West Coast Publishing Ocean 2014 affirmative page

Ocean Management Kritik Aff Responses

Impact Answers

Impact Answers – Biopower

Biopower checks extinction. Abandoning planetary management would be global suicide

Nick Dyer-Witheford, an Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, ‘4, "Species-Being Resurgent," Constellations, 11:4, p. 489-490
Being a species with high technology may both require and enable more radical social transformation. The management of a range of global eco-metabolic problems, including not only biotechnological risks but climate and atmospheric change, pandemics and water and energy supply, require institutions of oversight, testing, risk assessment, public resource management and regulation, and collective education – in short, social planning, and on a scale to make previous efforts look retiring.

Informationalism makes such governmentality feasible: the neural networked surveillance and simulation systems deployed to wage the war on terror could be turned to monitor the greening of the planet. Yet the possibilities of panoptic despotism are obvious. What tempers these risks are the equal potentialities for participation, transparency, creativity, and assemblage created by the new mesh of global, networked communication, potentialities being so vigorously explored by a host of social movements and individuals. Cognitive capitalism seems to have subsumed planetary society. But the technological possibilities of planning and participation that the world market has itself excited contain possibilities of a counter-subsumption that will give commodification a declining role in a human future. Born under the bad sign of cognitive capitalism, species-being may yet make a happy inheritance. Dark days invite radiant concepts like “speciesbeing,” but should also make us cautious of them. Invocations of common humanity have always been suspect as the weakest of idealizations, particularly by Marxists. Today, however, such invocations may just be the starkest of realisms, the only category adequate to the productive and destructive dimensions of global, high-technology capitalism, and the struggles against it.

The kritik creates a distinction between biological and political life that destroys any heuristic value of the alternative and undermines value to life

Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton, Fall 2010, “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol. 1 No 1, pp. 81-95

Conclusion Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era. However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention. In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human beings could be reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces, including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even under conditions of domination, manage subtle tactics that transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression. But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life “not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the expense of life.” It should be the incessant effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.

Impact Answers – Env. Securitization Good

Even the language of environmental securitization can foster dialogue toward environmental protection and human security

Richard A. Matthew, associate professor of international relations and environmental political at the University of California at Irvine, Summer 2002, “In Defense of Environment and Security Research,” ECSP Report 8: 109-124.

In addition, environmental security's language and findings can benefit conservation and sustainable development."' Much environmental security literature emphasizes the importance of development assistance, sustainable livelihoods, fair and reasonable access to environmental goods, and conservation practices as the vital upstream measures that in the long run will contribute to higher levels of human and state security. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are examples of bodies that have been quick to recognize how the language of environmental security can help them. The scarcity/conflict thesis has alerted these groups to prepare for the possibility of working on environmental rescue projects in regions that are likely to exhibit high levels of related violence and conflict. These groups are also aware that an association with security can expand their acceptance and constituencies in some countries in which the military has political control, For the first time in its history; the contemporary environmental movement can regard military and intelligence agencies as potential allies in the struggle to contain or reverse humangenerated environmental change. (In many situations, of course, the political history of the military--as well as its environmental record-raise serious concerns about the viability of this cooperation.) Similarly, the language of security has provided a basis for some fruitful discussions between environmental groups and representatives of extractive industries. In many parts of the world, mining and petroleum companies have become embroiled in conflict. These companies have been accused of destroying traditional economies, cultures, and environments; of political corruption; and of using private militaries to advance their interests. They have also been targets of violence, Work is now underway through the environmental security arm of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to address these issues with the support of multinational corporations. Third, the general conditions outlined in much environmental security research can help organizations such as USAID, the World Bank, and IUCN identify priority cases--areas in which investments are likely to have the greatest ecological and social returns. For all these reasons, IUCN elected to integrate environmental security into its general plan at the Amman Congress in 2001. Many other environmental groups and development agencies are taking this perspective seriously (e.g. Dabelko, Lonergan& Matthew, 1999). However, for the most part these efforts remain preliminary.

Forecasting potential scenarios is essential to sound environmental management

N.J. Valette-Silver and D. Scavia, both from the National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2003, “Ecological Forecasting: New Tools for Coastal and Ecosystem Management,” NOAA Technical Memorandum NOS NCCOS 1, http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/topics/coasts/ecoforecasting/ecoforecast.pdf, Accessed 4/8/2014

Forecasting future conditions based on a series of potential scenarios is a new tool that allows

for the evaluation of management options and associated tradeoffs. In addition to the forecasts, the data and information collected to develop and test them enrich scientific knowledge and improve the decision making process. Ecological forecasts strengthen the link between research and management. When managers understand and can clearly articulate forecast needs, scientists can in turn better understand those needs. In particular, when scientists and managers work together to define, develop, interpret, and evaluate ecological forecasts, the researchers stay better informed about manager’s needs and the managers help identify gaps in scientific knowledge. Developing and evaluating forecasts can also help set science priorities. Among potential research, modeling, and monitoring efforts, it is possible to set priorities based on the need to create and increase the reliability of desired forecasts. For example, monitoring priorities should support and validate forecasts, modeling priorities should lead to quantitative forecasts, and research priorities should increase the information content or decrease forecast uncertainties.

Impact Answers – Standing Reserve

Treating oceans as a standing reserve under stewardship is essential to economic growth and ecological sustainability for future generations

Leon E. Panetta, Chair, Pew Ocean Commission, May 2003, America’s Living Oceans, A Report to the Nation, Recommendations for a New Ocean Policy, pp. ix-x

The fundamental conclusion of the Pew Oceans Commission is that this nation needs to ensure healthy, productive, and resilient marine ecosystems for present and future generations. In the long term, economic sustainability depends on ecological sustainability. To achieve and maintain healthy ecosystems requires that we change our perspective and extend an ethic of stewardship and responsibility toward the oceans. Most importantly, we must treat our oceans as a public trust. The oceans are a vast public domain that is vitally important to our environmental and economic security as a nation. The public has entrusted the government with the stewardship of our oceans, and the government should exercise its authority with a broad sense of responsibility toward all citizens and their long-term interests. These changes in our perspective must be reflected in a reformed U.S. ocean policy. National ocean policy and governance must be realigned to reflect and apply principles of ecosystem health and integrity, sustainability, and precaution. We must redefine our relationship with the ocean to reflect an understanding of the land-sea connection and organize institutions and forums capable of managing on an ecosystem basis. These forums must be accessible, inclusive, and accountable. Decisions should be founded upon the best available science and flow from processes that are equitable, transparent, and collaborative.