ECology Narrative

School of Hard Knocks 2012 1
Snorlax K v Towson

Being rock, gas, mist, mind,
Being the mesons traveling the galaxies with the speed of light,
I have come here, my beloved.
I have manifested as trees, grass, butterflies, as single-celled beings and chrysanthemums;
but you tell me you have never died.

Start your decision with a recognition of your connection to more than human others.
Beginning with the human social betrays your anthropocentric bias and reinforces the root
cause of violence.

Rose 6 (Rebecca, Lecturer in Literature for Trinity College Foundation Studies, The University of Melbourne, 2006, COLLOQUY text theory
critique 12 )

In recent decades concern for the human-human relationship has brought attention to the human-nonhuman relationship. The argument
that the crises faced by humans do not exist in isolation but are inseparable from environmental crises is seldom rejected outright.5 It is
clear to many that humans and nonhumans live interdependently a conviction at the heart of the environmental movement. In 1982
The World Charter for Na- ture was adopted by the UN General Assembly and in 1997 an Earth Char- ter Commission was formed to
oversee a worldwide, cross-cultural conversation that produced the Earth Charter document.6 The Earth Charter is a declaration of
fundamental principles to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic
justice, and a culture of peace.7 It appears similar in form and purpose to the Universal Declaration. Both documents share the same
vision- ary quality and both resonate with a determination to initiate positive change for the future. A crucial difference is the extent to
which the Earth Charters vision for world peace centralizes environmental ethics. Rockefel- ler describes the Earth Charter as a
declaration of global interdependence and universal responsibility.8 Despite the soft legal status of the ideals articulated
within the Earth Charter and the Universal Declaration, they may be regarded as sets of principles which influence disciplines and
practices that provide direction for humanity, including ethics and international law. They help establish in-
ternationally shared principles essential for international or cross-cultural dialogue. For example, the principles of the Earth Charter
underlay the World Summit for Sustainable Development, which ostensibly promoted the interdependence of humankind and the
natural environment.9 The roles of the Earth Charter and Universal Declaration do not extend to identifying the mechanisms and
instruments required to implement [their] ethical and strategic vision.10 Acting upon ideals in order to change reality is a collabo-
rative task to be undertaken by the plurality of subjects and their knowl- edges which construct human culture. I am considering here
the contribu- tion of a perspective based in ecophilosophy and environmental ethics. Ecophilosophy and environmental ethics
are raising understanding of human-nonhuman interdependence, and nonhuman value, in an effort to end
denial and inaction. Three distinct modes of recognizing nonhuman rights have developed and may be summarized as follows.
One approach views nonhuman rights through the condition of human benefit; the perceived worth of nonhuman life is derived from
human interest. For example, we should value and prevent the destruction of the river, the fish, the soil, or else we shall destroy
ourselves.11 This is a reconfiguration of working to prevent humans abusing humans, but here the abuse is manifested through abuse of
the earth. Human responsibility towards the nonhuman is indirect and the value of nonhuman rights precarious. Another mode
for developing nonhuman rights has been to extend human rights. Basic human rights are modified, or partly or fully extended to
certain nonhumans that are compared to humans. For example, many people understand that animals may possess significant
consciousness and are able to suffer from cruelty, and therefore animals should not be subjected to cruel treatment.12 Nonhuman rights
are conferred according to a qualification process that is biased towards human qualities and against nonhuman qualities, so
many nonhumans are not recognised or treated by humans as significant beings with rights. Mick Smith is critical of popular animal
rights ethicist Peter Singer for this reason: Singers thesis of the expanding circle, and moral extensionism in general, is a graphic
representation of anthropocentrism. Humanity sits at the center of a concentrically ordered nature, as the arche- type of ethical value
both the measure and the measurer of all things. 13 Val Plumwood criticizes Peter Singer and Tom Regan as moral dualists who
continue Cartesian frameworks, and as theorists who have success- fully put some issues about animals on the philosophical and
social agenda, but have no larger conceptual resources to critique the rationalist framework of commodification that makes so many
animal lives a living hell.14 Thus, while we might extend certain rights to animals deemed sentient, those that are not, along with a
myriad other entities, such as rivers or forests, are awarded no moral standing. These human-centred modes of developing rights for
nonhumans deny them inherent value. Arguing that nonhumans are inherently valuable, that is, nonhumans have rights independent of
human interest or human resemblance, is met with general resistance, which is exceedingly powerful when coming from a dominant
modern culture. Consumption by humans is a core tenet of this dominant modern culture. Recognising the inherent value and rights
of nonhumans leads to recognising the necessary responsibility and care of humans towards nonhumans, and threatens the ideal, or
rather the ideology, of unconditional consumption, because it is nonhumans who are being consumed excessively and without
respect.15 That a foremost cause of humans violating other humans rights follows directly from this culture supporting a slight
Snorlax K v Towson

Dramatic Chipmunk 1NC (2/13)
minority of humans who consume excessively and indifferently at the expense of all others, is an established criticism that I will
not address directly.16 For now, I am skeptical of any reasoning which suggests that showing care towards nonhumans compromises
human well- being. If at all, it is the human-centric theories for admitting nonhumans into ethical consideration that are likely to be
accepted within the dominating modern culture. Even then, such acceptance of an ethical code is irregu- larly or improperly conducted
into practice. As for valuing nonhumans for their inherent selves this possible social development is at the farthest peripheries of
theoretical ethical consideration, let alone being a code evident in practice within the human-nonhuman relationship typical of
the dominant culture. An argument for human rights may be drawn by examining the founda- tions of present human rights work. A
fundamental cause of the failure of human rights work to achieve an enduring and positive difference can be identified in its underlying
reasoning. It seems sound: strengthen human rights by targeting those who appear to violate them. Nearly all human rights work is
based upon bettering the human-human relationship. The ideal human-human relationship, the kind envisioned by the Universal Dec-
laration, has been established as the theoretical foundation of world peace. By implication we perceive real human-human relationship
as the basic problem. Supposedly, if we fix the way humans treat each other, then the Human Rights
143 worlds problems will disappear. I partly agree. Without doubt, human beings are today an unprecedented and fierce
force. The immediate future of earthly life does appear to be dependent upon what we humans do. How- ever, I would disagree that
what we humans do to each other is the essential determinant of peace. I am not sure, in other words, that the mistreatment of
humans by humans is the foremost problem. The centralization of human-human relationships continues into the burgeoning work for
nonhuman rights, which is largely developing as secondary to human rights: either as a reinforcement or extension of human rights. It
is significant that work for nonhuman rights follows on from work for human rights. The ideal human-human relationship is constructed
as a pre-existent, or a priori ethical ideal for the human-nonhuman relationship. Taking human rights as the foundation for nonhuman
rights misdirects ethical development. Although I might proceed by bringing nonhuman rights solely into the foreground, my specific
intention here is to develop human rights. Orientating discussion towards the development of human rights specifically does not
undermine my belief that human and nonhuman rights cannot be treated as exclusive subjects or forked ethical paths. Continual and
inevitable recourse to the subject of nonhuman rights will attest this. My rejection of human-centric ethical development is not driven
entirely by the failure of human-centrism to really recognise nonhuman rights. Taking human rights as the foundation for nonhuman
rights misdirects ethical theory and practice to the detriment of nonhumans and humans. The rest of this discussion aims to clarify
how recognizing nonhuman rights independent from human interest lays a true foundation for human rights. Ar- guably, an ethical
human-nonhuman relationship is a prerequisite for an ethical human-human relationship. To support this
argument, Ill start by drawing attention to epistemological processes within human-nonhuman abuse, and will continue by considering
how violations of human rights by humans originate in human-nonhuman abuse in the context of contemporary war, including
terrorism. If reflecting upon how we relate to others is constitutive of human rights work, then understanding why we practice those
relations, or thinking about the epistemological foundation of our selves, is critical. The dominant modern relationship between human
self and other is shaped by an epistemology of hyperseparation. Modern paradigms of rationality and objectifi- cation have
constructed others as radically other. We might note how common and standard are the critiques that expose modern
technoscience, politics and economics as socially powerful and potentially selfish agents that may act to disengage from, marginalise,
exclude and control that which gets otherized.17 There is nothing unfamiliar about humans regarding themselves as exceptional and
superior to the other. History is a chronicle of human mistreatment of the other predominantly identified as
nonhuman nature: the human/nature dualism appears in classical epistemology.18 At present, the extremity of environmental
destruction is grossly and dangerously demonstrating the human attitude of superiority towards the other, and underlies the
modern human-human relationship forged by epistemic hyperseparation. An inclusion of humans into the prior construction
of radical nonhuman other has escalated in the modern world. These humans are identified and otherized as variously continuous
with nonhuman nature and thereat discontinuous with the human. Human difference is constructed as radical difference.
Human others have typically included people with other skin colour or other religions, cultures or
languages, women, the poor, or minorities. In the interest of human rights then, our re-consideration of dominant modern
epistemology, and its inherent epistemology of hyperseparation, should be unreserved. This reconsideration, then,
involves challenging human/nonhuman, mind/nature, mind/body dual-isms . The ethical implications of
centralizing the human-human relationship through an epistemology of hyperseparation are immense.
Nonhumans are excluded from ethical concern on the premise that, as a human-human field, ethics is disengaged
from the radically other.19 Developing from an epistemic rejection of human-nonhuman interrelationship, and subse- quently
upon the radical exclusion of those classed as other, ethics is a flawed agency for human rights.20 As philosopher and sociologist
Mick Smith puts it, the ethical cannot be located entirely in the systemic inter- changes between individual humans. Ethics also has to
include our relations to nature; it is a lived multidimensional relation of care for natural (and human) others, a relation that originates
in part from the environment itself.21 The ethical consequences of human-nonhuman hyperseparation for human-human
relationship can be demonstrated readily in the context of was, partly because it regularly devastates the natural environment,
Snorlax K v Towson

but also because there is probably a unanimous view that human rights are violated in the context of war. My intention is to clarify how
violations of human rights during war may originate from human-nonhuman hyperseparation. Analysts can enumerate
many causes of war, and probably countless more causes are untold. Certainly though, notions of territory commonly instigate
international or intranational conflict. Todays terrifying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is one such example of
humans killing each other through powerful convictions of land ownership. The radical otheriza- Human Rights 145 tion of
nonhuman nature as that without mind or as lifeless (and right-less) supports our understanding of nonhuman nature (such as land) as
a human resource. Governments interested in national resources and economy value land as commodity and property to be amassed
and defended.22 Land figures in war in another basic but highly consequential way. However it is instigated, warring takes place
within the land. This also applies to terrorism: the psychological expectation of a terrorist attack taking place within the land makes
the threat acute. Ill consider how the epistemology of hyperseparation operates firstly in war by military conflict and then by terror-
ism. Damage by military conflict is generally palpable damage to land or to a place. Bombs that blast the ground apart, radioactive,
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons: this abbreviated and inexpert list of modern weaponry is sufficient to signal the disturbing
nature of modern war. In this discussion, rather than particularizing a technical inventory of modern im- plements of war and
elaborating upon what precisely these do or have the potential to do (the term weapons of mass destruction is self-explanatory), it is
more helpful to question why challenging the epistemology that supports such things is not the prioritized task in a world where war is
frequently, if not continually, witnessed in the modern global context? The dominant understanding of land and sea as intrinsically
lifeless, and therefore as morally valueless, is fundamentally implicated in the violations of human rights. Firstly, the root of many
conflicts the very notion and practice of human ownership of land (the nonhuman) originates from failing to recognise and denying
nonhuman inherent rights. Secondly, as long as land and see are understood as lifeless, they will remain insignifi- cant and a morally
acceptable location for an immoral activity: military conflict. There exists the perception of the land or sea merely as somewhere for
war to take place. A region becomes a circumscribed war-zone wherein humans supposedly confine their attacks upon each other.
Physi- cal human conflict is the only registered activity in this zone. Or it is at least the only activity of real concern, for land
understood as lifeless and morally valueless cannot be understood as that which can be killed or killed with regret. Environmental
activist Captain Paul Watson recognises the habitu- ally unrecognised victims of war: When I see the daily bombing on televi- sion, I
am not thinking of the Taliban or Bin Laden or even the victims of the absurd concept of friendly fire. My thoughts and concerns go to
those species of nonhumans, both plant and animal that are dying under that military assault.23 Watson pushes us to view the
problems of war from beyond the anthropocentric position of perceiving it as an exclusively human crisis. From an ecophilosophical
perspective, an absence of ethical consideration Rebecca Garcia Lucas Rose 146 for the nonhuman derived from denying their
inherent rights continues into unethical treatment of humans. I have now started to support this claim by putting forward the simple
assertion that to accept that war can take place as though the literal place does not matter ethically exposes a critical omission and
failure in human ethical codes. The illusion of a radically autono- mous human self-identity constructed by radical otherisation (and
epistemic hyperseparation) is part of the problem. The complexity of the human relationship to place is not fully compre- hended.
Military weapons are invented to ensure efficient destruction and this efficiency is derived in part from a particular level of
understanding of human-nonhuman interrelation. Effective weapons are designed to devas- tate nonhuman nature precisely because
human life depends upon water, soil, air, plants, animals and other living things. The impact of war-ravaged land upon humans is
incontestable: humans suffer and die along with the suffering and dying more-than-human community of life. Watson writes: Vietnam
was a horrific killing field where humans died alongside ele- phants, tigers, trees, frogs, water buffalo and birds burned by
napalm, riddled by claymores, incinerated by bombs, defoliated by agent orange.24 War destroyed land equals war destroyed life
forms, including people, maybe for unforeseen generations. If some weapons are designed through a level of understanding human-
nonhuman interdependence, on another level the epistemology of hyperseparation counteracts an understanding of human-nonhuman
insepa- rability and conceals the extent of warfares destruction. Although the land and much life living on (and as) the land is
destroyed, this destruction is perceived as localized and isolated. Not only may a nation targeting a locality claim, and possibly
believe, that it is not targeting civilians but that it tar- gets national resources, it views itself as discontinuous from the locality and its
destruction. The denial of human-nonhuman (or self-other) interrelation and ecological connection is self-destructive. There do not
exist ecological boundaries that comply with human notions of territory, no matter how distant warring nations on earth are
geographically.25 So called localized destruction of life affects all other life, including humans. The conjec- ture that a localized
war initiates widespread impact is not incredible, particularly considering the kind of weaponry used, or threatened to be used, and the
numerous wars taking place within the world that are devastating places and people, physically, socially and emotionally. The
epistemology of hyperseparation also operates strongly in terrorism in a number of ways. Firstly, both the terrorists and
terrorized perceive each other as radically other. In part, this demarcation may be self- cultivated. For the terrorists it amplifies their
effect upon the terrorized, and Human Rights 147 for the terrorized it justifies constructing the terrorists as radically
uncivilized or as the dehumanized other. Otherisation strengthens the perception of self as the civilized and blameless victim.
The civilized/uncivilized dichotomy reconfigures the self/other dichotomy, and is derivative of the classical human/nature or
human/nonhuman dichotomy. We can investigate how understanding terrorists as radical others en- dorses a military response for
dealing with terrorism. Earlier I argued that the nonhuman other is excluded from ethical consideration. Denying the ethical status of
the nonhuman continues into diminished ethical responsibility towards the other identified as uncivilised/dehumanized human
other. Moral accountability of actions towards the other (terrorists) is lessened, or is at least qualified and legitimized in favour of a
military response. De- pending on who you are and who your other is, some human lives are worth more or less than others. The saying
violence begets violence remains unheeded by both the terrorists and those directing the War Against Terrorism.26 Defining
violence is partially dependent upon the
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ethical inclusion of the other (the target of violence) by the self (the sender of violence). The classification of violence, with its
ethical implications, is irrele- vant to those operating within self-interested ethical frameworks that exclude the other. In other words,
what I do is not violence if it is done to a subject outside my ethical framework. Marking the boundary for ethical in-
clusion and exclusion originates from the perception of human-nonhuman hyperseparation. With the
psychological or emotional target being so significant in terrorist attacks, in some cases it may appear more accurate to locate terror-
ism in mindscape rather than following my earlier assertion that warring takes place in landscape. The psychological preoccupation
with possibility, with what if scenarios, is a key means of maintaining terror beyond the actual event of a physical attack.
Nevertheless, psychologically registered possibility remains a highly situated threat. The possibility of a terrorist attack taking place is
only a possibility and only terrifying in its connection to the possibility that it takes place in my place. Furthermore, while psycho-
logical abuse is imperative for effective terrorizing, ultimately the psychological domain is physically embedded. Every terrorized
mind is embodied, and our bodies, our selves, inhabit physical places that can be targeted, in- vaded, attacked, bombed, poisoned,
etcetera. An understanding of human dependency upon the nonhuman is ap- parent within the anxiety that a place may be attacked.
The terrified person perceives their self as connected with the place they inhabit. Naturally, perception of
human-nonhuman interdependence is clearer within the immediate context. If the air I breathe is contaminated with bio-
chemical agents Rebecca Garcia Lucas Rose 148 then I am in danger. Terrorism exploits this context specific perception
of human-nonhuman connection by widely generating the possibility of localized targeting that something terrible could happen
where I live. People are not terrified or are terrified to a much lesser degree if they feel that an attack on the place which they
inhabit or value is a remote possibility. The sense of discontinuity from another place reduces or eliminates terror. For example, much
more concern is shown towards nuclear conflict between other countries if the direct fallout could reach our country and therefore
us. To some extent, terrorism relies upon the epistemology of hyperseparation by utilizing the deeply established illusion of
the selfs radical auton- omy from the other. The sense of safety fabricated through the illusion of disconnection, can be
challenged by terrorist threat only because it has been established in the first place. The strength of illusory safety established by
hyperseparation is itself a susceptible target for terrorists. The psychological safety mechanism of confining terrorist attacks to an
other place has been largely dismantled. Christian Reus-Smit describes international terrorism as essentially a faceless and
territorially unbound enemy.27 Hence, the fear and suspicion of any others are raised even in relatively stable communities,
resulting in tense, hostile social conditions. The sense of safety in disconnection is an extreme illusion then
vulnerable to being converted into an inverse extremity of fear. Without this illusion of safety in disconnection, the
threat of attack would own. Instead I am wonder- ing, if the dominant epistemology of hyperseparation were reconsidered,
if hyperseparation no longer strongly informed be a less effective agent of terror. I am not then claiming that holding an understanding
of our connections to the nonhuman and to other places would result in us living with a permanent degree of terror in our recognition
that the destruction of landscape, near and far, affects all life including our what we do and how we understand self, other and world,
would we then relate in such destructive unethical ways? How we relate to each other and overcoming our tendency
towards destructive relations remains the preoccupation for those working to establish a level of world peace. However, if efforts to
resolve global conflict remain exclusively preoccupied with the relations between human selves and others an important
consideration will be overlooked. Watson writes: Osama Bin Laden is not the problem nor is George Bush or Saddam Hus- sein. They
will be gone tomorrow and replaced by new hominid clowns. The problem is us. As Pogo once said, We have met the enemy and he
is us.28 Watsons words should not be interpreted as a call to intensify our focus upon our human selves as the
problem, in the egocentric manner we Human Rights 149 have predominantly followed. We might clarify the condition of
Watsons us by adding that the problem is us humans in our relationship with the nonhuman other. The aim is
to re-view the global problem by viewing human conflict in connection with the wider earth community. An ecophilosophical
approach towards conflict resolution aims to balance the anthropocentric mindset towards human relations with a perception of human
relations on a comprehensive scale. The perception of an interdependent earth community takes into account destructive human
behaviour as it impacts not only upon humans but also nonhumans. Watson puts this more pro- vocatively and perhaps less carefully,
however he better expresses a frus- tration with the anthropocentric blindspot that turns our focus inwards and away
from a biocentric perspective that could help resolve global problems: So we can either waste our time rooting for this side or that side
West vs. East, North vs. South, Right vs. Left, Muslim vs. Jew vs. Christian vs. Hindu, Conservative vs. Liberal, Communist vs. Capi-
talist. Or we can turn our back on all these anthropocentric concepts and see the world for what it is one world, one planet,
one complex biodiversity of life whose one purpose is simply to live and let live according to a design that has been billions
of years in the making.29

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Although humans are radically and undeniably different from animals and other natural
entities, using characteristics like sentience to rationally determine the political and social
value of nature risks the worst forms of violence that are at the underbelly of civil society.

Calarco 8 (Matthew, Asst. Prof of Phil at CSUF, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal From Heidegger to Derrida, June, p. 92-94 )

Agamben gives the name anthropological machine (a concept he borrows from the Italian scholar of myth Furio Jesi)
to the mechanism underlying our current means of determining the human-animal distinction. This machine can
best be understood as the symbolic and material mechanisms at work in various scientific and philosophical discourses that classify and
distinguish humans and animals through a dual process of inclusion and exclusion. The first chapters of The Open
provide the reader with a fascinating overview of some of the historical variations on the anthropological machine at work in a number
of authors and discourses, ranging from the philosophy of Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojeve to the taxonomic studies of Carl
Linnaeus and post-Darwinian paleontology. For the purposes of the argument I am developing here, it will suffice to recall the general
structure of the machine and why Agamben argues that it is necessary to stop its functioning. Agamben makes a distinction between
two key variations on the anthropological machine: the modern and premodern. The modern anthropological machine is
post-Darwinian. It seeks to understand, following the principles of natural science, the emergence of the fully constituted
human being from out of the order of the human animal (the latter, of course, is in many ways indistinguishable from certain
nonhuman animals, especially so-called higher primates). In order to mark this transition, it is necessary to determine and isolate the
animal aspects of the human animal and exclude them from humanity proper. Agamben describes this process as involving an
animalization of certain modes of human life, an attempt to separate outwithin human beings themselveswhat precisely is animal,
on the one hand, and human, on the other. This variation on the anthropological machine gives rise to the search by nineteenth-century
paleontologists for the missing link that provides the biological transition from speechless ape to speaking human. But it also opens
the way for the totalitarian and democratic experiments on and around human nature that function by
excluding animal life from human life within human beings. Agamben suggests that it is enough to move our field
of research ahead a few decades, and instead of this innocuous paleontological find we will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced
within the man, or the neomort and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself (O, 37). The
premodern form of the anthropological machine, which runs from Aristotle up through Linnaeus, functions in a
similar but inverted form. Rather than animalizing certain aspects of the human, animal life is itself humanized. Human
beings who take an essentially animal form are used to mark the constitutive outside of humanity
proper: the infant savage, the wolf-man, the werewolf, the slave, or the barbarian. Here, the beings situated at the limits of
humanity suffer similar consequences to those animalized beings caught within the working of the modern anthropological machine.
As Agamben suggests, the structure or machine that delimits the contours of the human is perfectly ironic and empty. It does not
function by uncovering a uniquely human trait that demarcates a clean break between human and all other nonhuman animalsfor, as
Agamben himself acknowledges, no such trait or group of traits is to be found. This much we know from current debates in
evolutionary biology and animal ethics. And here it is not so much a matter or subscribing to a watered-down,
quasi-Darwinian continuism that would blur any and all distinctions one might wish to make between and
among human and nonhuman animals but rather recognizing that deciding what constitutes the human
and the animal is never simply a neutral scientific or ontological matter. Indeed, one of the chief merits of The
Open is that it helps us to see that the locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are almost always deeply
political and ethical. For not only does the distinction create the opening for the exploitation of nonhuman
animals and others considered not fully human (this is the point that is forcefully made by animal ethicists), but it also
creates the conditions for contemporary biopolitics, in which more and more of the biological and animal aspects of
human life are brought under the purview of the State and the juridical order. As Agamben has argued in Homo Sacer and elsewhere,
contemporary biopolitics, whether it manifests itself in totalitarian or democratic form, contains within it the virtual possibility of
concentration camps and other violent means of producing and controlling bare life. It comes as no surprise,
then, that he does not seek to articulate a more precise, more empirical, or less dogmatic determination of the
human-animal distinction. Such a distinction would only redraw the lines of the object of biopolitics and
further define the scope of its reach. Thus, instead of drawing a new human-animal distinction, Agamben insist that the
distinction must be abolished altogether, and along with it the anthropological machine that produces the
distinction. Recalling the political consequences that have followed from the modern and premodern separation of human and
animal within human existence, Agamben characterizes the task for thought in the following terms: it is not so much a matter of
asking which of the two machines [ie, the modern or premodern anthropological machine]is better or more effectiveor, rather, less
lethal and bloodyas it is of understanding how they work so that we might eventually, be able to stop them (O, 38).

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Anthropocentrism is THE original hierarchy that makes racism, sexism, and other -isms
possibleif the future is not to endlessly repeat the horrors of the past, then we NEED a
politics that can respect more than human life.

Best 7 (Steven, Chair of Philosophy at UT-EP, JCAS 5.2 )

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the environmental determinism
approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in human history, as well as how the human exploitation of
animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, and environmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call animal standpoint
theory is that animals have been key driving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social
life, and history overall. More specifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over human has
deep roots in the oppression of human over animal. In this context, Charles Pattersons recent book, The Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal standpoint in a powerful form with revolutionary implications. The
main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that the human domination of animals, such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago
with the rise of agricultural society, was the first hierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for
patriarchy, slavery, warfare, genocide, and other systems of violence and power. A key implication of Pattersons theory is
that human liberation is implausible if disconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism -- a
speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchal relationship privileging superior humans over inferior animals and reduces animals to
resources for human use -- collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions. Patterson lays out his complex
holistic argument in three parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profound
connections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In Part II, he shows how these connections exist not only in the
realm of ideology as conceptual systems of justifying and underpinning domination and hierarchy but also in systems of
technology, such that the tools and techniques humans devised for the rationalized mass confinement and slaughter of animals were
mobilized against human groups for the same ends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes
how personal experience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to an insular identity
and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of Nazi evil and its tragic experience, others recognized the profound similarities between how
Nazis treated their human captives and how humanity as a whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt vegetarianism,
to become advocates for the animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed by universal compassion for all
suffering and oppressed beings. The Origins of Hierarchy "As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" Pythagoras It
is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals Pattersons
thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to the domination over other humans.
It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over humans brings about alienation from the
natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal to dominate nature. In
the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically dont even mention human domination
of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or significance. In Pattersons model, however, the human subjugation of
animals is the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all other systems of domination such as
include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. As he puts it, the exploitation of
animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of
the more dramatic examples. Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years
ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans
began to establish their dominance over animals through domestication. In animal domestication (often a
euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk,
clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of
animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to
make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed
numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of
animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled
after the domestication of
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animals, such that men began to control womens reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual
norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery
emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an
extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and
males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began
the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors,
models, and technologies used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human
slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who
scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across
continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a
hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor,
exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers
all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries
earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the
intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval
theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview that
came to be known as the Great Chain of Being used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.
Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide
typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided
the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. Throughout the history of our
ascent to dominance as the master species, Patterson writes, our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for
our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they
treat other people like animals and do the same to them. Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or
German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims Africans,
Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates with opprobrious terms such as rats, pigs,
swine, monkeys, beasts, and filthy animals. Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a
lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once
characterized as animals, they could be hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a
convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. The connections are clear: For a civilization built on the exploitation
and slaughter of animals, the `lower and more degraded the human victims are, the easier it is to kill them. Thus, colonialism, as
Patterson describes, was a natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom. For just as humans
had subdued animals with their superior intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white race had proven its
superiority by bringing the lower races under its command. There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism
in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moral worth. The arguments European colonialists used to
legitimate exploiting Africans that they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans in
ability to reason are the very same justifications humans use to trap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once
western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human
animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric peoples and
types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from humans was also used to ostracize blacks,
women, and numerous other groups from humanity. The oppression of blacks, women, and animals alike was
grounded in an argument that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought,
alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white, western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color, animals) is
deficient in rationality in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed and treated as inferior,
subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of skin color, and the sexist
mentality splits men and women into greater and lower classes of beings, the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by
dichotomizing the biological continuum into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism,
and sexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a violent human supremacism --
namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise or, more
generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Christianity
left behind.

Snorlax K v Towson

Anthropocentrism allows the destruction of all forms of alterity to be reengineered for
human purposesthis destroys value to life.

Lee 99 (Keekok, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, The Natural and the Artefactual )

To appreciate this dimension one needs to highlight the distinction between the artefactual and the natural. The former is the material
embodiment of human intentionality--an analysis in terms of Aristotle's causes shows that all four causes, since late modernity, may be
assigned to human agency.'- The latter, ex hypothesi, has nothing to do with human agency in any of its four causes. This shows that
the artefactual and the natural belong to two very different ontological categoriesone has come into
existence and continues to exist only because of human purpose and design while the other has come into
existence and continues to exist independently of human purpose and design. In the terminology of this book, the artefactual embodies
extrinsic/imposed teleology while the natural (at least in the form of individual living organisms) embodies intrinsic/immanent teleology. However, the
more radical and powerful technologies of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are capable of producing artefacts with an ever increasing degree
of artefacticity. The threat then posed by modem homo faber is the systematic elimination of the natural, both at the
empirical and the ontological levels, thereby generating a narcissistic civilization. In this context, it is, therefore, appropriate to
remind ourselves that beyond Earth, nature, out there, exists as yet unhumanized. But there is a strong collective
urge, not merely to study and understand that nature, but also ultimately to exploit it, and furthermore, even to transform parts of
it into ersatz Earth, eventually making it fit for human habitation. That nature, as far as we know, has (had) no life on it.
These aspirations raise a crucial problem which environmental philosophy ought to address itself, namely, whether abiotic nature on its own could be said to
be morally considerable and the grounds for its moral considerability. If no grounds could be found, then nature beyond Earth is ripe for
total human control and manipulation subject to no moral but only technological and/or economic constraints. The shift to ontology in grounding
moral considerability will, it is argued, free environmental philosophy from being Earthbound in the millennium about to dawn. In slightly greater detail, the
aims of this book may be summarized as follows 1. To show how modem science and its technology, in controlling and manipulating (both biotic and
abiotic) nature, transform it to become the~ artefactual. It also establishes that there are degrees of 'artefacticity depending on the degree of control and
precision with which science and technology manipulate nature. An extant technology such as biotechnology already threatens to
imperil the existence of biotic natural kinds. Furthermore technologies of the rising future, such as molecular
nanotechnology, i~ synergistic combination with biotechnology and microcomputer technology,. could intensify this tendency to
eliminate natural kinds, both biotic and abiotic~ as well as their natural processes of evolution or
change. 2. To consider the implications of the above for environmental philosophy, and in so doing, to point out the inadequacy of the extant accounts
about intrinsic value in nature. By and large (with some honorable exceptions), these concentrate on arguing that the biotic has intrinsic value but assume
that the~ undeniable contingent link between the abiotic and the biotic on Earth would~ take care of the abiotic itself. But the proposed
terraformation of Mars (and even of Earth's moon only very recently) shows the urgent need to develop a much
more comprehensive environmental philosophy which is not merely Earthbound but can include the
abiotic in its own right. 3. The book also raises a central inadequacy of today's approaches in environmental philosophy and movements. They
concentrate predominantly on the undesirable polluting aspects of extant technologies on human an~ nonhuman life, and advocate the introduction of more
ecologically sensitive technology (including this author's own earlier writing). If this were the most important remit of environmental philosophy, then one
would have to admit that nature-replacing technologies (extant and in the rising future) could be the ultimate 'green' technologies as their proponents are
minded to maintain in spite of their more guarded remarks about the environmental risks that ma' be incurred in running such technologies.' Such
technologies would also~ achieve what is seemingly impossible, as they promise to make possible ~ world of superabundance, not only for the few, but for
all, without straining and stressing the biosphere as a sink for industrial waste. But this book argue that environmental philosophy should not merely
concern itself with the virtuous goal of avoiding pollution risks to life, be that human or nonhuman It should also be concerned with the threat that such
radically powerful technologies could render nature, both biotic and abiotic, redundant. A totally
artefactual world customized to human tastes could, in principle, be designed and manufactured. When
one can create artefactual kinds (from what Aristotle calls 'first. matter,' or from today's analogue, what we call atoms and molecules of familiar elements
like carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc.) which in other relevant respects are indistinguishable from natural kinds (what Aristotle calls 'second matter'), natural
kinds are in danger of being superseded. The ontological category of the artefactual would replace that of the
natural. The upholding of the latter as a category worth preserving constitutes, for this book, the most fundamental task in
environmental philosophy. Under this perspective, the worrying thing about modem technology in the long run may not be that it
threatens life on Earth as we know it to be because of its polluting effects, but that it could ultimately humanize all of
nature. Nature, as 'the Other,' would be eliminated. 4. In other words, the ontological category of the natural would have to be
delineated and defended against that of the artefactual, and some account of 'intrinsic' value would have to be mounted which can encompass the former.
The book argues for the need to maintain distinctions such as that between human/nonhuman, culture/nature, the artefactual/the natural. In other words,
ontological dyadism is required, though not dualism, to combat the transformation of the natural to become
the artefactual. The book also argues that the primary attribute of naturally-occurring entities is
an ontological one, namely, that of independence as an ontological value. Such an
attribute is to be distinguished from secondary attributes like intricacy, complexity, interests-bearing,
sentience, rationality, etc., which are said to provide the grounds for assigning their bearers intrinsic
value. In this sense, ontology precedes axiology.

Snorlax K v Towson

Vote negative to reject their egocentric and human centric ethics in favor of an ecocentric
ethic that starts by emphasizing the intrinsic values of Earths geoecosystem.

Rowe 3 (Stan, retired ecology teacher, prof emeritus at the U of Saskatchewan, The Trumpeter Volume 19, Number 2 )

Ethical systems express human values, which is to say that only what is valued will be treated ethically, as moral objects. When only
people matter, then ethical concerns are limited to the human race. Everything else is only valued if it serves
humanity. As ecological awareness grows, things other-than-human are perceived as valuable, initially because
of utility. With greater sensitivity and empathy, sentient organisms are recognized as valuable in and for themselves. Legislation may
be passed to prevent cruelty to animals or to protect rare plants. Then, beyond organisms, affection and ethical concern may be
extended to special places, to the landscapes of home remembered from childhood, or to majestic old-growth forests, to coral reefs with
their dazzling tropical fish. This sequence illustrates ethics by extension as the individuals moral sense
grows from the egocentric to the homocentric to the biocentric to the ecocentric. The weakness of ethics-by-
extension is that its starting pointthe person, family, societygets most attention, while its outer
reaches get the least. The ethical sense, extended beyond society to the nation and humanity as a whole, plays out
before it reaches Earths non-human organic/inorganic realities. Just as light intensity varies as the
square of the distance from its source, so the ethical impulse fades outward from its human-centred
beginnings. This is clearly evident in the left-leaning political platforms of Social-Democratic political
parties. Their environmental concerns are no more than a greenwash on the two fundamental issues that
absorb most of their ethical interests: liberty of the individual (egocentric) and a degree of
communality (ethnocentric). Given the importance of Earth and its health, a better approach is first to emphasize
the intrinsic values of Earths geoecosystems, and then turn to their valuable organic and inorganic contents. This
suggests an ethics-by-inclusion that initially identifies the Life-source/support as the highest moral object. By this logic, Earth is most
worthy of ethical concern, then its geoecosystems, then their organic/inorganic constituents of which humanity is
one precious species. Such an inversion of traditional ethics is ecologically realistic. Further, it teaches the
human race humilitya virtue so far in short supply. To the charge that placing Earth first violates the meaning of ethics as
moral behaviour between sentient creatures, the answer is that ethical actions emanate from human values and the latter need not be
limited to the homocentric and the biocentric. When Earth is highly appreciated, ethics will be ecocentric, home-centred,
an Ecological Ethics.

Snorlax K v Towson

Dramatic Chimpunk 1NC (10/13)
We reject the rationalist view from nowhere. We are in a room breathing air, a small
part of an intergalactic ecosystem. We do not need to draw a circle defining our position in
a human society; we are part of innumerable circles beyond human reckoning, sharing our
embodiment with plants, animals, rivers, mountains, and the earth. Only this recognition
can rejuvenate ethics.

Abram 7 (David, Alliance for Wild Ethics, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi, William S.
Hamrick, SUNY Press, http://www.wildethics.org/essays/earth_in_eclipse.html )

We can have little hope of rejuvenating a collective sense of the ethical without beginning to
acknowledge and honor the forgotten primacy of the one world that we all have in common. Strangely, the
only world we all have in common is the very world that we share with the other animals and the plants --
this earthly dimension of wind and water and sky, shivering with seeds and warmed by the sun. Hence, it
seems unlikely that we will locate a lasting ethic without rediscovering our solidarity with all those
other shapes of sentience, without remembering ourselves to the swallows and the meandering rivers.
We are understandably fascinated by the rich promise of our technologies, and deliciously dazzled by the new experiential realms
opened to us by the genius of the electronic and digital revolution. Yet our enthrallment with our own creations is
steadily fragmenting our communities and our selves; our uncritical participation with technology risks eclipsing the
one realm that alone can provide the guidance for all our technological engagements. Indeed, only one realm is sufficiently outrageous
and inexhaustibly complex enough to teach us the use and misuse of our own creations. Only by remembering ourselves to the sensuous
Earth, only by recalling ourselves to this bodily land that we share with the other animals and the plants, and rediscovering this place
afresh, do we have a chance of integrating the multiple and divergent worlds that currently vie for our attentions. Only by rooting
ourselves here, recovering our ageless solidarity with this breathing world -- feeling the fur on our flesh,
drinking the rain, and listening close to the wind as it whirls through the city streets -- only thus do we have a
chance of learning to balance and to navigate among the multiple worlds that now claim our attention
at the outset of a new millennium. To paraphrase the words of Paul Eluard at the start of this essay: there are many, many other
worlds, yes, but they are all hidden within this one. And so to neglect this humble, imperfect, and infinitely
mysterious world is to recklessly endanger all the others.

Snorlax K v Towson

The role of your ballot is to evaluate which starting point is best to formulate an ethical
orientation towards alterity. Prefer it because it promotes the best in-depth education over
effective pedagogical strategies for resisting oppressioninstead of presenting a self-
serving role of the ballot that necessitates a win for one side, we allow for direct clash
between our two methodological frames of reference. This role of the ballot means the aff
cedes the right to the permutationsince their advocacy is merely a factual statement that
recognizes the importance of slavery and the black body in the history of American
democracy without a concrete, normative blueprint for changing oppression that we can
read disads toletting them perm different starting points makes it impossible for us to
clash, which destroys education about how best to approach civil society.
Snorlax K v Towson

The 1ACs reorientation of our frame of reference in pedagogy shapes realitythey suffer
from epistemological impoverishment.

Bonnett 2 (Michael, Lecturer at University of Cambridge in Education, Sustainability as a Frame of Mindand How to Develop It, The
Trumpeter 18.1 )

So, why recommend the move from policy to frame of mind? There are two main reasons. The first has been well
rehearsed elsewhere,2 and refers to arguments that demonstrate that despite its broad appeal (indeed, in many ways because of
it) the notion of sustainable development as a policy is highly problematic, being heavily contested and subject to
internal contradictions and severe epistemological difficulties. The second reason is more positive. At the heart of
any notion of education for sustainable development must lie a certain frame of mind involving some idea of a
right relationship with nature, since without this a severely impoverished notion of human utility would
become the criterion of sustainability. Focusing on this nature-orientated frame of mind offers the possibility of
both contributing to the clarification of sustainable development as an idea, and of identifying something
which is of great educational importance in its own right, for in many ways our underlying relationship with
nature defines both ourselves and our relationship with the world as a whole.3 What, then, are the key features
of sustainability as a frame of mind? The following seem central. It involves a genuine (poetic) receptive-responsive
openness to, and concern for, nature conceived in its most general sense as the non-human, self-originary aspects of
the world. Of course, nature can be conceived in numerous wayssuch as the great order of things (whether it be conceived in
biophysical or spiritual terms), as wilderness, as that which is innate, as that which is wholesome (natural), and so forthbut it seems to
me that informing our paradigmatic senses of nature is the notion of that which is other in the sense of being experienced as somehow
self-arising. In this sense nature is construed less as an objective realm than as a dimension of human awarenessunderstood as
independent of the human will, but not necessarily unaffected by it.4 For example, in the case of our own
bodieswhich clearly can be affected by our choices and actionswe maintain our health by working with powers
of which we are not the author and that are beyond our ability to transform. There is a nature, an integrity, recognized
as external to our will with which we have to find a harmony. It is neither purely anthropocentric nor bio-centric in essence. Recognizing that the non-
human (as well as the human) only shows up in the context of human concerns and practices, nature is thus human-related but neither human-authored nor
at human disposal. This places humankind authentically as neither the lord of beings nor as something simply to be subsumed to some greater ecological
whole, but as the occasioner of things and thus bearing certain responsibilities towards them which also constitute an element of our own good. Though it
cannot matter in the slightest to biophysical nature whether humankind survivessome equilibrium will always be established, with or without usnature
only has significance in that space which is human consciousness, or its equivalent. Thus, there is an important sense in which sustainability as a frame of
mind is not a bolt-on option but an integral element of authentic human awareness. Though now fairly systematically overridden, it is internal to the very
event of being conscious at the human level. For example, it is rooted in the notion of truth and its centrality to human being. Truthas our awareness of
things disclosing themselves and our sense of the fittingness of the language which both facilitates and expresses this (le mot juste)lies at the heart of
human consciousness. In constituting a celebration of what is, relatively unsubverted by external instrumental motives, the pure sustaining nature of
consciousness in this mode is also the essence of sustainability as a concern to let things be (as they are in themselves, including their cultural
dimensions)truly to safeguard, to preserve, to conserve. Clearly, this is quite a different sense of sustainability to that which seeks to sustain in order to
have ready to hand a resource that may be required for some further development (such as economic growth). Its development will require,
above all, a radical re-evaluation and re-positioning of the calculative motives and understandings that dominate
modern Western consciousness and society. That is to say that it will require the development of (and partly a retrieval of) a
different metaphysics. Otherwise we risk the likelihood of preoccupying pupils with symptoms masquerading as
causes. (For example, measuring pollutant levels and devising scientific remedies rather than addressing the underlying motives and
conceptions embedded in social practices which give rise to pollution.) Only a thoroughif gradualdisruption of currently prevalent
motives can clear a space for a more poetic re-appropriation of nature and of ourselves. Now if such an account is to serve as a basis for
thinking about how to develop sustainability as a frame of mind, certain elements in it require further elaboration and refinement. First,
poetic should not be equated with passive. We appropriate nature and ourselves not only through
abstract reflection and aesthetic contemplation, but in our making and in the intimate details of our sundry daily
transactions with our environment. Some aspects of this point will be developed below in a discussion of the notion of attentiveness, but
it also means that while the impact of particularin a sense, elevatedexperiences may be seminal, poetic response is also
constituted by day-to-day practices and action strategies which implicitly reflect the desire to disclose, conserve,
and safeguard things, to respect the intuitions provided by sensuous contact, and to properly acknowledge natural
rhythms and processes.

<<Bonnett Continues Several Pages Later>>

Parallel reservations about conditioning by inherent values can be voiced in relation to the democratic approach to teaching
environmental issues advocated by the Environment and School Initiatives program (ENSI).11 This long-running European project is
opposed to teachers promoting environmentalist attitudes (environmentalism), advocating instead that pupils exercise their own
Snorlax K v Towson

rationality through practically addressing local environmental issues in collaboration with their local community, thus developing what
can be called action competence. The problem with this is the faith put in rationality, and it arises at two levels. First, can education
afford to be procedurally neutral when so many other powerful influences in modern western society are not? In a social-economic-
political climate that privileges consumerism and the free market how pure is the rationality of pupils and other agents in local decision-
making likely to be? Indeed, (and this is the second point) are there not motives and values embedded in rationality itself that prejudice
the perception and evaluation of environmental issues and which may actually be a (now invisible) contributor to the environmental
problem? In the light of the critiques of Heidegger and others, many have come to appreciate that modern rationality is itself
not neutral: it expresses certain aspirations towards the world, notably to classify, explain, predict, assess,
control, possess, and exploit it. Arguably, it is precisely the ascendancy of such rationality that has led to
our current environmental predicament. (A rationality, by the way, that can be perceived to be instantiated in the new global
medium for thinking and the broadcast of understandingnetworked hypermedia. But that is a further argument!) The upshot of such
points is to cast a shadow over ENSIs highly democratic strategy. They also invite the further question of the adequacy of even pure
rationality to address environmental issues, which frequently involve ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual sentiments. So, where does this
leave the idea of developing sustainability as a frame of mind? Essentially we are concerned with a gradual change in
how we apprehend the world at a very fundamental levelthat is, the growth of a different metaphysics
within which such notions as attentiveness, democratic teaching, and the disciplines, and indeed, the criteria of
rationality need to be relocated. As a priority in the educational context, we need to reconsider what counts as
knowledge and learning. What projects towards the world do different kinds of knowledge and learning express? Clearly, the
inherent mystery and fluid integrity of nature conceived as self-arising, and the world of open, infinitely faceted
things are not susceptible to an engagement that is preoccupied with intellectual (and other) possession and
that is articulated exclusively through conceptual schemes. Such facets of the world are simply occluded by
teaching that has this orientation. A more intimate, intuitive, often sensuous, encounter with things must be
sought. Participation, celebration, accommodation to the strange, and willingness to be affected must displace an overweening drive to
disengage from the immediately present so as to set it to order, to control itto be effective. And certainly, on this view,
conventional science would cease to hold the privileged position that it currently enjoys as arbiter of our understanding of the natural
world. However, in many ways the issue is not primarily one of formal curriculum content as of the general culture of the school (and,
of course society). It is a matter of the underlying versions of human flourishing and the good life that are
implicit in the ethos and practices of the school as a community and how they connect with life outside.
These both invite direct participation in a way of going about the world and condition the spirit in which
the curriculum is taught. Only as they begin to reverberate to a different metaphysics can a space arise
for those kinds of experience of the presence of nature in which the power and subtlety of otherness and the
elemental is felt and allowed to matter. Whether directly experienced or mediated through literature, art, and craft, the
development of sustainability as a frame of mind is essentially a matter of apprehending that it is that which lies always beyond our
authorship, analyses and management, and yet is closest to us, that liberates us from stultification and spiritually that sustains us.

Snorlax K v Towson

Dramatic Chipmunk 2NC Overview
orientation towards alterity. Prefer it because it promotes the best in-depth education over
effective pedagogical strategies for resisting oppressioninstead of presenting a self-
serving role of the ballot that necessitates a win for one side, we allow for direct clash
between our two methodological frames of reference.

Their choice of starting points is mutually exclusivethe appeal to human liberation
struggles as a prior question means a consideration of the more than human is pushed to
the sidelines. The alternative solves 100% of the casethe Rose 6 and Rowe 3 evidence
explains that the starting point of an eco-centric ethics prevents the hyper-separation that
makes violence on a global scale possible, because it views all organic and inorganic
components of the earth as having intrinsic value.

Extend the Bonnett 2 and Abram 7 evidenceit indicates that shifting our frame of
reference to see the intrinsic value of the more-than-human and elemental is a vital pre-
requisite to concrete political actionwithout formulating an ethics that is attuned with
our natural location, future politics will replicate the catastrophic horrors of the past.
Shifting our frame of reference in our pedagogical practices like debate is especially
importantchanging the ways that we think translate into our everyday practices by
transforming our relationships with Otherness from one mediated by Western, calculative
motives to an experience that locates ourselves as interconnected with other biotic and
abiotic entities with their own intrinsic values.

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC Impact Extension/AT: Root Cause (1/2)
Well do our impact work herethe K outweighs because well win that anthropocentrism
is the FIRST Hierarchy that makes all other human oppressions possiblethe 1AC solves
your impacts by imbuing all entities with intrinsic value, while your alternative is
inadequate.

(A) Ideological Root Causethe Calarco evidence indicates that the human-nonhuman
binary is the ontological foundation of white, civil society and the foundation of the abject
figure of the slavebeings are rendered socially and politically valueless through the
creation of normative standards of what it means to be human, including biological
standards of classification used by Linnaeus, and the moralizing forces of Christianity.
The labeling of various groups as barbaric beasts and filthy animals shows how the
denigration of the non-human other is employed to maintain domination and resulted in
slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the Holocaust.

(B) Historical Root Causethe Best evidence is the only conclusive card on this question.
Technologies of domination used in chattel slavery, which literally means cattle slavery,
come from the inception of human societies ten thousand years ago when we first
transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes that had no assumption of civil societyas
humans began to exploit animals such as cattle for their labor through domestication and
agriculture, they developed techniques such as forced breeding, and adopted pens, cages,
collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons to devalue nature to the status of mere property.
These technologies directly translated to the sexual subjugation of women and slavery in
places such as Ancient Sumeria in 4000 BC, and were replicated in the international slave
markets by European colonists in the 1400s. The similarities between non-human
domination and human oppression are not a coincidencethe Calarco evidence says you
should prefer confronting the root cause over simply attacking the immediate symptoms
because oppression will merely be re-manifested through different kinds of exclusion

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC Impact Extension/AT: Root Cause (2/2)
(C) We smoke you on magnitudeeven if you win mitigation on the ability of the K to
solve the type of oppression you have isolated, rupturing anthropocentrism is the only way
to stop all other human and non-human oppressions

Kochi 9 (Tarik, Sussex law school, Species war: Law, Violence and Animals, Law Culture and Humanities Oct 5.3 )

This reflection need not be seen as carried out by every individual on a daily basis but rather as that which is drawn upon from time to
time within public life as humans inter-subjectively coordinate their actions in accordance with particular enunciated ends and plan for
the future.21 In this respect, the violence and killing of species war is not simply a question of survival or bare life, instead, it is bound
up with a consideration of the good. For most modern humans in the West the good life involves the daily
killing of animals for dietary need and for pleasure. At the heart of the question of species war, and all war for that
matter, resides a question about the legitimacy of violence linked to a philosophy of value.22 The question of
war-law sits within a wider history of decision making about the relative values of different forms of life. Legitimate violence
is under-laid by cultural, religious, moral, political and philosophical conceptions about the relative
values of forms of life. Playing out through history are distinctions and hierarchies of life-value that
are extensions of the original human-animal distinction. Distinctions that can be thought to follow from the human-
animal distinction are those, for example, drawn between: Hellenes and barbarians; Europeans and Orientals;
whites and blacks; the civilized and the uncivilized; Nazis and Jews; Israelis and Arabs;
colonizers and the colonized. Historically these practices and regimes of violence have been culturally, politically and
legally normalized in a manner that replicates the normalization of the violence carried out against non-
human animals. Unpacking, criticizing and challenging the forms of violence, which in different historical moments appear as
normal, is one of the ongoing tasks of any critic who is concerned with the question of what war does to law and of what law does to
war? The critic of war is thus a critic of wars norm-alization.

(D) Subsumes the Case the Lee evidence indicates that anthropocentrism will result in
the assimilation and eradication of all biotic and abiotic entities by recreating them in our
image via technological means. Even if they win a risk that the K doesnt solve the affs
impacts, any continuation of an anthropocentric frame of reference will erase all forms of
ontological difference through biotechnology, inevitably replicating their K impacts. Were
also winning two external impacts that outweigh the K. First, even if we are unable to solve
some domination on earth, anthropocentrism crushes all living alterity both within and
outside of Earth through space colonizationthere are loci of intrinsic value that are
beyond our planet, and the erasure of every source of value in the universe outweighs even
the total elimination of human value. Second, we control value to lifebeing presented
with the challenges of difference are the primary ontological attribute to our life
anthropocentrism stultifies the reasons for our existence which subsumes any defense of
our axiological, cultural values

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC Link Extension (1/3)
Discount their attempt to no link or link turn the criticismeven if there are some ways in
which the 1AC approximates our alternative the aff is undeniably anthropocentric so you
give us full access to our impacts, and theres a risk that the alternative is preferable

(1) Footnotingthe alternative begins from a human-centered lens of suffering by
speaking to the experience of the _______________ as a central to white supremacy. Their
____________ evidence indicates quote _____________________________. Cross-x also
proves that _____________________________________. The Rowe evidence indicates that
starting from a human reference point and then saying, oh, and animals too is an ethics-
of-extension that green-washes ethics and ends up occluding the human domination of non-
human othersthis is proven historically by the platforms of social democratic parties,
which sacrificed questions of non-human ethics to the popular plea to emphasize
individuality and ethnocentric commonality. Only our advocacy that situates ourselves
within the earth and attributes intrinsic value to all things in the earth can resolve
anthropocentrism and racism because it sees everything in the earth as intrinsically viable

(2) Performative Omissiontheres a reason why we started our debate with our poetry
about our natural location. The 1AC perpetuates a view from nowhere by not
acknowledging the forgotten primacy of the universe and our location in the natural world.
The Bonnett evidence indicates that the fluid integrity of a self-arising nature is not
susceptible to merely conceptual schemes, but can only be accessed specifically through
sensuous, poetic encounters that explicitly acknowledge our natural location as exemplified
at the top of the 1NC. Without this acknowledgement, both the Bonnett and Abrams
evidence indicates that we are unable to rejuvenate the ethical and are trapped in
calculative thinking that recreates anthropocentrism and other oppressions.

(3) Although the alternative can resolve disembodied debate practice, their notions of
empowerment and agency assume a misguided sense of independence that is premised on
freedom from passive nature

(A) This is proven by cross-x/ their ____ evidence: ________________________
Clark 2 (Nigel, teaches Social Science at the Open University The Demon-Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Cosmopolitanism
Theory, Culture & Society 19: 101 )

What seems to underpin the new cosmopolitan environmentalism then, is the premise that, left to itself, nature is docile; it maintains its
given forms and positions. Culture on the other hand, is seen to be inherently dynamic, both self-transforming and
responsible for the mobilization and transmutation of the material world for better or worse (see Wilson, 1996: 50
1). Western thoughts most pervasive dualism, we might be forgiven for thinking, has returned to haunt
cosmopolitan risk society. Moreover, the anti-naturalism of much of the new cosmopolitanism can itself be seen
to rest on a pre-existing nature/culture dualism. While many social theorists seem to accept the argument that a social or
techno-cultural offensive has rendered the category of nature obsolete, dissenters have pointed out that the very notion of
hybridization or de-naturalization is dependent for its authority on the positing of a previously stable and undeled identity (Ansell
Pearson, 1997: 136; Kirby, 1997: 147). The end of nature, in other words, relies on the belief that there once was a nature, just as it
presup- poses another force coming by denition from outside of nature capable of precipitating this change. It is perhaps
surprising that the idea of the de-naturalization of nature is being presented as culturally and politically liberating, given the philo-
sophical prominence of efforts to track its ancient lineage. Derrida has gone to great lengths to show the extent to which the suspicion
that culture leads us away from an intact nature is an enduring gure of western thought. For him, the sense of loss that haunts the
celebration of our cultural achieve- ments hinges on a logic of supplementarity. We afrm the capacity of culture to add to nature the
qualities we feel it lacks but at the same time we experience the new world that culture delivers as supplanting this nature and
Snorlax K v Towson

breaking the bond we imagine we once shared with it (Derrida, 1976: 17880, 1978: 28990). It is the qualities that culture
apparently brings to nature articulateness, malleability, freedom from determinacy that
have received so much attention in the recent cultural turn in social thought; and this renewed concern with
intercultural matters that has framed so much of the recent interest in globalization (see Robertson, 1992: 33).
But, as Vicki Kirby argues, one of the most profound but least addressed effects of all the talk of mobility and
mutability withinthe domain of culture has been the cementing of the sense of an outside of culture that is
wanting in these very qualities. Far from undoing the logic of supplementarity, she suggests, the cultural turn of the
humanities and social sciences has tacitly bolstered western thoughts timeworn binary of active, articulate culture
and silent, docile nature (1999: 21). Which is precisely the manoeuvre that Pheng Cheah has observed at work in much of the
current cosmopolitan resur- gence. The accounts of linguistic freedom and cultural ux grounding new hybrid
cosmopolitanisms, he argues, rely on the ... anthropologistic opposition between nature and
culture/language insofar as they regard indeter- minism as the exclusive feature of social or discursive formations (1998: 308).

(B) This turn is particularly true in the context of their critical pedagogy

Bell and Russell 2K(Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University and Constance L. a
graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism,
Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf )

So far, however, such queries in critical pedagogy have been limited by their neglect of the ecological
contexts of which students are a part and of relationships extending beyond the human sphere. The
gravity of this oversight is brought sharply into focus by writers interested in environmental thought, particularly in the cultural and
historical dimensions of the environmental crisis. For example, Nelson (1993) contends that our inability to acknowledge our
human embeddedness in nature results in our failure to understand what sustains us. We become
inattentive to our very real dependence on others and to the ways our actions affect them. Educators,
therefore, would do well to draw on the literature of environmental thought in order to come to grips with the misguided
sense of independence, premised on freedom from nature, that informs such notions as
empowerment. Further, calls for educational practices situated in the life-worlds of students go hand in
hand with critiques of disembodied approaches to education. In both cases, critical pedagogy challenges the liberal notion of
education whose sole aim is the development of the individual, rational mind (Giroux, 1991, p. 24; McKenna, 1991, p. 121; Shapiro, 1994). Theorists draw
attention to the importance of nonverbal discourse (e.g., Lewis & Simon, 1986, p. 465) and to the somatic character of learning (e.g., Shapiro, 1994, p. 67),
both overshadowed by the intellectual authority long granted to rationality and science (Giroux, 1995; Peters, 1995; S. Taylor, 1991). Describing an
emerging discourse of the body that looks at how bodies are represented and inserted into the social order, S. Taylor (1991) cites as examples the work of
Peter McLaren, Michelle Fine, and Philip Corrigan. A complementary vein of enquiry is being pursued by environmental researchers and educators critical
of the privileging of science and abstract thinking in education. They understand learning to be mediated not only through our minds but also through our
bodies. Seeking to acknowledge and create space for sensual, emotional, tacit, and communal knowledge, they advocate approaches to education grounded
in, for example, nature experience and environmental practice (Bell, 1997; Brody, 1997; Weston, 1996). Thus, whereas both critical pedagogy and
environmental education offer a critique of disembodied thought, one draws attention to the ways in which the body is situated in culture (Shapiro, 1994)
and to the social construction of bodies as they are constituted within discourses of race, class, gender, age and other forms of oppression (S. Taylor,
1991, p. 61). The other emphasizes and celebrates our embodied relatedness to the more-than-human world and to the myriad life forms of which it is
comprised (Payne, 1997; Russell & Bell, 1996). Given their different foci, each stream of enquiry stands to be enriched by a sharing of insights. Finally,
with regard to the poststructuralist turn in educational theory, ongoing investigations stand to greatly enhance a revisioning of environmental education. A
growing number of environmental educators question the empirical-analytical tradition and its focus on technical and behavioural aspects of curriculum (A.
Gough, 1997; Robottom, 1991). Advocating more interpretive, critical approaches, these educators contest the discursive frameworks (e.g., positivism,
empiricism, rationalism) that mask the values, beliefs, and assumptions underlying information, and thus the cultural and political dimensions of the
problems being considered (A. Gough, 1997; Huckle, 1999; Lousley, 1999). Teaching about ecological processes and environmental hazards in a
supposedly objective and rational manner is understood to belie the fact that knowledge is socially constructed and therefore partial (A. Gough, 1997;
Robertson, 1994; Robottom, 1991; Stevenson, 1993). N. Gough (1999) explicitly goes beyond critical approaches to advocate poststructuralist positions in
environmental education. He asks science and environmental educators to adopt skepticism towards metanarratives, an attitude that characterizes
poststructuralist discourses. Working from the assumption that science and environmental education are story-telling practices, he suggests that the
adequacy of narrative strategies be examined in terms of how they represent and render problematic human transactions with the phenomenal world (N.
Gough, 1993, p. 607). Narrative strategies, he asserts, should not create an illusion of neutrality, objectivity, and anonymity, but rather draw attention to our
kinship with nature and to the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding (N. Gough, 1993, p. 621). We contend, of course, that
Goughs proposal should extend beyond the work of science and environmental educators. The societal narratives that legitimize the domination of nature,
like those that underlie racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and so on, merit everyones concern. And since the ecological crisis
threatens especially those most marginalized and vulnerable (Running-Grass, 1996; D. Taylor, 1996),
proponents of critical pedagogy in particular need to come to terms with the human-centred frameworks
that structure their endeavours. No doubt poststructuralist theory will be indispensable in this regard. Nevertheless, anthropocentric
assumptions about language, meaning, and agency will need to be revisited. In the meantime, perhaps we can
ponder the spontaneous creativity of spiders and the life-worlds of woodticks. Such wondrous possibilities should cause even the most
committed of humanists to pause for a moment at least.

Snorlax K v Towson

(4) Interrogations of social and cultural location mandated by their _______________
evidence occlude our natural location and recreate anthropocentrism by creating a
fundamental distinction between humans and nature predicated on social imagination.

Denzin 8 (Norman K., Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of
Communications, Sociology and Humanities, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Handbook of critical and indigenous
methodologies, pg. 248-249 )

Bowers's (2003) third claim, that revolutionary critical pedagogy is "based on an anthropocentric view of
human/nature relationships," is perhaps the most accurate. Consider, for example, the (anthropocentric) questions that revolutionary theorist
Ramin Farahmandpur (see McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2001) positions at the center of the discourse: What does it mean to be human? How can we live
humanely? What actions or steps must be taken to be able to live humanely? While such questions could be answered in a manner that decenters human
beings (i.e., to be "human" means living in a way that accounts for the deep interconnection between all living entities), McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001)
choose to reassert the primacy of Marxist theory in their responses. Specifically, they confirm and concur with Marx's radical assertion of a profoundly
human-centered world, quoting the following from Volume I of Capital: "A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver and a bee would
put many a human architect lo shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. Hut what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the
architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax"(Marx, 1977,p.284). McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001) respond, "In other words, the
fundamental distinction between humans and other species is that humans are endowed with a social
imagination, One that Operates as a tool for transforming their social conditions," underscoring the
primacy of consciousness as "a powerful mediating force in transforming the existing the social and
economic structures that constrain it" (p, 307). Thus, following Marx, they insist that the "question of what it
means to be human" is "conditioned by the specificity of the socio-historical conditions and
circumstances of human society," believing that "the purpose of education is linked to men and women
realizing their powers and capacities" (McLaren & Farahmandpur,2001,p.305,emphasis added). Such expressions of
profound anthropocentrism are not only unnecessary to the imperatives of the critical project but also weaken its validity. McLaren and
Farahmandpnrs (2001) maintenance of the hierarchy between human beings and nature not only prohibits
us from learning from "all our relations" but also reinscribes the colonialist logic that conscripts
"nature" to the service of human society. Indeed, McLaren (2003b) seconds Kovel's (2002) notion that "the transition to
socialism will require the creation of a usufructuary of the earth" {p. 31). While he contends that a "usufructuary" implies "restoring
ecosystemic integrity" so that "ecocentric modes of production" are made accessible to all, the model exists for the sole purposes of
transferring assets "to the direct producers" (i.e., worker ownership and control). The value of the Earth itself is therefore only
derived in terms of its ability to serve as a distinctly human resource, carrying no inherent worth or
subjectivity. While Bowers's (2003) final claim that critical pedagogy presumes a "Western approach to literacy" and reinforces a "pattern of social
relationships not found in oral-based cultures," is rather self-evident, it is unclear what kind of pedagogy (a Western construct) would not presume literacy
as its basis. Moreover, indigenous cultures engaged in institutionalized forms of schooling are just as concerned with students' literacy as other cultures.
Indeed, the value of revolutionary pedagogies is dial the concept of "literacy" is reformed to take on meaning beyond a simple depoliticized notion of
reading and writing. Specifically, it takes on a politics of literacy that recognizes it as being "socially constructed within political contexts: that is, within
contexts where access to economic, cultural, political, and institutional power is structured unequally" (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993, p. xviii). In Critical
Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern, Lankshear and McLaren (1993) further comment on the notion of critical literacy, writing, In short,
literacies are ideological. They reflect the differential structured power available to human agents
through which to secure the promotion and serving of their interests, including the power to shape literacy in ways
consonant with those interests. Consequently, the conceptions people have of what literacy involves, of what counts us being literate, what they see as "real
"appropriate" uses of reading and writing skills, and the way people actually read and write in the course of their daily livesthese all reflect and promote
values, beliefs, assumptions, and practices which shape the way life is lived within a given social milieu and, in turn, influence which interests are promoted
or undermined as a result of how life is lived there. Thus, literacies are indicies of the dynamics of power. (p.xviii) Such a definition neither limits "literacy"
to purely Western conceptions nor advocates an unconscious approach that merely "enables producers to get their message to individual consumers," as
Bowers (2003) contends. On the contrary, critical theorists aim to disrupt the unconscious processes of "language" acquisition and communication. While
the question regarding the homogenizing affects of critical literacy reemerges, indigenous cultures have been navigating the impact of such forces since the
time of contact. Furthermore knowledge of the oppressor and the oppressors language is essential to the processes of resistance, particularly in a context
where the vast majority of indigenous students are schooled in Whitest ream institutions. In summary, Bowers's (2003) critique of critical theory identifies
significant points of tension but it is limited both by its inaccurate reading of such theories and its essentializing of indigenous cultures. In perhaps the final
irony, Bowers* own outline for an cco-conscious education employs the same precepts of critical pedagogy that he discounts. Specifically, he calls for a
pedagogy that helps students (a) understand the causes, extent, and political strategies necessary for addressing environmental racism; (b) clarify the nature
of the ideological and economic forces that are perpetuating the domination of the South by the North; (c) revitalize noncommodified forms of knowledge,
skills, and activities within the communities represented by the students in the classroom; and (d) recognize the many ecologically informed changes in
individual lifestyles and uses of technology that will help ensure that future generations will not inherit a degraded environment. Such precepts dearly
presume some of the cultural assumptions of critical pedagogynamely, the importance of critical reflection, an orientation toward (emancipatory) change,
and a mastery of critical forms of literacy that enable such reflection and change. Revolutionary pedagogies have the potential to provide such a structure as
they have the analytical robustness and ideological inclination needed to sort through the underlying power manipulations of colonialist forces. Yet, as noted
by Bowers (2003) and other critics, critical pedagogy is born of a Western tradition that has many components in conflict with indigenous knowledge,
including a view of time and progress that is linear and an anthropocentric view that puts humans at the center of the universe. Nevertheless, if revolutionary
critical pedagogy is able to sustain the same kind of penetrating analysis it unleashes on capitalism, it may evolve into an invaluable too! for indigenous
peoples and their allies, fighting to protect and extend indigenous sovereignty over tribal land and resources.
Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: No LinkBlack Body is Not A Human Subject
Even if they win the claim that the Black Body is enframed by civil society to be inhuman
and without subjectivity or ontology, that doesnt link turn the Kthe Rowe evidence
indicates that starting an ethical demand from a particular entity within the world and
then extending our ethics outwards towards other beings definitively results in footnoting
of other forms of oppression, regardless of whether that particular entity is conceived of as
human or inhuman in the status quostarting with an eco-centric ethic that values
everything in the universe and then spirals downwards towards particular entities is more
likely to resolve violence. Additionally, were winning other links to their 1AC
methodology that inform their political project, even if the black body can be conceived as
not human.

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: Alt = View from Nowhere
The 1AC focuses on social location. But, what about your actual location? You are in a
room breathing air. You are part of an intergalactic ecosystem, a citizen of the cosmos.
We do not need to draw a circle defining our position in a human society; we are part of
innumerable circles beyond human reckoningthats the Abrams evidence

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC Must Read AT: Whiteness (1/2)
Put away your whiteness offense

(A) Well win defensewere not color-blind on the question of white supremacy because
we engage the historical formation of white supremacy via tracing the roots of civil
societyhowever, well win that the denigration of certain cultures and the production of
the abject is preceded by our relationship with and valuation of naturethats the Calarco
and Best evidence. Their offense assumes specific animal rights movements and animal
based ethics that may have been racist and occluded the black body but thats not us
because we dont prioritize the animal over all elsewe only need to defend our vision of
eco-centric ethics that values all biotic and abiotic entities in the universe.

(B) TurnCultural strategies of racial identification via the interrogation of white civil
society merely perpetuates the dialectic between white supremacy and survival strategies
that reifies domination. An eco-centric ethic that problematizes the construction of race by
finding intrinsic value in all organic and non-organic components of the world solves
better.

Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, assistant professor of English at Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race, p.
8-9 )

My contention that the category of race is inherently a discourse of supremacy may seem inattentive to the advances that our legal
systems and liberal social ideologies have made precisely in relation to racism and racist" practices. Modern civil society
refuses to permit its subjects the enjoyment of supremacist rhetoric, the rhetoric of exceptionality, by distin-
guishing between race and racism. It draws this distinction between a supposed ontology (the study of physical or cultural differences)
and an epistemology (discriminatory logic) in the name of preserving a semblance of inter-subjectivity Race, it suggests, is a
neutral description of human difference; racism, it suggests, is the misappropriation of such difference.
The liberal consensus is that we must do away with such ideological misappropriation, but that we must celebrate difference. It is
understood as a baby and the bath water syndrome, in which the dirty water of racism must be
eliminated, to reveal the cleansed and beloved fact of racial identity. This rather myopic perspective refuses to
address the peculiar resiliency of race, the subjective investment in racial difference, and the hypervalorization of appearance. It
dismisses these issues or trivializes them because race seems a historical inevitability. The logic is that people have been constituted for
material and other reasons as black and white and that this has had powerful historical consequences for peoples thus constituted.
Whether race exists or not, whether race and racism are artificial distinctions or not, racialization is a hard historical
fact and a concrete instance of social reality We have no choice, according to this reasoning, but to inhabit our
assigned racial positions. Not to do so is a form of idealism, and a groundless belief that power can be wished away In making
this ostensibly pragmatic move, such social theorists effectively reify race. Lukacs, who elaborated Marxs notion of reification in
relation to the commodity form in History and Class Consciousness, is worth recalling here: Its basis is that a relation between people
takes on the character of a thing, and thus acquires a phantom objectivity, an autonmy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing
as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people (1923: 89). To arrest analysis of race at the point where
one discerns and marks its historical effects is to reproduce those very relations of power that one intends to oppose. It is to render race
so objective that it is impossible to conceive human difference or inter-subjectivity anew. Modern civil society engages in
such reification because ultimately its desire is to keep the dialectic between races alive. It must thus
prohibit what it terms racism in order to prevent the annihilation not so much of the inferior races but
of the system of race itself. This is how the system of desiring Whiteness perpetuates itself, even in
the discourses that are most pragmatically aimed against racism. The resilience and endurability of race as a
structure can thus be attributed to its denials and disavowals. On the one hand, it is never in the place that one expects it
to be: it disavows its own historicity in order to hold out the promise of being to the subject the something more than symbolic a
sense of wholeness, of exceptionality. On the other hand, as a social law, it must disavow this object in order to keep the system viable
and to perpetuate the dialectic: the race for Whiteness. Exploring the structure of race requires a
toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an inherently contradictory discourse, and a
willingness to see beyond relations of power in order to mine the depth of subjective investment in it.
Snorlax K v Towson

2NC Must Read AT: Whiteness (2/2)
(C) Identity politics is the flip side of the same coin of civil societyit excludes difference
through the suspect essentialism of experiences, resulting in a homogenization of discourse
that eliminates those who do not fit within its frameworkthat makes their impacts
inevitable

Alsop 2 (Rachel, Gender Studies @ Hull University, Theorizing Gender, p 224//JD)

Identity politics therefore run against the current anti-essentialist trend in gender theory. The notion of shared
experience, of some sameness bringing women together as political actors, is incongruent with the deconstruction of woman and
women as stable, fixed coherent categories. Iris Marion Youngs article The ideal of community and the politics of difference (l990a)
is useful here in exploring tensions that have emerged in relation to the notion of shared experience and the premise that political action
can be founded on a sense of commonality (for example, sisterhood or brotherhood). Young argues that a desire for unity, of
finding commonality underpins movements such as feminism, and this automatically generate borders, dichotomies
and exclusions (Young l990a: 301) (see also the discussion of Butler in chapter 4). In so doing it suppresses the
recognition and flourishing of difference. While understanding the yearning for relationships of mutual identification,
social closeness and comfort, she suggests that those pursuing political strategies based on the ideal of community tend to suppress
differences among themselves and/or exclude from their political groups persons with whom they do not identify (l990a: 300). Within
this framework, unity takes precedence over difference and heterogeneity is curbed. This idea is taken up elsewhere by other authors.
Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983) also points to the exclusions created by identity categories. The illusion of sameness, she argues,
provides a space for a form of political action but the focus on commonality ignores difference. After an
initial necessary period of consolidation the preoccupation with sameness proves exclusionary. What is needed, she argues, is a politics
based on coalitions (see chapter 3). Returning to Youngs analysis, the ideal of community is presented as problematic not just because
the pressure of unity forces the disregard and suppression of differences but also because it presumes that individual subjectivities are
both unified and fixed. Young contends that the ideal of shared subjectivities, which underpins the pursuit of community, is
unrealizable, as individual subjects are themselves so complex, multi-layered, dynamic and incoherent
they cannot ever fully comprehend or grasp their entirety in other words, they are not even transparent to
themselves. How is the sharing of subjectivities possible when one cannot fully understand ones own subjectivity? If the subject is
heterogeneous process, unable to present to itself, then it follows that subjects cannot make themselves transparent, wholly present to
one another. If each subject escapes its own comprehension and for that reason cannot fully express to one another its needs and desires,
then necessarily each subject also escapes sympathetic comprehension by others (Young 1990a: 311).

(D) Identity politics cements and naturalizes domination

Alsop 2 (Rachel, Gender Studies @ Hull University, Theorizing Gender, p 227//JD)

Butlers work radically challenges the ways in which we conceive political action, contesting as it does the case for identity based
poiitics. As illustrated in chapter 4, in Butlers account calls to unite as women, disabled, gay, etc., become questionable because they
are based upon the existence of stable and unified identities. Butler insists that identities are constituted through the
repetition of acts, deeds and corporeal styles, and that there is no stable, coherent subject in existence prior to
entry into culture. As she puts it, there is no doer behind the deed; instead the doer is constituted through the doing. The
subject is thus never complete or fixed but in a constant, ongoing process of negotiation and transformation. In this sense, identity
movements, rather than representing the interests of a preexisting group, actually form part of the performance the
repetition of acts which serve to create the illusion of essential categories. By consequence political
movements that coalesce around the categories woman, gay, black, etc., paradoxically serve to
compound and cement the problems the group may face by reinforcing the very categories which
restrict, subordinate and exclude. As Butler remarks: If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its
gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place
the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start (1992: 19).

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: You Have No Concrete Action to Solve Oppression
(1) We meetthe Bonnet 2 and Abram 7 evidence indicates that shifting our frame of
reference by endorsing an ethical orientation that can see the intrinsic value of the of the
more-than-human and elemental is a concrete actdoing so in pedagogical practices like
debate changes the ways in which we think, translating materially into our everyday
practice by transforming our relationships with Otherness from one mediated by Western,
calculative motives to an experience that locates ourselves as interconnected with other
biotic and abiotic entities.

(2) They rely on a binary between speaking and acting which is untenable in a debate
contextthey link just as hard by only talking about the fact that concrete actions could
be made. Our Bonnett evidence is far more specific than them in the context of
anthropocentrism to say that speaking and framing our ethics differently is enough to
substantially disrupt our engagement with civil society

(3) Turnby demonizing strategies that they deem not concrete, they require the
unconditional elimination of perspectives that do not fit within their framework of what is
reasonable and politically valuablethe Calarco evidence says this makes the violence
they indict inevitable and was the logic of historical atrocities, meaning they have no
possibility of solving the case

(4) Turnthe strategy of seeking a concrete political action is anthropocentricnature is
unable to access the human political sphere now because it relies on a form of reasonable,
rational exchange that intrinsically excludes their participationthis means that only a
strategy centered around ethics can solve specifically for the alternative.

Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: Conditionality/Gaming Bad
(1) Conditionality is key to debatabilitythe affirmative gets infinite prep to select the
best evidence for the best arguments. Conditionality is an equalizer because it allows the
neg to make in-round decisions in the block to compensate for the fact that they cant bring
this level of preparation for every case. Its especially true for this aff because they merely
take the moral high ground of oppression of minoritarian groups bad, coupled with a
pedagogy that is mutable and open to interpretation. Neg flex outweighs their substantive
offense because the only way we can learn about the 1ACs content is by delving into the
details of their method through various points of contestation and sticking the aff to
defending a particular interpretation of their pedagogy.

(2) Turntheir argument that we must firmly side with personal conviction ignores the
fact that sometimes we disagree with ourselves or that our perspectives change. They
literally create a debate witch-huntthey seek out and ostracize individuals whose
convictions are still fluid or not intelligible under the dominant idea of reasonable
consistency this is the logic that results in the unconditional elimination of alterity
which turns their aff by shutting down the unintelligible abject without a static ontology
and means they dont solve any of the K.

Secomb 2K (Linnell, a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, Fractured Community, Hypatia volume 15, Number 2,
Spring, pp. 138-9 )

This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the capacity
to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their
voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a
"reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be
reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community
must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to
overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a universalist community which recognizes the concrete
other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal
theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that
her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy
difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between
alterities [End Page 138] so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a
"reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable
agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of
purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover,
Benhabib's formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation,
and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational
conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in
theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than
rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not
adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication
fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular,
coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. . . . [T]he concealment
is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves
contradiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of diffrance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent
meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies
turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective
is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as
much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the
majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decision-
making because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that
assume homogeneity and transparency.
Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: You Lack Personal Conviction = Depoliticizing
(1) Turntheir argument that we must firmly side with personal conviction ignores the
fact that sometimes we disagree with ourselves or that our perspectives change. They
literally create a debate witch-huntthey seek out and ostracize individuals whose
convictions are still fluid or not intelligible under the dominant idea of reasonable
consistency this is the logic that results in the unconditional elimination of alterity
which turns their aff by shutting down the unintelligible abject without a static ontology
and means they dont solve any of the K. (Note: If you answered condo, you may have
already read this card.)

Secomb 2K (Linnell, a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, Fractured Community, Hypatia volume 15, Number 2,
Spring, pp. 138-9 )

This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the capacity
to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their
voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a
"reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be
reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community
must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to
overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a universalist community which recognizes the concrete
other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal
theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that
her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy
difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between
alterities [End Page 138] so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a
"reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable
agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of
purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover,
Benhabib's formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation,
and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational
conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in
theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than
rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not
adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication
fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular,
coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. . . . [T]he concealment
is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves
contradiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of diffrance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent
meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies
turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective
is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as
much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the
majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decision-
making because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that
assume homogeneity and transparency.

(2) At least we are honestwe have eaten meat before but we realize its ethical problems
and are actively trying to change our habits. On the other hand, they are guilty of the
same crime they accuse of us: they have gone to the store beforethey have bought food
and clothing, which means you have paid sales tax. This means they have also funded the
wars and domestic programs conducted by the US that actively disenfranchises the
oppressed on a daily basis. Arguments about personal conviction should be a wash because
they engage in the same form of ethical hypocrisy
Snorlax K v Towson

2NC AT: Permutation
( ) They have no right to the permutationtheir 1AC is merely a recognition that
________________letting them perm makes it impossible to clash with them because the
lack of a concrete blueprint of action means they can perm any method. The only way to
allow for education on how to interrupt civil society is to allow for clash on the question of
starting points

( ) The permutation is assimilationthe Lee evidence indicates that their attempt to
include our 1NC advocacy into the 1AC is an erasure of ontological difference that is
rooted in anthropocentrism by attempting to create everything in our image. It also double
turns the aff because this is the methodology that white supremacy in the status quo co-
opted minorities through the benevolent guise of multiculturalism.

( ) Theyre in a Double BindEither any one of the links apply and the perm has no net
benefit or they sever out of the framing of the aff, making them a moving target because
its what makes their aff intelligiblethats a voter for education.

Well do the link story here<<Insert Link Extension if they make a perm>>

Snorlax K v Towson

2NR Overview
orientation towards alterity. Our role of the ballot should be preferred because it promotes
the best in-depth education over effective pedagogical strategies for resisting oppression
instead of presenting a self-serving role of the ballot that necessitates a win for one side, we
allow for direct clash between our two methodological frames of reference.

Their choice of starting points is mutually exclusivethe appeal to human liberation
struggles as a prior question means a consideration of the more than human is pushed to
the sidelines. The alternative solves 100% of the casethe Rose 6 and Rowe 3 evidence
explains that the starting point of an eco-centric ethics prevents the hyper-separation that
makes violence on a global scale possible, because it views all organic and inorganic
components of the earth as having intrinsic value. If we win a risk of a link, well win that
anthropocentrism renders their impacts inevitable and outweighs the case.

Snorlax K v Towson

2NR Impact Extension/AT: Root Cause
Extend our impactsthe K outweighs because well win that anthropocentrism is the
FIRST Hierarchy that makes all other human oppressions possiblewhich means the
alternative solves the case and any small residual reasons why we cant solve the aff. If we
win any risk why they are anthropocentric, their aff impacts are inevitable and well win
the external DA of perpetuating all other human and nonhuman oppressions beyond white
supremacy.

(A) Ideological Root Causethe Calarco 8 and Kochi 9 evidence indicates that the human-
nonhuman binary is the ontological foundation of white, civil society and is specific to the
foundation of the abject figure of the slavebeings are rendered socially and politically
valueless through the creation of normative standards of what it means to be human
the denigration of the non-human other is employed to maintain domination, racial and
otherwise

(B) Historical Root Causethe Best evidence is the only conclusive card on this question.
Technologies of domination used in chattel slavery, which literally means cattle slavery,
come from the inception of human societies ten thousand years ago when we first
transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes that had no assumption of civil society, and
then these technologies carried over to Ancient Sumeria before Western civilizations in
4000 BC until it finally was replicated in the international slave markets by European
colonists in the 1400s, proving we win the sequencing issueYou should prefer confronting
the root cause over simply attacking the immediate symptoms because oppression will
merely be re-manifested through different kinds of exclusion

(C) Even if they win a risk that the K doesnt solve the affs impacts, the K subsumes the
caseboth pieces of Lee evidence indicates that our anthropocentric frame of reference
will result in the assimilation and eradication of all biotic and abiotic entities by recreating
them in our image via bio and chemical technologies. This is reminiscent of the apartheid
South African government that created plans for genetic weapons to eliminate those that
did not fit their definition of human. Well win an external impacteven if we are
unable to solve some domination on earth, anthropocentrism will crush all living and
nonliving alterity both within and outside of earth through space colonizationthere are
infinite loci of intrinsic value that are beyond our planet, and the erasure of every source of
value in the universe outweighs even the total elimination of humanity.

Snorlax K v Towson

2NR Link Extension
Discount their attempt to no link or link turn the criticismeven if there are some ways in
which the 1AC sounds like our alternative the aff is undeniably anthropocentric and we
access our impacts:

( ) Footnoting Linkthe alternative begins from a human-centered lens of suffering by
speaking to the experience of the black body as a central to civil society. Their
___________________ evidence says quote________________________________________.
The Rowe 3 evidence indicates that starting from a particular entity as a reference point,
oh, and animals and nature too is an ethics-of-extension that green-washes ethics and
ends up occluding the human domination of non-human othersthis is proven historically
by the platforms of social democratic parties, which sacrificed questions of non-human
ethics to the popular plea to emphasize individuality and ethnocentric commonality. Even
if the oppressed are not considered human subjects or have no ontology, starting from a
specific location and extending our ethics outward is a recipe for disaster.

( ) Performative Omission LinkThe 1AC perpetuates a view from nowhere by not
acknowledging the forgotten primacy of the universe and our location in the natural world.
The Bonnett and Abrams evidence indicates that the idea of a self-arising nature is not
susceptible to merely conceptual schemes like talking about nature, but can only be
accessed specifically through sensuous, poetic encounters that explicitly acknowledge our
natural location as exemplified by our poetry the top of the 1NC. Without this
acknowledgement, we are unable to rejuvenate the ethical and are trapped in calculative
thinking that recreates anthropocentrism and other oppressions. Only our alternative is an
embodied approach that understands our interconnection with the world and solves their
disembodied debate bad turns.

(3) Star the Critical Pedagogy Linkstheir evidence suggests quote
______________________________________ Extend the Clark 2 and the Bell and
Russell 2K evidencetheir notions of empowerment and agency assume a misguided sense
of independence that is premised on freedom from passive nature. The Denzin evidence
goes one step further: it shows that their interrogation of social and cultural location
recreates anthropocentrism because it elevates humans above nature by emphasizing the
importance of social imaginationsomething that chipmunks and mountains cant access.

We also have an independent disad to the 1AC that doesnt link to the alternative alone
and provide defense against every disad to the alternative. Survival strategies against white
supremacy based on identity politics ironically require the continued existence of white
supremacya cultural strategy of racial identification through their methodological
interrogation of whiteness gives credence to the system of race as something objective and
maintains dominant power relations through repetitionthats Seshandri-Crooks and the
two pieces of Alsop evidence. Instead, an eco-centric ethic that does not rely on racial
identification and instead finds intrinsic value in all components within the world is a
better way to solve violence.

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School of Hard Knocks 2012 1

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