V18_SECOND%20REVISION.pdf, Accessed 06-24-2017)

There has been much semantic and theoretical treatment of the resilience concept, but here we are concerned with identifying metrics for real world applications. An ecological system can be defined by the species composition at any point in time [26] and there is a rich ecological literature, both theoretical and experimental, that focusses on the stability of communities [16, 27-29] with potential relevance to resilience. Of course, the species in a community are essential to the provision of many ecosystem functions which are the biological foundation of ecosystem services [3]. However, the stability of species composition itself is not a necessary pre-requisite for the resilience of ecosystem functions. Turnover in species communities might actually be the very thing that allows for resilient functions. For example, in communities subjected to climatic warming, cold-adapted species are expected to decline whilst warm-adapted species increase [30]. The decline of cold- adapted species can be limited through management [31], but in many cases their local loss might be inevitable [32]. If these species have important functional roles, then ecosystem functions can suffer unless other species with similar functional roles replace them. In fact, similar sets of functions might be achieved by very different community structures [33]. Therefore, while the species composition of an ecosystem is typically the target of conservation, it is ecosystem functions, rather than species composition per se, that need to be resilient, if ecosystem services are to be maintained (Figure 1). In this case the most relevant definition of resilience is: the degree to which an ecosystem function can resist or recover rapidly from environmental perturbations, thereby maintaining function above a socially acceptable level. This can be thought of as the ecosystem-functions related meaning of resilience or alternatively as the inverse of ecological ‘vulnerability’ [34]. Resilience in this context is related to the stability of an ecosystem function as defined by its constancy over time [35], but the approach of using a minimum threshold more explicitly measures deficits of ecological function that impact upon human well-being [e.g. 14]. Note that here we focus on the resilience of individual ecosystem functions, which might be appropriate for policy formulation (e.g. pollination resilience), although ecosystem managers will ultimately want to consider the suite of ecosystem functions supporting essential services in a given location.

2AC – Institutionalized Values Inevitable

The impact is inevitable – the “institutionalized values” they criticize are produced by everyday social processes and convivial institutions are irrelevant.

Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17)

Mich's model of consumption-manipulation is crucial at every stage of his political argument. But it is substantially incorrect. In the following three sections I shall criticize three basic thrusts of his analysis. 75

First, Illich locates the source of social decay in the autonomous, manipulative behavior of corporate bureaucracies. I shall argue, in contrast, that the source must be sought in the normal operation of the basic economic institutions of capitalism (markets in factors of production, private control of resources and technology, etc.),3 which consistently sacrifice the healthy development of community, work, environment, education, and social equality to the accumulation of capital and the growth of marketable goods and services. Moreover, given that individuals must participate in economic activity, these social outcomes are quite insensitive to the preferences or values of individuals, and are certainly in no sense a reflection of the autonomous wills of manipulating bureaucrats or gullible consumers. Hence merely ending "manipulation" while maintaining basic economic institutions will affect the rate of social decay only minimally.

Second, Illich locates the source of consumer consciousness in the manipulative socialization of individuals by agencies controlled by corporate and welfare bureaucracies. This "institutionalized consciousness" induces indivduals to choose outcomes not in conformity with their "real" needs. I shall argue, in contrast, that a causal analysis can never take socialization agencies as basic explanatory variables in assessing the overall behavior of the social system.4

In particular, consumer consciousness is generated through the day-to-day activities and observations of individuals in capitalist society. The sales pitches of manipulative institutions, rather than generating the values of commodity fetishism, merely capitalize upon and reinforce a set of values derived from and reconfirmed by daily personal experience in the social system. In fact, while consumer behavior may seem irrational and fetishistic, it is a reasonable accommodation to the options for meaningful social outlets in the context of capitalist institutions. Hence the abolition of addictive propaganda cannot "liberate" the individual to "free choice" of personal goals. Such choice is still conditioned by the pattern of social processes which have historically rendered him or her amenable to "institutionalized values." In fact, the likely outcome of de-manipulation of values would be no significant alteration of values at all.

Throughout this paper, I restrict my analysis to capitalist as opposed to other economic systems of advanced industrial societies (e.g., state-socialism of the Soviet Union type). As Illich suggests, the outcomes are much the same, but the mechanisms are in fact quite different. The private-administrative economic power of a capitalist elite is mirrored by the public-administrative political power of a bureaucratic elite in state-socialistcountries, and both are used to reproduce a similar complex of social relations of production and a structurally equivalent system of class relations. The capitalist variety is emphasized here because of its special relevance in the American context.

1AR – Institutionalized Values Inevitable

The impact is inevitable – consumption and “institutionalized values” are created by everyday observation and experience.

Gintis 72 – Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Former Professor Emertius in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1972 (“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, Available Online at: http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775, Accessed 6-22-17)

To understand consumption in capitalist society requires a production orientation, in contrast to illich's emphasis on "institutionalized values" as basic explanatory variables. Individuals consume as they do—and hence acquire values and beliefs concerning consumption—because of the place consumption activity holds among the constellation of available alternatives for social expression. These alternatives directly involve the quality of basic activity contexts surrounding social life—contexts which, as I have argued, develop according to the criteria of capital accumulation through the normal operation of economic institutions.

What at first glance seems to be an irrational preoccupation with income and consumption in capitalist society, is seen within an activity context paradigm to be a logical response on the part of the individual to what Marx isolated as the central tendency of capitalist society: the transformation of all complex social relations into impersonal quid-pro-quo relations. One implication of this transformation is the progressive decay of social activity contexts described in the previous section, a process which reduces their overall contribution to individual welfare. Work, community, and environment become sources of pain and displeasure rather than inviting contexts for social relations. The reasonable individual response, then, is a) to disregard the development of personal capacities which would be humanly satisfying in activity contexts which are not available and, hence, to fail to demand changed activity contexts and b) to emphasize consumption and to develop those capacities which are most relevant to consumption per se.

Second, the transformation of complex social relations to exchange relations implies that the dwindling stock of healthy activity contexts is parceled out among individuals almost strictly according to income. High-paying jobs are by and large the least alienating; the poor live in the most fragmented communities and are subjected to the most inhuman environments; contact with natural environment is limited to periods of vacation, and the length and desirability of this contact is based on the means to pay.

Thus commodity fetishism becomes a substitute for meaningful activity contexts, and a means of access to those that exist. The "sales pitch" of Madison Avenue is accepted because, in the given context, it is true. It may not be much, but it's all we've got. The indefensibility of its more extreme forms (e.g., susceptibility to deodorant and luxury automobile advertising) should not divert us from comprehending this essential rationality.

In conclusion, it is clear that the motivational basis of consumer behavior derives from the everyday observation and experience of individuals, and consumer values are not "aberrations" induced by manipulative socialization. Certainly there is no reason to believe that individuals would consume or work much less were manipulative socialization removed. Insofar as such socialization is required to stabilize commodity fetishist values, its elimination might lead to the overthrow of capitalist institutions—but that of course is quite outside Illich's scheme.

They Say: “Schools are the Panopticon”

The Panopticon is inevitable and good – it solves a laundry list of impacts.

Armstrong 13 — Stuart Armstrong, Alexander Tamas Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, D.Phil in Parabolic Geometry from Oxford, 2013 (“Life in the fishbowl”, Aeon, September 30^th, Available Online at https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-benefits-of-living-in-a-total-surveillance-state, Accessed 06-24-2017)

Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because you know someone is watching. You know this because you live in the future where surveillance is universal, ubiquitous and unavoidable. Governments and large corporations have spread cameras, microphones and other tracking devices all across the globe, and they also have the capacity to store and process oceans of surveillance data in real time. Big Brother not only watches your sex life, he analyses it. It sounds nightmarish — but it might be inevitable. So far, attempts to control surveillance have generally failed. We could be headed straight for the panopticon, and if recent news developments are any indication, it might not take that long to get there. Maybe we should start preparing. And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits. The first, and most obvious, advantage of mass surveillance is a drastic reduction in crime. Indeed, this is the advantage most often put forward by surveillance proponents today. The evidence as to whether current surveillance achieves this is ambiguous; cameras, for instance, seem to have an effect on property crime, but not on incidences of violence. But today’s world is very different from a panopticon full of automatically analysed surveillance devices that leave few zones of darkness. If calibrated properly, total surveillance might eradicate certain types of crime almost entirely. People respond well to inevitable consequences, especially those that follow swiftly on the heels of their conduct. Few would commit easily monitored crimes such as assault or breaking and entering, if it meant being handcuffed within minutes. This kind of ultra-efficient police capability would require not only sensors capable of recording crimes, but also advanced computer vision and recognition algorithms capable of detecting crimes quickly. There has been some recent progress on such algorithms, with further improvements expected. In theory, they would be able to alert the police in real time, while the crime was still ongoing. Prompt police responses would create near-perfect deterrence, and violent crime would be reduced to a few remaining incidents of overwhelming passion or extreme irrationality. If surveillance recordings were stored for later analysis, other types of crimes could be eradicated as well, because perpetrators would fear later discovery and punishment. We could expect crimes such as low-level corruption to vanish, because bribes would become perilous (to demand or receive) for those who are constantly under watch. We would likely see a similar reduction in police brutality. There might be an initial spike in detected cases of police brutality under a total surveillance regime, as incidents that would previously have gone unnoticed came to light, but then, after a short while, the numbers would tumble. Ubiquitous video recording, mobile and otherwise, has already begun to expose such incidents. On a smaller scale, mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime). Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials. There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser’s control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place. With reduced crime, we could also expect a significant reduction in police work and, by extension, police numbers. Beyond a rapid-reaction force tasked with responding to rare crimes of passion, there would be no need to keep a large police force on hand. And there would also be no need for them to enjoy the special rights they do today. Police officers can, on mere suspicion, detain you, search your person, interrogate you, and sometimes enter your home. They can also arrest you on suspicion of vague ‘crimes’ such as ‘loitering with intent’. Our present police force is given these powers because it needs to be able to investigate. Police officers can’t be expected to know who committed what crime, and when, so they need extra powers to be able to figure this out, and still more special powers to protect themselves while they do so. But in a total-surveillance world, there would be no need for humans to have such extensive powers of investigation. For most crimes, guilt or innocence would be obvious and easy to establish from the recordings. The police’s role could be reduced to arresting specific individuals, who have violated specific laws. If all goes well, there might be fewer laws for the police to enforce. Most countries currently have an excess of laws, criminalising all sorts of behaviour. This is only tolerated because of selective enforcement; the laws are enforced very rarely, or only against marginalised groups. But if everyone was suddenly subject to enforcement, there would have to be a mass legal repeal. When spliffs on private yachts are punished as severely as spliffs in the ghetto, you can expect the marijuana legalisation movement to gather steam. When it becomes glaringly obvious that most people simply can’t follow all the rules they’re supposed to, these rules will have to be reformed. In the end, there is a chance that mass surveillance could result in more personal freedom, not less. The military is another arm of state power that is ripe for a surveillance-inspired shrinking. If cross-border surveillance becomes ubiquitous and effective, we could see a reduction in the $1.7 trillion that the world spends on the military each year. Previous attempts to reduce armaments have ultimately been stymied by a lack of reliable verification. Countries can never trust that their enemies aren’t cheating, and that encourages them to cheat themselves. Arms races are also made worse by a psychological phenomenon, whereby each side interprets the actions of the other as a dangerous provocation, while interpreting its own as purely defensive or reactive. With cross-border mass surveillance, countries could check that others are abiding by the rules, and that they weren’t covertly preparing for an attack. If intelligence agencies were to use all the new data to become more sophisticated observers, countries might develop a better understanding of each other. Not in the hand-holding, peace-and-love sense, but in knowing what is a genuine threat and what is bluster or posturing. Freed from fear of surprising new weapons, and surprise attacks, countries could safely shrink their militaries. And with reduced armies, we should be able to expect reduced warfare, continuing the historical trend in conflict reduction since the end of the Second World War. Of course, these considerations pale when compared with the potential for mass surveillance to help prevent global catastrophic risks, and other huge disasters. Pandemics, to name just one example, are among the deadliest dangers facing the human race. The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century and, in the early 20th century, the Spanish Flu killed off between 50 and 100 million people. In addition, smallpox buried more people than the two world wars combined. There is no reason to think that great pandemics are a thing of the past, and in fact there are reasons to think that another plague could be due soon. There is also the possibility that a pandemic could arise from synthetic biology, the human manipulation of microbes to perform specific tasks. Experts are divided as to the risks involved in this new technology, but they could be tremendous, especially if someone were to release, accidentally or malevolently, infectious agents deliberately engineered for high transmissibility and deadliness. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly Mass surveillance could help greatly here, by catching lethal pandemics in their earliest stages, or beforehand, if we were to see one being created artificially. It could also expose lax safety standards or dangerous practices in legitimate organisations. Surveillance could allow for quicker quarantines, and more effective treatment of pandemics. Medicines and doctors could be rushed to exactly the right places, and micro-quarantines could be instituted. More dramatic measures, such as airport closures, are hard to implement on a large scale, but these quick-response tactics could be implemented narrowly and selectively. Most importantly, those infected could be rapidly informed of their condition, allowing them to seek prompt treatment. With proper procedures and perfect surveillance, we could avoid pandemics altogether. Infections would be quickly isolated and eliminated, and eradication campaigns would be shockingly efficient. Tracking the movements and actions of those who fell ill would make it much easier to research the causes and pathology of diseases. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly. Likewise, mass surveillance could prevent the terrorist use of nukes, dirty bombs, or other futuristic weapons. Instead of blanket bans in dangerous research areas, we could allow research to proceed and use surveillance to catch bad actors and bad practices. We might even see an increase in academic freedom. Surveillance could also be useful in smaller, more conventional disasters. Knowing where everyone in a city was at the moment an earthquake struck would make rescue services much more effective, and the more cameras around when hurricanes hit, the better. Over time, all of this footage would increase our understanding of disasters, and help us to mitigate their effects. Indeed, there are whole new bodies of research that could emerge from the data provided by mass surveillance. Instead of formulating theories and laboriously recruiting a biased and sometimes unwilling group for testing, social scientists, economists and epidemiologists could use surveillance data to test their ideas. And they could do it from home, immediately, and have access to the world’s entire population. Many theories could be rapidly confirmed or discarded, with great benefit to society. The panopticon would be a research nirvana.