rights malthus da final

7wk Juniors - CHLJPR RightsMalthusIt’s fun to be evil

RIGHTS MALTHUS

RIGHTS MALTHUS...................................................................................................................................................................................1

NINJAS (1/2)............................................................................................................................................................................................2NINJAS (2/2)............................................................................................................................................................................................3

CRUNCH – NOW.......................................................................................................................................................................................4CRUNCH – NOW.......................................................................................................................................................................................5CRUNCH – A2: DEMOCRACY SOLVES......................................................................................................................................................6CRUNCH – A2: POPULATION STABILIZE...................................................................................................................................................7AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE...........................................................................................................................................................8AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE...........................................................................................................................................................9AUTHORITARIANISM BETTER NOW THAN LATER.........................................................................................................................10TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE............................................................................................................................................................11TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE............................................................................................................................................................12

LINK – RIGHTS.....................................................................................................................................................................................13LINK – FREEDOM..................................................................................................................................................................................14LINK – FEMINISM.................................................................................................................................................................................15LINK – SOCIAL REFORM.......................................................................................................................................................................16

CRUNCH BAD........................................................................................................................................................................................17NINJA ATTACK INEVITABLE – 2NC AWESOMENESS...............................................................................................................................18CRUNCH WAR.................................................................................................................................................................................19AUTHORITARIANISM SOLVES OVERPOPULATION..................................................................................................................................20IMPACT - OVERPOPULATION................................................................................................................................................................21IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION................................................................................................................................................................22IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION................................................................................................................................................................23IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION (GENOCIDE)...........................................................................................................................................24IMPACT – TYRANNY/ECO DESTRUCTION.............................................................................................................................................25IMPACT – CRIME...................................................................................................................................................................................26TURNS THE K AFF – HA!........................................................................................................................................................................27A2: IMPACT TURN................................................................................................................................................................................28A2: CURRENT CIVILIZATION GOOD - MASKING.....................................................................................................................................29GLOBAL ECONOMY UNSUSTAINABLE..................................................................................................................................................30A2: ENVIRONMENT................................................................................................................................................................................31AT: SQ SOLVES ENVIRONMENT...........................................................................................................................................................32A2: SPACE COL.....................................................................................................................................................................................33

A2: TECH SOLVES..................................................................................................................................................................................34A2: TECH SOLVES..................................................................................................................................................................................35A2: DEMOCRACY.................................................................................................................................................................................36A2: PEOPLE ARE GOOD........................................................................................................................................................................37A2: RACE TO BOTTOM...........................................................................................................................................................................38A2: FREE SPEECH..................................................................................................................................................................................39AT: MORALITY......................................................................................................................................................................................40AT: MORALITY......................................................................................................................................................................................41AT: MORALITY......................................................................................................................................................................................42A2: NO ALTERNATIVE...........................................................................................................................................................................43

AFF ANSWERS:......................................................................................................................................................................................44NON UNIQUE – POPULATION STABALIZING...........................................................................................................................................45AFF – PLAN SOLVES SUSTAINABILITY.................................................................................................................................................46TECH LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................................................................47TECH LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................................................................48HEGEMONY/MILITARY LINKS..............................................................................................................................................................49HEG LINK TURN.....................................................................................................................................................................................50

Alyssa, Bob, (Mr.) Clark, Nadeem, Nate, 1


WELFARE LINK TURNS.........................................................................................................................................................................51A2: OPHULS...........................................................................................................................................................................................52



NINJAS (1/2)

Overpopulation is forcing us to face the crunch – resource depletion and environmental destruction are loomingJacoby, the Boston Globe, 6-18-08 [Jeff, “The Coming Population Burst,” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/18/the_coming_population_bust/]

THOMAS MALTHUS has been dead for 170 years, but the Malthusian fallacy - the dread conviction that the growth of human population leads to hunger, shortages, and a ravaged environment - is unfortunately alive and well: America's congested highways are caused by "population growth wildly out of control," the group Californians for Population Stabilization laments in a new ad. So are "schools and emergency rooms . . . bursting at the seams." And with every additional American, immigrant or native-born, "comes further degradation of America's natural treasures." In a new documentary, Britain's Prince Philip blames the rising price of food on overpopulation. "Everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food," the queen's husband declares, "but it's really that demand is too great - too many people." Overpopulation is "very serious - very, very serious," the Dalai Lama tells a crowd of 50,000 in Seattle. Somewhat inconsistently, he also proclaims that "children are the basis of our hope," and that "our future depends on them." Is our planet overstuffed with human beings?" asks columnist Johann Hari in The Independent. The "overpopulation lobby," he decides, has a point. "How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions? Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?" Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The current government is unsustainable – The Aff’s promotion of Negative freedom will inevitably result in ecological destruction and social extinction. Restraints on liberty are the only way to ensure Positive freedom and create a sustainable system.Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 33-35]

Sustainable development is an oxymoron. Modern political economy in any form is unsustainable, precisely because it involves “development” –that is, more and more people consuming more and more goods with the aid of ever more powerful technologies. Such an economy produces nothing, it merely exploits nature. Such an economy reckons without the laws of thermodynamics and other basic physical laws: these ordain limitation as the price of life and guarantee that the invisible hand will generate the tragedy of the commons.2 To put it another way, such an economy is based on stolen goods, deferred payments, and hidden costs; it continues to exist or even thrive today only because we do not account for what we steal from nature or for what posterity will have to pay for our pleasures or for what we sweep under the ecological carpet. In sum, development as commonly understood is intrinsically unsustainable. In addition, to treat sustainability as if it were a merely technical problem- how can we make economies compatible with ecology ? – is to miss the point almost entirely. The ecological crisis calls into question not our means, but our ends; not our ability to sustain so-called development, but its very meaning and purpose.3 Therefore, achieving a form of development that is truly sustainable over the long term – that is, one does not involve more and more people consuming more and more goods with the aid of ever more powerful technologies – will necessarily require a radical change in our basic values, perhaps even in our very notion of “civilization.” Above all, the standard discussion of sustainability begs an enormous question. That is, even supposing that development as usual were technically possible and morally desirable, would it be politically feasible? I believe the answer is no: the basic premises of modern political economy are not only ecologically self-destructive but socially and psychologically damaging as well, and the aftermath of this damage is a large part of the reason that governance is in such trouble almost everywhere in the modern world today. In short, the most critical challenge confronting us is not economic but political sustainability – for moral and social collapse will hit us sooner and with more devastating effect than the ultimate ecological collapse. To reduce the question of political sustainability to more manageable proportions, I propose to focus on the tension between liberty and freedom, for this core political issue illuminates the profound challenge to modern values that lurks within the ecological crisis. In effect, I shall respond to the question Ivan Illich raised about the developed world’s near total dependence on so-called energy slaves: “The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether freemen need them.”4 I begin with Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive freedom.5 The former means the freedom to do what we want, provided only that our acts do not directly injure others; in other words, what liberty usually denotes in the modern, or “liberal,” tradition (so this is the term I shall use from now on.) By contrast, positive freedom means subordinating desires to ideals in order to achieve some more virtuous or nobler state of being that better accords with our “higher nature.” Freedom thus resides in self-fulfillment, not self-indulgence: to promote the former and check the latter, it follows that restraints on individual liberty may be necessary.



NINJAS (2/2)

Modernity is moribund – we must rise from the ashes and resist the affirmatives claims of libertyOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics]

The essential lesson of this political tragedy is that taught by the ancient philosophers: liberty is not freedom, and happiness is not felicity, because mere liberty and the heedless pursuit of individual happiness are ultimately self-defeating. Paradoxically, genuine freedom and felicity require self-rule: inner control of the self by the self to avert outer coercion and the cancerous growth of the state. Not only is such inner control impossible within the social vacuum created by Hobbesian amorality and Cartesian rationality, but the latter also systematically destroy the outer context of civic virtue and moral authority needed to sustain and support individual self-rule. Nor can the throne left empty by the death of God be filled with some merely secular ideal of heaven on Earth: the path of social perfectionism and political utopia leads only toward totalitarian hells. The fatal flaw in Hobbes's political philosophy was identified centuries ago by Aristotle: For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice . . . [because he] is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence, when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals. By renouncing the aim of perfecting the political animal--that is, of teaching him to use his "weapons" for wise and virtuous ends, instead of for contrary ones--the liberal polities founded on Hobbesian principles effectively abandoned the vocation of politics, which is precisely to foster an Aristotelean "rule of life" among the citizens. It was thus inevitable that "the best of the animals when perfected" would be progressively "sundered from law and justice" and turned into "the worst of all"--into an amoral or even immoral creature of will and appetite who must be ruled by force, if he can be ruled at all. In the end, mere liberty is not and can never be the basis for a workable philosophy of politics over the long term. Man's "weapons for . . . wisdom and virtue" must be directed to positive ends, or the resulting social order is bound to be both "unholy and savage." It comes down to this: modern civilization has no future. It confronts the same lethal combination of ecological collapse and inner decay that has extinguished previous civilizations. Liberalism has no future. Its basic principles are contradictory and ultimately self-destructive; and its mostly laudable ends are subverted by its largely pernicious means. A fortiori, the American polity in its present form has no future. It epitomizes the modern, liberal way of life and hence exhibits all of its contradictions and problems in their most extreme and dangerous form. The political animal must therefore reinvent politics: only radically new forms of governance can cope with the aftermath of liberalism and meet the challenges of the coming century; only a new and radically different philosophy of governance can foster the wisdom and virtue that are indispensable both for the felicity of the individual and for the peace, welfare, and justice of the community. We seem to be in the precise situation described in the Prologue: modernity is moribund, so we need a major advance in civilization, yet bringing it about will all but wreck the society in which it occurs. The question is, Will we cling fanatically to our decaying way of life and outmoded ideas or help the phoenix rise from the ashes?



CRUNCH – NOW

Crunch Coming – Malthus was right about food scarcityHurst, feature writer for the Toronto Star, 4-12-08 [Lynda, “The Coming hunger,” http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/413769]

The warning bells are ringing, furiously. This week, food riots paralyzed Haiti, with angry marchers outside the president's palace shouting "We are hungry!" Five people were killed in the chaos. In Egypt, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed this week in two days of violence over food shortages. Last month, a two-week protest at government-subsidized bakeries ended with the deaths of 10 Egyptians in clashes with police. Rice is the staple food of 4 billion people. But the prices for it, along with corn, wheat and other basics, has surged by 40 per cent to 80 per cent in the last three years and caused panicked uprisings in some of the poorest countries on Earth, from Cameroon to Bolivia. The situation has deteriorated so swiftly that some experts predict the effects of a global food crisis are going to bite more quickly than climate change. According to the World Bank, 33 countries are now vulnerable to social unrest and political instability because of food insecurity – and that has implications for all the rest. Major rice producers like China, Cambodia and Vietnam are already battening down, curbing exports to ensure supplies for their own populations. The Philippines, whose population has grown from 60 million to almost 90 million in 17 years, is warning rice hoarders they'll be charged with economic sabotage. Why is it happening? Was Malthus right when he said the world would eventually be too populated to feed itself? The United Nations already provides food for 73 million people in 78 countries worldwide. But the planet is getting hungrier. At least 4 million more people are being added to the list, most of them living in high-density, Third World cities. The new face of hunger – and thirst – is overwhelmingly urban. It takes 1,000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of food, but water scarcity is affecting supplies. And, as Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute in Washington, has cautioned: "A future of water shortages will be a future of food shortages." The current crisis was ignited by a number of elements coming together in deadly tandem. Analysts say the most important one – the jump in global fuel prices – has triggered a chain reaction in the entire food-production system, from seed planting right through to the delivery process. The world has been down this road before, of course. In 1973-74, OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) quadrupled the world price of oil, resulting in spiralling food prices and distribution snarls. The disaster led to a World Food Summit in 1976, but nothing was done to prevent it happening again. Today's crisis is even worse because biofuels, a factor unanticipated in the mid-'70s, has been added to the mix, says David Bell, emeritus professor of environmental studies at York University. "A false environmental sensibility has led to a push on biofuel production and corn is the product of choice," he says. "There's been a significant diversion of crops away from food use." The corn needed to produce ethanol fuel has to be grown somewhere and when land available for food farming is converted, food prices are pushed up: "That's what's tripped off the food riots this time." And the environmental benefits of corn fuel, he scathingly adds, are "completely illusory." Throw in the new and exploding demand for meat in economically booming China and India and even more land is being converted – for cattle, and the feeding thereof. Climate change is also making its toxic contribution. Major droughts have hit wheat-producing nations such as Australia and Ukraine, leading to a 30-year low in the world's wheat inventories. This week, John Holmes, the UN's top humanitarian and emergency relief co-ordinator, warned that the number of global "extreme weather" disasters has doubled in the past two decades to 400 a year. What's building in consequence of all these factors, he said, is a "perfect storm." "The security implications should not be underestimated ...Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity. In other words, this week's food riots may be just a foreshadowing of what looms ahead in the not-so-distant future. It took all of human history for the world to reach a population of 2.5 billion in 1950. Half a century later, it's risen to more than 6.5 billion. By 2030, it's expected to reach 8.2 billion, and by 2050, a staggering 9 to 12 billion. Can the world sustain that number of people? A UN report says we are already living beyond the planet's means – just as Thomas Malthus warned could occur. The early 19th-century British demographer and political economist believed population growth was exponential and man's "struggle for existence" eventually would outstrip Earth's capacity to sustain it. Malthus's thinking influenced Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, but it also led to nightmare scenarios. In 1968, American biologist Paul Ehrlich notoriously predicted that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions would die because of overpopulation and subsequent lack of food. It didn't happen. Not only did Ehrlich take a drubbing, but Malthus's theory did, as well. Critics have continually insisted that Malthus was too pessimistic. Humans would always find alternatives to resources that have been exhausted, they say, develop new technologies to improve crop yield. But how far, asks David Bell, can substitution go? After having dismissed Malthus, people are starting to talk about him again, he says. "His warning of a crash as a possible outcome may not be that far wrong. Ultimately, more mouths to feed is going to exacerbate political pressures. There will be more failed societies." Today, projections are that, by 2030, global agriculture/agribusiness will have to double its output – and use less water to do it . Fish as a food source? Every fishery in the world is expected to have collapsed within 25 to 50 years, says Bell.



CRUNCH – NOW

We are exceeding our carrying capacity and resources Fairfax, 2K7 [“Population pressure takes Earth to its limits,” 10-26-2007, http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?id=833]THE most authoritative scientific report on the planet's health has found water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in "inexorable decline" as 2007 became the first year in human history when most of the world's population lived in cities.The United Nations' Global Environment Outlook-4 report, released in New York, reveals a scale of unprecedented ecological damage, with more than 2 million people possibly dying prematurely of air pollution and close to 2 billion likely to suffer absolute water scarcity by 2025.Put bluntly, the report warns that the 6.75 billion world population, "has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available".And it says climate change, the collapse of fish stocks and the extinction of species "may threaten humanity's very survival".Launching the report, the head of the UN's Environment Program, Achim Steiner, warned that, "without an accelerated effort to reform the way we collectively do business on planet earth, we will shortly be in trouble, if indeed we are not already".

Crunch coming – increasing population and water scarcity proveSadoff, Kemper, & Grey, World Bank Staff, 7-7-06 [Claudia, Karin, David, “Calming Global Waters: Managing a Finite Resource in a Growing World,” http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTABOUTUS/Resources/Water.pdf]

But today a new and conflicting set of challenges has arisen: global food security must be achieved against a backdrop of growing populations, increasing water scarcity, and rising environmental concerns. Reforms are needed to promote the intensification of irrigated agriculture, through greater participation by farmers in irrigation management and in investments to modernize and rehabilitate existing infrastructure. In the next 25 years, 90 percent of the increase in food production will have to come from land already under cultivation. Meanwhile the need for new water supply for urban and industrial uses and for environmental protection will increasingly take both water and land away from irrigated areas. All of this means that the productivity of the remaining irrigated land will have to double.


http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?id=833

http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?id=833


CRUNCH – A2: DEMOCRACY SOLVES

Resources are peaking now – a democratic government cannot direct our goals to solve thru their “fairness.”Hanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 2K7 [Jay, 8-21-2007, “SHORTAGE OF ENERGY” or “LONGAGE OF PEOPLE”?, http://www.warsocialism.com/]A specter is haunting developed countries, the specter of “peak oil.” If you were born after 1960, you will probably die of violence, starvation or contagious disease. This is because our genetic demand for more-and-more resources, within a physical environment of less-and-less “net energy”[1] available for those resources, will inevitably lead to widespread violence and global nuclear war.Geologists have calculated that global oil production [2] and North American natural gas production [3] are peaking about now. American coal is expected to peak about 2035.[4] No alternative – even nuclear [5] – has the potential to replace more than a tiny fraction of the power presently generated by fossil fuels.America was specifically designed by special interests (e.g., General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil) to require fossil fuel and automobiles [6] to be viable. The exhaustion of fossil fuel will leave many millions of Americans with no access to food or water and facing certain death. For example, ten or more millions of people in Southern California alone will die within a couple of days after drinking their toilet tanks and swimming pools dry. Since it’s literally impossible to increase global net energy production, the only approaches which can mitigate this problem are national – to either increase national net energy, or reduce national energy demand, or both. The primary goal of American public policy should be to minimize the suffering [7] of as many American citizens as possible by delivering basic “needs”[8] gratis. Unfortunately, our democratic [9] form of government can not direct us to any specific goal because it is “process politics” instead of “systems politics”: “As the name implies, process politics emphasizes the adequacy and fairness of the rules governing the process of politics. If the process is fair, then, as in a trial conducted according to due process, the outcome is assumed to be just – or at least the best the system can achieve. By contrast, systems politics is concerned primarily with desired outcomes; means are subordinated to predetermined ends.”[10] Indeed, all measures that our present government takes to mitigate our problems will make them even worse! [11] Since our present government can not direct us to any specific goal, the first step in mitigation must be to invent a new systems politics. In other words, dump our present “special interest” government in favor of a new “common interest” government based on a new set of values: “In brief, liberal democracy as we know it – that is, our theory or ‘paradigm’ of politics – is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of political institutions. Moreover, it appears that the basic principles of modern industrial civilization are also incompatible with ecological scarcity and that the whole ideology of modernity growing out of the Enlightenment, especially such central tenets as individualism, may no longer be viable.”[12]


http://www.warsocialism.com/


CRUNCH – A2: POPULATION STABILIZE

Nations will still face the crunch to go Authoritarian – world resources are already scarceWOOLDRIDGE, teacher and author of Immigration’s Unarmed Invasion: Deadly Consequences, 9-16/ 2K5 [Frosty, Setting The Stage For America's Disaster - Part 2, The Official News Paper, http://www.rense.com/general67/settingthestage2.htm]

Even if we attained zero population growth today, our own population momentum would add 40 million people to the USA giving us 335 million. The world already manifests itself in diseases such as two million deaths from TB annually worldwide, one third of the world's people do not have access to clean drinking water, species extinction tops 2,500 plants and animals in the USA every decade from human population encroachment on wild life habitat, growing acid rain, global warming, and the poor of America suffering more and more from legal and illegal immigration and dozens of other consequences-what else is there to argue about immigration?



AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE

Resource scarcity will collapse modern government order into world warsHanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 2K8 [Jay, “A BASIC IDEA OF HOW OUR GOVERNMENT WORKS,” 6-24-2008, http://www.warsocialism.com/democratic.htm]Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured by spending [4] – the more, the better. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical sense – not GDP), all of our Founders’ core assumptions are known to be wrong …BIOPHYSICAL LAWS Thermodynamic laws, evolution theory, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government. The first law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter/energy. This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist Lord Kelvin had explained the principle by the middle of the 19th century.The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that energy is wasted in all economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law’s concepts while working on “heat engines”. Lord Kelvin and the German physicist Clausius eventually formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics.Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy. Energy “resources” must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called “sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). In other words, if it costs more-than-one-barrel-of-oil to “produce” one-barrel-of-oil, then that barrel will never be produced – the money price of oil is irrelevant! Thus, the net energy principle places strict limits (in the physical sense) on our government’s ability to solve social problems. Although bankers can print money, they can not print energy! Biologists have found that our genes predispose us to act in certain ways under certain environments. This explains why history repeats itself and why humans have engaged in war after war throughout history: from time-to-time an environment emerges when “inclusive fitness”[5] is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources. [6] Since our government was designed to require ever-growing energy resources, but energy resources are strictly limited by thermodynamic laws, sooner-or-later our government will collapse into another orgy of world wars. It’s just a matter of time... ELECTIONS DON’T MATTER! WHAT MATTERS ARE LOBBYISTS! A “genetic” process called “reciprocal altruism” guarantees that elected officials and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the suggestions of lobbyists. It’s a natural, automatic and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is immune. Unfortunately, no lobbyists represent the common interest. Our Founders assumed that the common interest was the sum of individual interests. Our Founders based our system on the ideas of the French Physiocrats,[7] which were formulated before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.LOCAL GOVERNMENT: No public advocate! Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms too, but additional structural aspects of our political system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the rich from converting local neighborhoods into cash. Our present system of government is designed so elected and appointed officials serve as BOTH public advocate and judge. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s impossible. On the one hand, we are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex economic proposals; on the other hand, we are supposed to be non-professionals – just plain folks.The result is that commissioners can’t personally evaluate the proposals in front of them, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a public advocate (the government’s professional planners are known to NOT represent the public interest – in fact, commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government).Yes, commissioners DO hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are able to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals do not bring “studies” (with explicitly-stated assumptions, etc.), it’s always unclear how much weight to give to their testimony. Moreover, commissioners are acutely aware of their impossible double role of judge AND advocate, bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-always give the benefit of the doubt to the developer. A good analogy for our present system is a trial composed of a “defendant” (the public), a “prosecutor” (the developer), and a “judge” (elected officials or commissioners.) The public has NO professional advocate and there is no trial by jury. Moreover, the judge frequently accepts gifts from – and takes the advice of – the prosecutor (the developer’s lobbyists). No one would argue that the defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like this! Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social problems, the public didn’t need a professional advocate to ever question special interests. The point here is that our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual economic growth to solve social problems and maintain public order. The political system is self-reinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible – as thermodynamics tells us it must – then our present form of government becomes impossible too.

Authoritarianism is inevitable – the government needs to ensure control of resources that are key to the militaryKlare, five college prof of peace & world security studies & director of Peace and World Security Studies, 2008 [Michael, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, p 239]

A new Cold War atmosphere would continue the trend toward state supervision of all fields related to energy exploration, procurement, transportation, and distribution. Because energy and other raw materials are needed to sustain critical industries and the military establishment, scarcity might well legitimize greater state intervention in the name of national security or even national surivival. The fact that oil is regarded as “strategic commodity,” essential for the operation of military forces, will justify government rationing and the diversion of available supplies from civilian to military use.


http://www.warsocialism.com/democratic.htm


AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE

American democracy is vulnerable in the Status Quo – Authoritarianism inevitableGiroux, American cultural critic, 2K6 [Henry A., “The New Authoritarianism in the United States,” 1-3-2006, Dissident Voice, http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Giroux03.htm]Recent revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administration s decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without first �obtaining warrants, the Washington Post disclosure of the chain of secret CIA torture prisons around the world, and the ongoing stories about widespread abuse and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan are just some of the elements in the popular press that point to a growing authoritarianism in American life. The government, as many notable and courageous critics ranging from Seymour M. Hersh to Gore Vidal and Robert Kennedy Jr. have pointed out, is now in the hands of extremists who have shredded civil liberties, lied to the American public to legitimate sending young American troops to Iraq, alienated most of the international community with a blatant exercise of arrogant power, tarnished the highest offices of government with unsavory corporate alliances, used political power to unabashedly pursue legislative polices that favor the rich and punish the poor, and disabled those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Closer to home, a silent war is being waged against poor young people and people of color who are either being warehoused in substandard schools or incarcerated at alarming rates. Academic freedom is increasingly under attack, homophobia has become the poster-ideology of the Republican Party, war and warriors have become the most endearing models of national greatness, and a full-fledged assault on women s reproductive rights is being championed by Bush s evangelical supporters -- most evident in Bush s � � �recent Supreme Court appointment and nominee. While people of color, the poor, youth, the middle class, the elderly, gays, and women are being attacked, the current administration is supporting a campaign to collapse the boundaries between the church and state and even liberal critics such as Frank Rich believe that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. [1] A number of powerful anti-democratic tendencies now threaten American democracy. The first is a market fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns, but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a Social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a

war of all against all replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others.� � Within neoliberal ideology, the market becomes the template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities. The logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low intensity warfare at home chips away at democratic freedoms and high intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks, and chemical warfare. The cost abroad is massive human suffering and death, and at home, as Paul Krugman points out, The hijacking of public policy by private interests � �parallels the downward spiral in governance. [2] With the rise of market fundamentalism, economics is accorded more respect than politics; the citizen has � �been reduced to a consumer -- the buying and selling of goods is all that seems to matter. Even children are now targeted as a constituency from which to make money, reduced to commodities, sexualized in endless advertisements, and shamelessly treated as a market for huge profits. Market fundamentalism not only makes time a burden for those without health insurance, child care, a decent job, and adequate social services, it also commercializes and privatizes public spaces, undermining not only the idea of citizenship but also those very spaces (schools, media, etc.) needed to make it a vigorous and engaged force for a substantive democracy. Under such circumstances, hope is foreclosed, and it becomes difficult either to imagine a life beyond capitalism or to believe in a politics that takes democracy seriously.

Authoritarianism is inevitable, even in the USKlare, five college prof of peace & world security studies & director of Peace and World Security Studies, 2008 [Michael, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, p 241-242]

Here, too, a likely result will be an increase in state oversight. At the very least, governments will come under immense pressure from domestic constituencies to satisfy energy demands by any means necessary . Meeting demand was, in fact, the stated objective of the National Energy Policy adopted by the Bush administration in May 2001 – a time when the nation was already suffering from an “energy crisis” brought about by shortages of oil, natural gas, and electricity. To “ensure a steady supply of affordable energy for America’s homes and businesses and industries”- the policy’s ultimate goal – the president advocated the removal of existing restrictions on oil and gas drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; along with increased government subsidies for Big Oil, King Coal, and the nuclear power industry; intensified efforts to gain access to overseas oil and gas deposits; and greater reliance on arms transfers and military aid to cement U.S. ties with key suppliers abroad.3 The adoption of statist measures of this sort will occur at the expense of both corporate and societal autonomy. Greater governmental intervention in the procurement and distribution of oil and natural gas will usurp powers long enjoyed by the major energy firms (though it is worth recalling that, in many parts of the world, the state often played a key role in creating or nurturing giant firms such as BP, Total, and Eni, which are now mostly independent actors). Any increase in state oversight of energy affairs will undermine basic democratic rights and the prerogatives of local authorities. In general, the lower the level at which a decision is made about the design or location of a drilling rig, refinery, reactor, dam or power plant, the greater the opportunity for public scrutiny of, and participation in, plans for such facilities; once control shifts to central state authorities, these opportunities largely disappear. Even in the United States, where suspicion where suspicion of and hostility toward federal authority remains strong, one can see a trend toward reduced local control over energy-related matters. A key turning point may have been the Energy Policy Act of 2005 , which gave the Department of Energy increased authority over the siting of regasification facilities and interstate electric transmission lines – major installations whose construction can alter the character of a community and expose it to new hazards. Previously, control over the placement of such facilities was largely exercised by state, county, and municipal authorities; under the new law, these powers will be wielded by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This may set a precedent for the granting of authority in such matters as the placement of nuclear power plants and oil refineries, all potentially contentious issues – especially if monopolized by unelected federal bureaucrats.


http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Giroux03.htm


AUTHORITARIANISM NOW- BETTER THAN LATER

Postponing the transition of authoritarianism and the imminent collapse of civilization heightens the magnitude of the inevitable disasterOphuls (William, Professor of Political Science @ Northwestern, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited) 1992

Up to now, we have found cleverer and more ruthless ways not to pay and to continue the slavery. But doing so may cost us more in the long run : postponing the day of reckoning increases the stakes, and therefore the risks of the game. This has not previously bothered us, because we were sure that we could always come up with a technological fix to build the edifice yet higher. However, recent developments have shown us that constructing the next story of civilization will be much harder and riskier than all the previous ones. In fact, we may be hard-pressed to maintain what we have already achieved in some areas, even if we continue to make progress in others. Nor can we casually assume that future generations will be willing or able to pay the deferred costs of our spendthrift ways. In deed as our first generation to be saddled with major ecological clean-up costs, we ourselves are troubled by the dubious legacy of our industrial past. Finally, and most important of all, the more we succeed in postponing the day of reckoning physically, the higher the psychological social, and political price we shall eventually have to pay.

Russia, Isreal, and the US are just few examples of the Authoritarian push nowStarobin, contributing editor of The Atlantic and a staff correspondent for National Journal, 2K4 [Paul, “Dawn of the Daddy State,” The Agenda, June 2004, Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200406/starobin]

An authoritarian push is often seen as coming from above, forced on an unsuspecting public by would-be autocrats. But today's global trend toward what might be called the Daddy State is propelled by the anxious demands of majority blocs of citizens. The Russians recently re-elected Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, with 71 percent of the vote, handing him a mandate to continue his crackdown on Chechen terrorists. The Israelis are demanding the Fence—envisioned as a sniper-patrolled, electrified national barrier aimed at keeping out Palestinian suicide bombers. Not only do Americans broadly support Bush's Patriot Act, but women—who worry more than men do that they or someone close to them will fall victim to terrorism—tend to view the measure as not tough enough, according to a recent Gallup poll. Europeans are demanding closer policing of their rapidly growing Muslim minority, which now stands at 15 million in the EU.In short, we are at the dawn of a popularly sanctioned movement toward greater authoritarianism in the domain of what is now fashionably called "homeland security." As Thomas Hobbes explained in his mid-seventeenth-century treatise Leviathan (a work that can be read as a primer on homeland security), there is no real contradiction in the idea of authoritarianism as a choice. In a proverbial state of nature, man willingly gives up some portion of his liberty to a sovereign as the only conceivable protector of his life and property. During times of relative quiet and prosperity it is easy to forget that this sort of bargain exists—but in times of danger, woe to the sovereign that neglects its duty to protect.



TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE

There is no such thing as democracy—Industrialization is bringing us closer to a totalitarianism age Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 233-235]

At the same time, the individual's general level of skill, competence, and autonomy has been degraded in mass society. The people who inhabit organic communities can by and large grow their own food, make their own clothes, and even construct their own dwellings--all of which gives them a sense of self-sufficiency and independence not enjoyed by modern men and women, who must depend on the "system" to provide every requisite of life as an "output." Summarizing the vast sociological literature, Krishan Kumar says, The triumphs of industrialism . . . involved a progressive decline in the skills, competence, autonomy, and responsibility of the bulk of the population in the industrial societies. Knowledge and skills have gone into machines and the professionalized service institutions; authority and autonomy into the hierarchical and bureaucratic structures of large-scale organization. . . . As Marx put it . . . "the more the worker produces, the more he diminishes himself." In other words, the common people have been reduced to a dependent proletariat at the mercy of the corporate state. All in all, therefore, modern men and women suffer from a pervasive sense of vulnerability and powerlessness, because they have no more control over their physical and social environment than a savage--in fact, rather less. Even in the political sphere more narrowly defined, although it may be true that they are no longer under the direct control of feudal lords or village elders, citizens are subject to the overwhelming power of the modern nation-state to tax, conscript, and generally compel. And, as Paul Johnson points out, it is not certain that the latter is necessarily to be preferred to the former--not when the state numbers in the hundred millions, the bureaucracies that administer it answer largely to themselves or to their special-interest allies, and the elections that supposedly make the citizens the master of the state seem increasingly manipulated and meaningless. What Edmund Burke called the "little platoons"--family, neighborhood, parish, guild, county, and all the other local structures of cooperation, integration, and authority within an organic community--may have constrained men and women, often severely at times, but they also served as bulwarks against a more impersonal tyranny. These bulwarks are now gone. In fact, the old liberal distinction between "society" and "state" has been virtually obliterated: the state is now the primary focus of allegiance and identity and almost the only remaining source of social authority. Thus nothing but the unreliable goodwill of those who control the state defends the individual from the "monolithic unity" of totalitarianism. Given the sense of vulnerability and powerlessness that pervades modern existence, it is hardly surprising that many observers have perceived a widespread fear of freedom in mass society. If "solitude" engenders personal loneliness compounded by feelings of rootlessness, anxiety, frustration, and powerlessness--in short, existential despair--the desire to escape from the burden of this pain would have to become compelling, consciously or unconsciously. A characteristic feature of modern or modernizing societies is therefore the flight from freedom. This takes two principal forms: fundamentalism, or the effort to restore a lost sense of certainty and belonging by clinging to the old verities, and anesthesia, or the effort to block out pain and abdicate responsibility. The fundamentalist resembles the ideologue, but rather than adopt a secular religion as an antidote to the meaninglessness of a mythless existence, he chooses to reject modern values in favor of traditional ones. By cleaving faithfully or fanatically to the old ways and old certainties-whether these are religious, cultural, or nationalistic--the fundamentalist tries to negate the modern world and assuage his existential pain with true belief. And like the rabid ideologue, the fundamentalist is paranoid: he not only rejects modern values more or less categorically for himself, but he demonizes those who espouse them, seeing the devil's hand behind their every intention and act. Although the degree of paranoia obviously varies, this is as true of the extreme religious right in the United States as it is of the Iranian ayatollahs and the Irish Republican Army: the enemy is Satan, the personification of evil, against whom a no-holdsbarred war is obligatory. Fundamentalism is thus responsible for many of the pathologies that afflict modern polities--civil war, terrorism, organized racism, extreme political activism, religious and quasi-religious cults, and so on. Fundamentalism and secular ideology are two sides of the same coin: they are both ways of fleeing the psychological burden of individual freedom by embracing true belief, whether in a social utopia, a political struggle, a racial cause, a cultural tradition, or a religious creed. The dangers of fundamentalism are comparatively well understood, if only because extremist groups habitually commit violent acts that outrage public sensibilities. Unfortunately, despite the increasing salience of the street-drug problem, the society-wide extent of the flight from freedom into anesthesia is little acknowledged, or even denied. To the extent that we do take the "drug problem" seriously, we tend to define it as a matter for the police rather than the polity. Yet it is probably our most basic, most ominous, and least tractable social ill.

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TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE

[CONTINUED—NO TEXT REMOVED]

As we have seen, Hobbesian political economy is fundamentally addictive in character, and addiction of all kinds is hence the norm in liberal society: most citizens are hooked on one or more means of denying or drowning out existential pain, with the officially proscribed drugs being only the tip of an enormous iceberg. That is, addiction is by no means confined to heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or other illegal drugs--as extensive and damaging, both personally and socially, as the use of such substances is. Nor does it stop with the abuse of such legal drugs as alcohol and nicotine, as well as numerous prescription and even nonprescription drugs, although we have finally begun to grasp how pervasive and harmful such abuse is. Rather, the addictive search for anesthesia extends to virtually the whole of our way of life--eating, shopping, sex, music, work, sports, and television, to cite only the most obvious. The point is not to condemn all amusing activities and pleasurable substances per se: the problem is that these tend to be used as opiates by very large numbers of people. Although we do not ordinarily classify, say, work or the media as "narcotics," they are nevertheless used as such, as we tacitly acknowledge when we call someone "a workaholic" or "a media junkie." Addiction to television is especially pervasive: even leaving aside the insidious way in which it pushes commodities, purveys cheap thrills, and numbs minds with trivial pursuits, it seems literally to entrance viewers physiologically. It has therefore become the almost universal narcotic of mass-consumption societies. Fundamentalist fanaticism and narcotic escape are thus basic features of our social order: most people are addicted to opium, either the opium of true belief or the opium of anesthesia. But these very same things are the basis of social control in the dystopian visions of Orwell and Huxley. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, fanatical religious adoration of Big Brother and equally passionate hatred of the current "enemy," supplemented by cheap gin, are the primary means of keeping the populace in line. In Brave New World, similar means are employed with more finesse: obligatory sexuality, artificial religious ecstasy, and, when all else fails, the anodyne of "soma" are used to keep the populace "happy." The ways that people today try to alleviate or escape their existential pain are precisely those that Orwell and Huxley identify as constituting the basis of their totalitarian orders. That the desire to escape reality with some form of opium is so strong in liberal society suggests that the latter is indeed fundamentally inhuman. As Freud pointed out, all forms of civilization are shadowed by the "discontents" that arise out of the "repression" that is seemingly required by life in complex societies. But only liberal society--Wolin's "masochistic failure" and Wallerstein's "recipe for misery"--seems to drive the great mass of men and women toward existential despair.



LINK – RIGHTS

Even the right to food is nonsense in the real world – maintaining rights would justify starvationHardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 2006 [Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980, “Limited World, Limited Rights,” http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]Probably no right now claimed is so revolutionary in its consequences-and, I shall argue, so indefensible-as the right to food. On 23 March 1976 an organization called Bread for the World presented the following statement to the American Congress: "We believe that every man, woman and child on earth has the right to a nutritionally adequate diet. This right is not ours to give or take away. It is fundamental and derives from the right to life itself. The Declaration of Independence identifies the right to life as an unalienable human right coming from God who has created all persons equal. Without the food to sustain life, that right is meaningless." This is lovely rhetoric, but it is ecological nonsense. In a limited world, indefinitely continued exponential growth, if food is equally shared, will lead ultimately to starvation and misery for all – and "ultimately" is not far off. Every year another 90 million mouths clamor for food-another Egypt and Vietnam, as it were. The World Health Organization says that 800 million persons are now malnourished. The advances in agricultural productivity, most conspicuous in the already advanced countries, give little promise of decreasing the number of malnourished, in either absolute numbers or relative to the total global population.

Unrestricted Rights would destroy life – they must be limitedHardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 1980 [Garret, “Limited World, Limited Rights,” Commentaries: Rights and Liberties, Society, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]

We do not keep our attention focused long enough on the problem of chronic misery to see that simultaneously asserting the right to food and the right to breed insures the perpetuation and increase of need. Every right must be evaluated in the network of all rights claimed and the environment in which these rights are exercised. When the human population was periodically decimated by such crowd diseases as cholera, typhoid, plague and smallpox, claiming both the right to breed and to be fed may have done no long-term harm (though such double claims were seldom made in those days). But the new limit to growth-sheer want-created by substantially eliminating the old limits (disease, principally) turns the right to food and the right to breed into a suicidal combination. If these two rights have a translegal existence – if to use the language of earlier days, they are God-given rights – then we must bitterly conclude that God is bent on the utter destruction of civilization, that He must intend to reduce human existence to the level of the Iks, so movingly described by Colin Turnbull. Saying that both such translegal rights exist in unqualified, unquantified form is fatalism of the most extreme sort . On the other hand, if we hold that every right, “natural" or not, must be evaluated in the total system of rights operating in a world that is limited, we must inevitably conclude that no right can be presumed to be absolute, that the effect of each right on the suppliers as well as on the demanders must be determined before we can ascertain the quantity of right that is admissible. From here on out, ours is a limited world. Rights must also be limited. The greater the population, the more limited the per capita supply of all goods; hence the greater must be the limitation on individual rights. At its heart, this is the political meaning of the population problem.

Rights cut both ways and don’t assume the ecological crisis – it’s not a valuable framework given the world’s stateHardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 2006 [Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980, “Limited World, Limited Rights,” http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]One person's right is, then, a demand upon others. Pufendorf follows his definition with a two-word précis: Vocabuli ambiguitas. Rights are ambiguous words, literally "words that drive both ways." This fact is conveniently neglected by those who fight most vigorously to establish new legal rights on the basis of supposed translegal rights. The desirability of the right to the person benefited may be admitted by all; but before acquiescing in the establishment of a new legal right, we need to examine its drive in the other direction, in the demands it makes on those who must pay the cost of the right. The highly individualistic view implicit in rights as currently conceived is not adequate for a world of more than four billion human beings. Our world is not the world of Robinson Crusoe or even of Daniel Boone. It is preeminently a social world, and social relationships are fantastically complicated and subtle. Whenever we contemplate intervening in an existing social system, we must be acutely aware that we can never do merely one thing. Quantities matter. A right that may be bearable and even beneficial at one level of population, may be unbearable or disastrous at another. Situation ethics is the only ethics that works.


http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html



LINK – FREEDOM

Freedom in a world of scarcity leads to ruinHardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 1980 [Garret, “An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament,” http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_ecolate_view_human_predicament.html]

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to this herd. And another; and another...But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit-in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all . As a result of discussions carried out during the past decade I now suggest a better wording of the central idea: Under conditions of overpopulation, freedom in an unmanaged commons brings ruin to all. When there is no scarcity, as is the case in a pioneer community with ample resources, an unmanaged commons may in fact be the best distribution device since it avoids the costs of management.4 It must be pleasant to live in such an uncrowded world; but when shortages develop the prospect of tragedy has to be faced. Even with crowding and its consequent scarcity, the experience of such religious communes as the Hutterites shows that formal management does not necessarily have to be invoked if the informal power of shame is available. Apparently shame works only if the community does not exceed about 150 people; beyond that number this informal control is not effective enough to prevent "freeloading" and the drift toward the tragedy of the commons.5



LINK – FEMINISM

Women once held the moral fabric of society together – calls for feminism just result in more selfishness that results in the collapse of societyOphuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 38-39]

This provides the appropriate context for the promised discussion of bourgeois woman. To get right to the point, feminism heralds the final collapse of civil society and therefore of liberal polity. Women’s liberation means precisely what it says: women now want to be just as “liberated” as men, just as “free” to pursue their own selfish ends . To obviate any possible misunderstanding, I am neither blaming women for deciding to play by men’s rules – given the economic conditions and moral climate created by generations of male selfishness, they really had little choice – nor am I suggesting that some reactionary status quo ante be restored. I am simply reporting what I believe to be the social and political consequences of women becoming good liberals looking out for Number One in the great marketplace of life. For the fact is that, whereas men long ago abandoned the family for the marketplace, women until very recently upheld both family and civil society by not living according to Hobbesian premises: men lived for money, women for love. Woman’s role in bourgeois society was thus utterly anomalous: putting aside all ambition for herself, she was to be the gentle custodian of traditional virtues, the warm champion of the heart against the head, and the loving incarnation of home and hearth. And in so doing, she provided the social and emotional glue that held together a society otherwise given over to self-interest . In short, women formerly devoted themselves to resisting moral entropy: they tended our inherited moral capital and thereby preserved the civil society that is absolutely indispensable to the success of the liberal polity. Now that they are no longer willing to make that sacrifice, both civil society and liberal polity are in jeopardy, and the future is, once again, bleakly Hobbesian.



LINK – SOCIAL REFORM

The Aff’s Short term goals of social reform will inevitably be counterproductive and alter the world for the worseHardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 1980 (Garret, “An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament,” http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_ecolate_view_human_predicament.html)

The possibility of causing more harm than good seldom enters the mind of an international intervener. The intervener in Egypt-the U.S.S.R., as it happened, but it would have been the U.S., had we not earlier had a falling out with Nasser-no doubt viewed the goal as one of working toward a maximum of electricity production, or irrigation water (or both). The goal of maximizing a single variable is woven into the fabric of engineering, and it has long seemed an innocent tool. The political scientist William Ophuls, however, calls on us to reexamine this assumption in terms of a bit of modern folk wisdom that has been called Ophuls' Axiom: Nature abhors a maximum.22 Survival of any system depends on a subtle and incompletely understood balance of many variables. Maximizing one is almost sure to alter the balance in an unfavorable way. So complex is every natural system that the cascade of consequences started by an ill-advised maximization of a single variable may take years, or even generations, to work itself out. This is the reason why proponents of intervention find it so easy to dose their eyes to the consequences of their meddling. The goals of energy maximization, optimum capital utilization, personal utility maximalization, and optimal resource depletion all become suspect under Ophuls' Axiom. In the ecolate view of the world, time has no stop: every well meant proposal must be challenged by the question, "And then what?" Refusal to meet this challenge is the commonest cause of the failure of social reforms. Slum clearance, urban redevelopment, and most welfare programs have been generally counterproductive of their goals because their proponents, largely literate and not ecolate in their thinking, did not subject their plans to the acid test of "And then what?"



CRUNCH BAD

The Crunch is no future to look forward to – Hanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 1998 [Jay, “Requiem,” 2-20-98, http://www.dieoff.org/page181.htm]What kind of future will our children have? Shortly after the year 2000, industrial activity will rise high enough for it to seriously degrade land fertility. This will occur because of contamination by heavy metals and persistent chemicals, climate change, salinization, topsoil loss, falling water tables, and increased levels of ultraviolet radiation from a diminished ozone layer.Around the year 2005, global oil production will "peak", and the spike in oil prices will quickly exacerbate other major problems facing industrial agriculture.[52] Food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. It has been estimated that about four percent of the nation's energy budget is used to grow food, while about 10 to 13 percent is needed to put it on our plates. In other words, a staggering total of 17 percent of America's energy budget is consumed by agriculture![53]By 2040, we would need to triple the global food supply in order to meet the basic food needs of the eleven billion people who are expected to be alive. But doing so would require a 1000 percent increase in the total energy expended in food production. [54] Guess what? Eleven billion people won't be alive by 2040.The dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, the declining fertility of the land, and the positive feedbacks imposed by declining resource quality will force the economy to divert much more investment into the agriculture and energy sectors as part of a desperate attempt to maintain agricultural output. Government budgets also decline in real terms as greater and greater fractions of the economy are diverted into the resource sectors.As resource quality and land fertility continue to fall, society will be forced to allocate more and more capital to the agriculture and resource sectors, otherwise the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would restrict production still more -- it's circular, there is no way to avoid the positive feedback. Ultimately, industrial capacity will decline rapidly taking with it the service and agricultural sectors, which depend upon industrial inputs. Constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, the availability of life-supporting resources will go into a permanent, steep decline.In many ways, the next hundred years will be the inverse of the last hundred. As fossil fuels dwindle, supply lines collapse, and societies disintegrate, muscle will gradually replace machinery. "Home grown" will replace "imported". Obviously, large cities will be mostly abandoned.Well-intended activists from both the Left and Right -- armed with facts and ideologies -- will form political movements, select the best liars for leaders, and take to the streets demanding that government take us back to "the good old days". The worse our problems become, the more they will act instead of think. The less they think, the worse our problems will become. Social order will disintegrate, and Roadside Warriors will go mad, killing, raping, torturing, and burning...It really will be back to the good old days! Shouts of "BRING ME HIS HEAD" will ring through the land, slaves, scalps, souvenirs and trophies of all sorts, ... exciting possibilities limited only by our ingenuity.The good news is that recycling will finally become fashionable! We will see feral children mining the dumps for plastic to burn (Pampers) so they can heat the hovels they are forced to live in. The strongest kids will set traps for fresh meat -- rats -- while the weaker kids will eat anything they can cram into their mouths (old shoes, styrofoam peanuts, newspaper soup). Pandemics will sweep the world, punctuated every so often by explosions as abandoned and rotting nuclear facilities blow up. Leaking dumps and tanks will spew PCBs and radioactive hazwaste into the feral food chain spawning surprising new shapes for young mothers to enjoy nursing.[55] Toxic chemical fires, blowing garbage and trash, genetic mutations, filthy water, cannibalism ...As the Easter Islanders say: "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth".[56]The situation will be especially serious for a short time because the population will keep rising due to the lags inherent in the age structure and social adjustment. Then mercifully, the population will drop sharply as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.[57] Trapped in obsolete belief systems, Americans won't even know why their society disintegrated.A hundred thousand years from now -- once the background radiation levels drop below lethality -- a new Homo mutilus will crawl out of the caves to elect a leader. Although we have no idea what mutilus might look like, evolutionary theory can still tell us who will win the election. He will be the best liar running on a platform to end hunger by controlling nature.


http://www.dieoff.org/page181.htm#57







NINJA ATTACK INEVITABLE – 2NC AWESOMENESS

This selfishness makes all impacts inevitable – weigh every right of the affirmative against extinctionOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics]

In the end, therefore, not only did the Enlightenment paradigm of politics fail to achieve many of its avowed goals--for example, equality (at least to the extent hoped)--but it also inflicted a wanton destruction on the world, becoming thereby both its own worst enemy and the author of new forms and possibilities of tyranny undreamt of by ancient despots. Everything that does not work, all that we hate and fear about the modern way of life, is the logical or even foreordained consequence of the basic principles we have chosen to embrace. Explosive population growth, widespread habitat destruction, disastrous pollution, and every other aspect of ecological devastation; increasing crime and violence, runaway addictions of every kind, the neglect or abuse of children, and every other form of social breakdown; antinomianism, nihilism, millenarianism, and every other variety of ideological madness; hyperpluralism, factionalism, administrative despotism, and every other manifestation of democratic decay; weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, the structural poverty of underdevelopment, and many other global pathologies--all are deeply rooted in Hobbesian politics, whose basic principles set up a vicious circle of power seeking and self-destruction. In other words, the most intractable problems of our age are due not to human nature itself but, instead, to the way in which the Enlightenment in general and Hobbesian politics in particular have encouraged the worst tendencies of human nature to flourish in the modern era.



CRUNCH WAR

Without State action to prevent the crunch resource depletion would provoke war and it’s own storm of death checksHEILBRONER, Ecologist and Author of books on philosophy, the environment and economics, 1974 [An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, p. 132-133] Therefore the outlook is for what we may call “convulsive change” – change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation. As with Malthus’s much derided but all too prescient forecasts nature will provide the checks, if foresight and “morality” do not. One such check could be the outbreak of wars arising from the explosive tensions of the coming period, which might reduce the growth rates of the surviving nation-states and thereby defer the danger of industrial asphyxiation for a period. Alternatively, nature may rescue us from ourselves by what John Platt has called a “storm of crisis problems.” As we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance, local disasters- large-scale fatal urban temperature inversions, massive crop failures, resource shortages – may also slow down economic growth and give a necessity impetus to the piecemeal construction of an ecologically and socially viable social systems.



AUTHORITARIANISM SOLVES OVERPOPULATION

Authoritarian governments are crucial to preventing the crunch and solving overpopulationHEILBRONER, Ecologist and Author of books on philosophy, the environment and economics, 1974 [An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, p. 38] But there is an alternative- and in the long run mor probable – course of action that may avoid this dreadful “solution” to the overpopulation problem: the rise off governments capable of halting the descent into hell. It is certainly possible for a government with dedicated leadership, a well-organized and extensive party structure, and an absence of inhibitions with respect to the exercise of power to bring the population flood to a halt.



IMPACT - OVERPOPULATION

Overpopulation kills any effort to sustain the world, destroying biodiversity, causing war, and ensuring extinction – authoritarian child policies would be a necessary checkHedges, Senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, 2/9/09 (Chris, “We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction,” http://peaceandjustice.org/article.php/20090309091429962)

All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms -- an estimated 8,760 species die off per year -- because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources . The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic -- the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland. The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines. The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom-the number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity-is about 18 million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think. A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.



IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION

Overpopulation outweighs and turns case – it results in warming, war, poverty, and famine – only authoritarian control can stop itAssociated Content, 9-21-06(Steven Halverson, AC, “Overpopulation: Should Having a Child Require a Permit?” http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/61009/overpopulation_should_having_a_child_pg2_pg2.html?cat=37)

In America a permit is required to own a gun, a business, to drive an automobile, to hunt game, and to fish. Americans live with almost no hostility to these limitations because these permits are used to protect the population from severe harm. Gun permits are intact to reduce crime, drivers licenses protect the roads from a state of metal anarchy, fishing and hunting permits protect other species, like the American Eagle, which are in danger of total extinction. Permits can and have been used as a solution (sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding) for large and complex problems, on a national and more importantly global level. The world faces one of its most potentially disastrous crises ever: overpopulation. The rate of growth is staggering, the severe consequences of this growth at times unimaginable. The roots of the problem lie mainly with two phenomenons: lowering mortality rates, and rising and even stable birth rates. Population grows at an exponential rate, and with these two roots of population growth compounded together, the problem becomes even more immense. If the current trend isn’t altered, the human race is surely on a track of self-destruction. Famine, water shortages, uncontrollable global warming, specie extinction, energy crises, more traffic, are only a few of the consequences of overpopulation. From these consequences more problems arise: crime from frustration of traffic and famine, war from water shortages, more famine from specie extinction, poverty, the list of possibilities go on forever as well as the constant lingering of devastating worldwide surprise. It is safe to say that overpopulation is a gigantic danger to all the nation-states in the world.



IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION

There are two ways the population will decrease – either through authoritarian control now, or through violence, starvation, and epidemics later – prefer our evidence, it’s from scientists who have spent their entire lives studying growthConnor, Science Editor for the Independent, 1-7-06 (Steve, “Overpopulation 'is main threat to planet',” http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/overpopulation-is-main-threat-to-planet-521925.html)

Climate change and global pollution cannot be adequately tackled without addressing the neglected issue of the world's booming population, according to two leading scientists. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, and Professor John Guillebaud, vented their frustration yesterday at the fact that overpopulation had fallen off the agenda of the many organisations dedicated to saving the planet. The scientists said dealing with the burgeoning human population of the planet was vital if real progress was to be made on the other enormous problems facing the world . "It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about" Professor Guillebaud said. "Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation." Professor Guillebaud said he decided to study the field of human reproduction more than 40 years ago specifically because of the problems he envisaged through overpopulation. His concerns were echoed by Professor Rapley, an expert on the effects of climate change on the Antarctic, who pointed out that this year an extra 76 million people would be added to the 6.5 billion already living on Earth, which is twice as many as in 1960. By the middle of the century, the United Nations estimates that the world population is likely to increase to more than nine billion, which is equivalent to an extra 200,000 people each day. Professor Rapley said the extra resources needed to sustain this growth in population would put immense strains on the planet's life-support system even if pollution emissions per head could be dramatically reduced. "Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental 'footprint', the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing," Professor Rapley says in an article for the BBC website. "So if we believe that the size of the human 'footprint' is a serious problem - and there is much evidence for this - then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed." Professor Rapley says the explosive growth in the human population and the concomitant effects on the environment have been largely ignored by many of those concerned with climate change. "It is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability," he says. "So controversial is the subject that it has become the Cinderella of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private. "In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.'' Professor Guillebaud, who co-chairs the Optimum Population Trust, said it became politically incorrect about 25 years ago to bring up family planning in discussing the environmental problems of the developing world. The world population needed to be reduced by nearly two-thirds if climate change was to be prevented and everyone on the planet was to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of Europeans, Professor Guillebaud said. An environmental assessment by the conservation charity WWF and the Worldwatch Institute in Washington found that humans were now exploiting about 20 per cent more renewable resources than can be replaced each year. Professor Guillebaud said this meant it would require the natural resources equivalent to four more Planet Earths to sustain the projected 2050 population of nine billion people. "The figures demonstrate the folly of concentrating exclusively on lifestyles and technology and ignoring human numbers in our attempts to combat global warming," he said. "We need to think about climate changers - human beings and their numbers - as well as climate change." Some environmentalists have argued that is not human numbers that are important, but the relative use of natural resources and production of waste such as carbon dioxide emissions. They have suggested that the planet can sustain a population of nine billion people or even more provided that everyone adopts a less energy-intensive lifestyle based on renewable sources of energy rather than fossil fuels. But Professor Guillebaud said: "We urgently need to stabilise and reduce human numbers. There is no way that a population of nine billion - the UN's medium forecast for 2050 - can meet its energy needs without unacceptable damage to the planet and a great deal of human misery."



IMPACT – OVERPOPULATION (GENOCIDE)

Overpopulation will be used to justify genocide and war – authoritarianism today would be better than laterHeidenrich, Senior Nat Security Analyst at Sci Applications International Corporation, 01 [John G, How to Prevent Genocide: a guide for policymakers, scholars, and the concerned citizen, “Forecasting and Direction of Genocide”]Overpopulation is another notion commonly presumed to cause genocide, via an intense competition for limited space and resources. In propaganda, at least, it has certainly been used as an excuse for genocide: Hitler asserted that the German nation needed more lebensraum (“living space”), and so he started World War II. Nay contemporary leader who calls for the equivalent of more lebensraum ought to be watched with concern. But analysts should be careful about attributing any particular genocide, such as Rwanda’s in 1994, to a cause as simplistic as “overpopulation.” Overpopulation alone does not explain every genocide.



IMPACT – TYRANNY/ECO DESTRUCTION

Tyranny is justified – the current political scheme is founded upon ignorance and corruption, destroying the world and inevitably resulting in social collapseOphuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, editor Dennis Pirages, p 35]

Berlin marshals a powerful case in favor of liberty and against freedom (in the positive sense): it is possible, he says “to coerce men in the name of some [worthy] goal… which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt.” Or, to put it more bluntly, tyranny can be (and has been) justified in the name of freedom, so let us for God’s sake cleave liberty at all costs, abandoning any hope of fulfilling our “higher nature” by political means. Moreover, since individuals differ fundamentally in their psychological makeup, they must be allowed to pursue their own self-defined ends, lest they be oppressed. Thus we must not only eschew the kind of ideologies that lead to tyranny, but we must learn to tolerate the astonishing diversity that results when individuals are liberated from traditional social restraints.6Alas, although liberty is undeniably attractive as a political principle – who would not wish to be free of all constraints except the need to keep the peace? – the theoretical cogency of the libertarian position is belied by the practical outcome it has produced. Polities founded on the concept of negative freedom, or mere liberty, are now experiencing not only ecological degeneration from without, but also moral decay from within – precisely because they believe in nothing positive.7 That some more positive ideal of freedom is indispensible will be clear once we understand how mere liberty engenders a process of moral entropy that leads ultimately to social collapse.



IMPACT – CRIME

The current order makes social decay inevitable – effects like crime are just a product of liberal rights to conveniences Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 37-38]

With respect to crime, for example, the principal duty of the liberal state is to keep the peace by suppressing deviant behavior. For this reason it is often called “the night watchman state.” As we all know, however, the watchman has fallen down on the job: despite prisons packed to the rafters with vicious criminals, there are even more out prowling the streets . Indeed, in a stark admission that the authorities have lsot control of the nation’s capital, already one of the most heavily policed cities in the country, the mayor of Washington in October 1993 asked the president to send in the National Guard to help stem the rising tide of murder and mayhem. How could it be that the liberal state of today – especially in the United States, but increasingly in all other modern polities as well – is failing to perform its one essential function (and a purely negative one at that)? Leaving aside all sociological complexities, the answer is that crime is the logical and, indeed, inevitable consequence of living by Hobbesian premises. When all members of the society are not only thrown into a fierce competition with each other for access to the sources of satisfaction, but also into a Sadean moral wasteland in which that satisfaction is the ultimate and only value. Eventually all that restrains them is fear of the watchman’s club – and when that ceases to intimidate, crime is bound to flourish. Those who take to a life of crime in the urban wastelands of today are simply good Hobbesians: if the sovereign does not provide enough of the necessary and appropriate “conveniances” of life, then you owe the state and society neither loyalty nor obedience. As Hannah Arendt put it, “Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts’ organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie’s moral philosophy.”11 In sum, the practical effect of Hobbesian polity is paradoxically to encourage just the kind of lawless violence that it is supposed to prevent, because living by Hobbesian premises over the long term fosters a vicious circle of antisocial behavior that tends toward the state of nature and the war of all against all.



TURNS THE K AFF – HA!

A long transition to Authoritarian regime genocides those economically disadvantaged – turns their moral ethicHanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 2003 [Jay, “Jay Hanson: Interview,” by Scott Meredith, 6-21-2003, http://www.wordwright.com.au/paul/HansonSummingUpInterview.htm]Q: I have often felt that people have misunderstood the structural essentials of the doom that you foresee. Many people seem to grasp a simple idea of “Depletion = Die off”, assuming you mean that we’ll simply freeze in the dark, and they react with approval or dismissal, depending on their politics, as usual. But what you say is more articulated than that. You actually posit a two-stage process. First, economic trainwreck triggered by, not the final stages of depletion, but by the Oil Peak itself, followed by, Second, horrendous wars fought by the great powers desperately hoping to secure the final precious reserves to themselves. This second stage would culminate in a horrific inversion, whereby “global elites” will decide to directly immolate the vast hordes of poor, ignorant, “useless eaters” of the world, via some kind of bio-weapon. In other words, not so much a “Die off” but rather a “Kill off”. Is this sketch of your analysis roughly correct?A: Your snapshot is essentially correct. But a great deal of death will occur because food and water supply lines will collapse. Food cannot be grown in anything like the quantities we need without oil and natural gas. Moreover, neither food nor water can be delivered without oil and gas. Cities like Las Vegas must become uninhabitable deserts again. The population of Southern California must fall to a few hundred thousand again. In Canada, water pipes will freeze in the winter without gas. It’s a very long list, I can’t guess how many will die from each.Q: Do you buy into conspiracy theories that posit various organizational mechanisms as the likely planners and implementers of a big “Kill-off” (e.g. Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Masons, Bilderberg, etc.)? Or, do you assume that the existing governments, or the US government alone, would be sufficient to straight-forwardly implement the “Kill-off”?A: I don’t think it matters. At any future point in time when people feel threatened, when the ruling elite is threatened, when the mob is at the gates, they’ll find a way to protect themselves. The details are not important. But that’s what I would do if I were them – get rid of them, kill them all. You have to remember, it’s like playing golf as far as the genes are concerned. It’s that easy. America is the best place to ride out the coming crash because it has the best “means of control” to keep public order and protect us from intruders.


http://www.wordwright.com.au/paul/HansonSummingUpInterview.htm


A2: IMPACT TURN

Increases in liberty have just resulted in social and moral decay – that’s the cause of the 1AC harmsOphuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 37]

To speak more generally about the nature of this new moral climate, bourgeois man (and I will get to bourgeiois woman in a moment) was no longer content with mere political and economic liberty. He began to clamor for social and psychological libery as well – that is, for “liberation” from the inner repression involved in submitting to the demands of “civilization.” (Although Freud often m receives the credit or blame for this development, he is really only a convenient symbol for a cultural upheaval affecting everything from high art to popular attitudes.) Twentieth-century history is therefore the record of how the “immoralism: of the avant-garde spread to the common man . That is to say, it is the chronicle of an orgy of “desublimination,” an explosive release of hitherto repressed fantasies and desires, along with a resolute rejection of the social conventions that presumed to channel or forbid their expression. In this fashion, the moral entropy that is intrinsic to the liberal order has slowly but steadily eroded both the moral legacy of the Middle Ages and the bourgeois rectitude of the Protestant ethic. A vicious circle of decay in both morals and mores has propelled us toward a social collapse whose details – crime, broken families, drug addiction, and the like – are so well known as to require neither documentation nor discussion. However, a closer look at two aspects of the vicious circle will further illuminate my general point.



A2: CURRENT CIVILIZATION GOOD - MASKING

They only claim it’s good because they want an easy short route, hiding its faultsViederman, former President of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, a middle size philanthropic foundation that supports organizing and advocacy at the intersections of the environment, reproductive rights, community and social justice, 1996 [Stephen, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 3 “Sustainability’s Five Capitals and Three Pillars,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 46]

Medieval theology, or the Roman corruption of morals, poisoned only their own people, a small part of mankind; today, electricity, railways and telegraphs spoil the world. Everyone makes these thing his own. He simply cannot help making them his own. Everyone suffers in the same way, is forced to the same extent to change his way of life. All are under the necessity of betraying what is most important for their lives, the understanding of life itself, religion. Machines – to produce what? The telegraph – to dispatch what? Millions of people herded together and subject to a supreme power – to accomplish what? Hospitals, physicians, dispensaries in order to prolong life – for what? How easily do individuals as well as whole nations take their own so-called civilization as the true civilization: finishing one’s studies, keeping one’s nails clean, using the tailor’s and the barber’s services, travelling abroad, and the most civilized man is complete. And with regard to nations: as many railways as possible, academies, industrial works, battleships, forts, newspapers, books, parties, parliaments. Thus the most civilized nation is complete. Enough individuals, therefore as well as nations can be interested in civilization but not in true enlightenment. The former is easy and meets with approval; the latter requires rigorous efforts and therefore, from the great majority, always meets with nothing but contempt and hatred, for it exposes the lie of civilization.



GLOBAL ECONOMY UNSUSTAINABLE

Lack of connectivity means the global economy is unsustainableViederman, former President of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, a middle size philanthropic foundation that supports organizing and advocacy at the intersections of the environment, reproductive rights, community and social justice, 1996 [Stephen, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 3 “Sustainability’s Five Capitals and Three Pillars,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 51-52]

Perhaps the system most in need of overhaul is the global economic system – I never suggested sustainability would be easy. The question “Can a global economy work?” is often asked. However, a more important question is seldom raised: “Can there be economic security, ecological integrity, or democracy in a global economy?” In a world economy characterized by virtually uncontrolled capital mobility, sustainability is likely to be unattainable. Why? Economic security is virtually impossible at the level of the family, the community, the state, and limited even at the national level. There is no locus of control that respects the three pillars of sustainability. Note, for example, a report, a report on the 1993 gubernatorial election in New Jersey. The challenger blamed the incumbent for having lost 280,000 jobs as a result of the large tax increase he pursued three years ago. The New York Times reporter astutely observed: “Beyond the campaign oratory, there is a broader question: How much can a governor, or nay state official, do about a state’s economy, especially when market forces operate not only nationally but internationally?”14The global economy underlines the lack of connection between production and place, as demonstrated by the historian William Cronon in his history of Chicago. This in turn limits the commitment of the corporation to place, except perhaps in the very short term, which is then reflected in the corporation’s lack of commitment to the social and ecological infrastructure of the place. What is allegedly good on a global scale for Kodak or Xerox when those companies lay off ten thousand workers is not good Rochester, New York, where they are based.



A2: ENVIRONMENT

ONLY THE STEADY STATE CAN BALANCE THE MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS’ THE CRUNCH WILL CAUSEDE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996 [Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls’ Solution., p192, Routledge Publishing]

A fourth reason for viewing the state as an essential actor in the field of the environment is that there is a strong need for impartial expertise and the formulation of boundary conditions for sustainable development (e.g. what is a responsible and sustainable utilisation of the environmental wealth of the biosphere per inhabitant). What is needed is a collection of expertise to measure the level of pollution caused by certain specific kinds of behaviour, to decide what are 'safe' emission levels and norms, to set criteria for environmentally dangerous substances, and to collect relevant information concerning the possibilities for preventing and combating different kinds of pollution. These are complicated tasks that require large-scale and expensive application of funds, which can be provided only by a state with sufficient financial strength standing above the parties concerned. Taking into account the interests that are implied in environmental policies, it is of the utmost importance that this expertise is of an independent character and is not in the grip of highly influential societal groups, like trade and industry. In green critiques the state is often seen as structurally committed to adopting a pro-business stance. The impartiality that is needed must go so far that criteria, norms, measures and solutions are adopted which are necessary for environmental protection, even when they are disagreeable for, or even detrimental to, certain influential interest groups.

CENTRALIZATION IS KEY TO ACCOUNTABILITY—DECENTRALIZATION ALLOWS NO ONE TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATIONDE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996 [Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls’ Solution., p196-197, Routledge Publishing]

A third disadvantage of fundamental decentralisation seems to be the danger of parochialism and especially the very short distance between governors and those being governed. In small communities a tendency to give priority to one's own interests and to consider the outside world as hostile can easily arise. This could lead to the inclination to try to pass on the locally produced pollution to the surrounding area, as was argued above regarding the free-rider dilemma. As pointed out by Robyn Eckersley: historically most progressive social and environmental legislative changes-ranging from affirmative action, human rights protection, and homosexual law reform to the preservation of wilderness areas-have tended to emanate from more cosmopolitan central governments rather than provincial or local decision making bodies. In many instances, such reforms have been carried through by central governments in the face of opposition from the local community or region affected-a situation that has been the hallmark of many environmental battles. (Eckersley 1992:173-4) The short distance between governors and those being governed which is the direct consequence of decentralisation implies that the former might be reluctant to take disagreeable measures. Because of the close contacts between 'rulers' and 'ruled' it is difficult for the former to take a detached view, and this is fertile ground for the favouring of acquaintances, closing of eyes to abuses, and cover-ups. It was shown in the Netherlands that municipalities (in particular) are not very strict with the granting of permits to pollute to factories, farmers, and small traders and that in general the local officers do not tend to punish transgressions of environmental laws according to the official rules (Groen 1991:6). In the southern Dutch provinces like Noord Brabant and Limburg, investigations showed that the predominantly christian democratic mayors and aldermen have had the utmost difficulties-to say the least-in maintaining the quite strict national environmental regulations which they have to impose on their voters (the farmers and agriculturists who are their neighbours and friends, and who make up their own constituency). The Dutch national policy to restrict the production of manure, and to curtail the extensive use of fertilisers, insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, has become a complete failure for that reason. Higher levels of government, like regions or provinces, are more distant from the local population, but this makes them far less vulnerable than decentralised communities to local interests, favouritism, nepotism and the tendency to spare their own citizens (Wijkhuizen 1992:10-15).



AT: SQ SOLVES ENVIRONMENT

Current policies are only token reforms – they don’t create sustainabilityAlperoviz, Prof of Pol Econ @ the U of Maryland, former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, 1996 [Gar, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 4 “Sustainability and the ‘System Problem’,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 59-60]

Part of our difficulty in confronting the system issue on the environmental front is that we often have trouble distinguishing between reforms that help ameliorate the worst aspects of environmental degradation and those changes that actually result in altering trends . At the most general level, positive movement that diminishes harmful impact on the environment of course occurs within capitalist systems. Legislation is passed that helps control pollution; progress is made in eliminating lead and chlorofluorocarbons; there are improvements in the reduction of sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulates. Let me urge, however, that it is absolutely essential that we discriminate much more clearly among the following three categories of change: “A,” occasional breakthroughs; “B,” token reforms and “gains”; and “C,” significant long term trend reversals . Although most of our environmental debate is focused on fostering occasional breakthroughs, token reforms, and “gains” – and certainly efforts at policy reform reflect this – a great deal of evidence points to the conclusion that the basic outcome trends that matter most in terms of sustainability are commonly not significantly affected by the A and B type improvements.



A2: SPACE COL

Space Colonization is impossible, and even if it is possible it will start an intergalactic warDaleiden, 1999 [Joseph L., served as an economic consultant to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Carter administration, and as Director of Corporate Planning for Ameritech. He and has written and lectured extensively on public policy issues, The American Dream, Can it Survive the 21st Century?, pp.64-98]

One final note: some wild - eyed optimists believe that after filling the earth to capacity we will just move to other planets , sort of like the Europeans who moved to the new world of the Americas. We already know, however, that there are no inhabitable planets in our own solar system. (Of course we could build some ecopod to house a few dozen or perhaps even a few hundred people on a barren and inhospitable moon or perhaps Mars, but only at a huge cost.) To find a livable planet, we need to travel to other solar systems, and there is the rub As Garrett Hardin explains, the nearest star to the earth is Alpha Centauri which is four light years away.* Traveling at the present rate of space speeds ―about twenty-five thousand mph― it would take 114,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Even assuming we could boost the speed to twenty-two million mph ―which may or may not be theoretically possible― it would take 125 years for the trip, i.e., four to five generations. And at the present birth rate, to keep the population of the earth from increasing further we would have to send off a quarter million people a day! Considering that it costs about $1 billion to build a submarine to house 140 sailors for a year, the cost of just one vehicle to house and support a quarter million people for 125 years is almost unimaginable. Even with economies of scale, one trillion dollars per spaceship would seem a bargain. And we would need to build one a day!89There is no evidence that Alpha Centauri has any planets ―in fact the odds are against it. The closest star with planets appears to be over eight light years away, and the likelihood that those planets are inhabitable is extremely small. Moreover, what if we discover there is already intelligent life on another planet? Does that give us the right to invade and conquer the indigenous people (assuming we could) so that we can export our surplus population? It never occurs to science fiction writers that from the perspective of any other planet with an indigenous population, we would be the space aliens. Perhaps only Native Americans can appreciate this irony.Finally, during those five generations of space travel, the voyagers would have to limit their population to replacement levels only (i.e., births - deaths = zero). But if we can get to zero population growth on the space vehicle, why not do it here on earth in the first place, saving all that absurd effort? It should be obvious to all but the most obtuse that the notion of populating distant solar systems to solve the earth's population problem is preposterous. Nevertheless, some people will clutch at any solution, no matter how absurd, to avoid taking the necessary actions dictated by circumstances.



A2: TECH SOLVES

Technology has only allowed us to artificially sustain life, while exponentially increasing the effects that deplete it – we will be pushed over the edgeScience Encyclopedia Vol 1 , 2K9 [Net Industries, “Carrying Capacity - Carrying capacity for humans,” http://science.jrank.org/pages/1244/Carrying-Capacity.html]

Carrying capacity is never static. It varies over time in response to gradual environmental changes, perhaps associated with climatic change or the successional development of ecosystems. More rapid changes in carrying capacity may be caused by disturbances of the habitat occurring because of a fire or windstorm, or because of a human influence such as timber harvesting, pollution, or the introduction of a non-native competitor, predator, or disease. Carrying capacity can also be damaged by overpopulation, which leads to excessive exploitation of resources and a degradation of the habitat's ability to support the species. Of course, birth and death rates of a species must respond to changes in carrying capacity along with changes in other factors, such as the intensities of disease or predation.Humans, like all organisms, can only sustain themselves and their populations by having access to the products and services of their environment, including those of other species and ecosystems. However, humans are clever at developing and using technologies; as a result they have an unparalleled ability to manipulate the carrying capacity of the environment in support of their own activities. When prehistoric humans first discovered that crude tools and weapons allowed greater effectiveness in gathering wild foods and hunting animals, they effectively increased the carrying capacity of the environment for their species. The subsequent development and improvement of agricultural systems has had a similar effect, as have discoveries in medicine and industrial technology.Clearly, the cultural evolution of human socio-technological systems has allowed enormous increases to be achieved in carrying capacity for our species. This increased effectiveness of environmental exploitation has allowed a tremendous multiplying of the human population to occur. In prehistoric times (that is, more than 10,000 years ago) all humans were engaged in a primitive hunting and gathering lifestyle, and their global population probably amounted to several million individuals. In the year 2000, because humans have been so adept at increasing the carrying capacity of their environment, more than six billion individuals were sustained, and the global population is still increasing.Humans have also increased the carrying capacity of the environment for a few other species, including those with which we live in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Those companion species include more than about 20 billion domestic animals such as cows, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, and chickens, as well as certain plants such as wheat, rice, barley, maize, tomato, and cabbage. Clearly, humans and their selected companions have benefited greatly through active management of Earth's carrying capacity.However, an enormously greater number of Earth's species have not fared as well, having been displaced or made extinct as a consequence of ecological changes associated with the use and management of the environment by humans, especially through loss of their habitat and over harvesting. In general, any increase in the carrying capacity of the environment for one species will negatively affect other species.In addition, there are increasingly powerful indications that the intensity of environmental exploitation required to sustain the large populations of humans and our symbionts is causing important degradations of carrying capacity. Symptoms of this environmental deterioration include the extinction crisis, decreased soil fertility, desertification, deforestation, fishery declines, pollution, and increased competition among nations for scarce resources. Many reputable scientists believe that the sustainable limits of Earth's carrying capacity for the human enterprise may already have been exceeded. This is a worrisome circumstance, especially because it is predicted that there will be additional large increases in the global population of humans. The degradation of Earth's carrying capacity for humans is associated with two integrated factors: (1) overpopulation and (2) the intensity of resource use and pollution. In recent decades human populations have been growing most quickly in poorer countries, but the most intense lifestyles occur in the richest countries.

No matter how superawesome technology is it can’t recreate resources – We must change our social and behavioral patterns Rees, professor at the University of British Columbia, PhD degree in population ecology, serves on the National Board of Advisors of the Carrying Capacity Network, 1995 [William, “OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT,” Wackernagel and Rees; New Society Pub., http://dieoff.org/page13.htm]Today, of course, humankind has become a global culture, one increasingly driven by a philosophy of competitive expansionism, one which is subduing and consuming the Earth. The problem is that, unlike the wasp, even the fattest and richest among us have no means to abandon the withered hulk of our habitat once consumed and there is no evidence yet of other Earth-like "mushrooms" in our galactic forest.The good news is that—also unlike the wasp—humans are gifted by the potential for self-awareness and intelligent choice, and knowing our circumstances is an invitation to change.The first step toward reducing our ecological impact is to recognize that the environmental crisis" is less an environmental and technical problem than it is a behavioral and social one. It can therefore be resolved only with the help of behavioral and social solutions. On a finite planet, at human carrying capacity, a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle. Certainly human beings are competitive organisms but they are also cooperative social beings. Indeed, it is no small irony (but one that seems to have escaped many policy advisors today) that some of the most economically and competitively successful societies have been the most internally cooperative—those with the greatest stocks of cultural and social capital.


http://dieoff.org/page13.htm

http://science.jrank.org/pages/1244/Carrying-Capacity.html

http://science.jrank.org/collection/1/Gale-Encyclopedia-Science.html


A2: TECH SOLVES

Global technology production has peaked – we can’t bank our future on the hopes of innovationAdler, Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Vienna, inventor who held numerous patents, awarded an Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 2K5 [Robert, “Entering a dark age of innovation,” 7-2-2005, p1/2, New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation.html]

But Huebner is confident of his facts. He has long been struck by the fact that promised advances were not appearing as quickly as predicted. "I wondered if there was a reason for this," he says. "Perhaps there is a limit to what technology can achieve."In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him.Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.The period between 1873 and 1915 was certainly an innovative one. For instance, it included the major patent-producing years of America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, including the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph.Medieval futureHuebner draws some stark lessons from his analysis. The global rate of innovation today , which is running at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology", Huebner says.Extrapolating Huebner's global innovation curve just two decades into the future, the innovation rate plummets to medieval levels. "We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages," Huebner says. "We'll reach that in 2024."

Technology won’t be effective enough to overcome the impacts of scarcity – a consensus of ecologist are on our sideKates, Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College, 2004 [“Reproductive Liberty and Overpopulation,” Environmental Values, February, http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/philrel/replib.pdf]


http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/philrel/replib.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation.html


A2: DEMOCRACY

Only an Authoritarian state can resist trade and industry – Democracies would be coopted.DE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996 [Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls’ Solution., p191, Routledge Publishing] A second reason to consider the state as an organisation of vital importance in order to tackle environmental problems is that industry forms a very strong centre of power in modern liberal democracy. Trade and industry will not voluntarily decide to decrease current levels of pollution. Only a robust centre of power-the state-will be able to resist the influence of organised trade and industry, whose primary goals are growth of production, increasing profits and long-term survival in a strongly competitive market economy, not protection of the environment. The power of enterprises, especially that of multi-nationals, can be neutralised only by the strong countervailing power of an energetic state organisation (or a strong supra-national organisation) that will take into account the interests of others, like those of individual citizens and future generations.

Unrestrained Liberty is empirically destructive and unsustainable – to achieve real freedom, Rights must be restrainedOphuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 41-42]

Indeed, the fundamental problem with liberal polities is that they do not actually govern, except in the most minimal sense. According to my dictionary, to govern means to control, guide, direct, and restrain. This is precisely what liberal governments are not supposed to do in theory and what they try not to do in practice . (Now, of course, they are more and more obliged to do so by force of circumstance – but largely to remedy problems, rather than to achieve positive ends.) To govern in the true sense, however, is always to control, guide, direct, and restrain in accordance with some political and social ideal. Otherwise it is not government, but democracy at best and tyranny at worst . In sum, we now need to govern – to control, guide, direct, and restrain individuals who would otherwise behave selfishly and destructively, so that they respect the interests and needs of the larger human and natural community of which they are a part . It seems that Rousseau was right. As he predicted, the unbridled individualism and unrestrained hedonism of liberal polity have proven to be morally and socially destructive. A politics based on mere liberty is unsustainable: to achieve real freedom, we must govern our appetites. Whether we like it or not, therefore, we must be politically encourage to higher ends than self-gratification and self-aggrandizement. We must, in other words, be “forced to be free.” But this does not mean to be tyrannized, only to be governed by our own consent in accordance with some notion of morality and some vision or the good life. And Rousseau was convinced, as I am, that to be so governed leads ultimately to a greater happiness than can be found in gratifying ego’s desires – to the genuine felicity that only arises when we give ourselves to some higher purpose, some larger enterprise, than mere appetite.

Authoritarian governments are super awesome – they’re the only ones who will save us in the crunchHEILBRONER, Ecologist and Author of books on philosophy, the environment and economics, 1974 [An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, p. 110]

Finally, and with great reluctance, I must advance one last implication of my argument. It is customary to recognize, but to deplore, the authoritarian tendencies within civil society, especially on the part of those who, like myself, are the beneficiaries of the freedoms of minimally authority-ridden rule. Yet, candor compels me to suggest that the passage through the gantlet ahead may be possible only under governments capable of rallying obedience far more effectively than would be possible in a democratic setting. If the issue for mankind is survival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary. What our speculative analysis provides is not an apologia for these governments, but a basis for understanding the critical support that they may be able to provide for a people who will need, over and above a solution of their difficulties, a mitigation of their existential anxieties.



A2: PEOPLE ARE GOOD

Who are you kidding? People inherently suck when they aren’t ruled by force.Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 2 “Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 39]

The fatal flaw in Hobbe’s political philosophy was identified centuries ago by Aristotle: For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice … [because he] is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence, when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals.12By renouncing the aim of perfecting the political animal – that is, of teaching him to use his “weapons” for wise and virtuous ends, instead of for contrary ones – the liberal polities founded on Hobbesian premises effectively abandoned the vocation of politics. It was thus inevitable that “the best of animals when perfected” would be progressively “sundered from law and justice” and gradually turned into “the worst of all” – into an immoral creature of will and appetite who must be ruled by force, if he can be ruled at all. In the end, therefore, although the negative concept of freedom is attractive on many grounds, both theoretical and practical, mere liberty is not and can never be the basis for a workable philosophy of politics over the long term. Man’s “weapons for… wisdom and virtue” must be directed at positive ends, or the resulting social order is bound to be both “unholy and savage.”



A2: RACE TO BOTTOM

The steady state solves the race to the bottomDE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996 [Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls’ Solution., p191-192, Routledge Publishing]

A third reason for a central role for the state is to prevent counter-productive relations of competition between enterprises. Often enterprises find themselves in a stalemate. Companies that are prepared to behave in a more environmentally friendly way run the risk of being eliminated from the market, because of the higher prices of their products. When they, as forerunners, opt for extensive environmental investments and the passing on of the so-called 'external costs', their products become comparatively too expensive. The competitiveness of companies that move too quickly with environmental policies can easily be endangered. Enterprises that continue to produce high levels of pollution have lower production costs and are thus able to offer their goods to the market more cheaply. The result of this mechanism is that companies that dare to take the initiative will be punished by the consumer, unless the environmentally friendly character of the products is decisive for the consumer, despite the price that has to be paid. When a state or a supra-national organisation exists that enacts uniform environmental rules and emission norms for all enterprises in a certain branch of industry, the above-mentioned counterproductive relations of competition can be avoided. Because similar demands are put on all companies, 'open and just relations of competition' will prevail and nobody can hide behind the argument that forerunners in the domain of environmental measures run the risk of being harmed by the consumer via the market mechanism.



A2: FREE SPEECH

No such thing as free speech – the media bias controls what is heardOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics]

But the first casualty in any war is always the truth, so hyperpluralism has inundated the polity in lies and half-truths. The problem is inherent in a liberal polity: because the goal is to satisfy private wants rather than to achieve public ends, all political arguments are likely to be more or less unconscious rationalizations of private prejudice and self-interest (with appeals to the common good thrown in simply as rhetorical camouflage). This tendency is bolstered by the previously noted propensity to withdraw into "small coteries" of the ideologically like-minded, with the result that genuine dialogue among differing groups or viewpoints has become a rare phenomenon in American life. The intense partisanship of hyperpluralism only makes matters that much worse: with politics now seen as a zero-sum game, in which a win by one side is a defeat for the other, confrontation tends to be total. Political discourse, such as it is in liberal society, therefore gives way to propaganda barrages designed to shut up or shout down the opposition. There is not even the pretense of considering other views. And the end justifies the means, so both sides resort to what used to be called the big lie, as when those opposing abortion hold up pickled fetuses and those favoring it brandish coat hangers--visceral symbols that bypass all the political, legal, moral, and emotional complexities of this excruciating issue.



AT: MORALITY

We can restrict rights if it’s not in their best interest – weigh those rights against extinction from the crunchRaz, influential legal, moral and political philosopher, one of the most prominent living advocates of legal positivism, 1986

[Joseph, Clarendon Press, p180-183, The Morality of Freedom, Individualistic Freedom, The Nature of Rights, won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize from the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and The Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize from the conference for the Study of Political Thought, NY.According to the definition, rights-discourse indicates a kind of ground for a requirement of action. To say that a person ought to behave in a certain way is to assert a requirement for action without indicating its ground. To assert that an individual has a right is to indicate a ground for a requirement for action of a certain kind, i.e. that an aspect of his well-being is a ground for a duty on another person. The specific role of rights in practical thinking is, therefore, the grounding of duties in the interests of other beings. Rights ground requirements for action in the interest of other beings. They therefore assume special importance in individualistic moral thinking. But belief in the existence of rights does not commit one to individualism. States, corporations and groups may be right-holders. Banks have legal and moral rights. Nations are commonly believed to have a right of self-determination, and so on. Though rights are based on the interests of the rightholders, an individual may have rights which it is against his interest to have. A person may have property which is more trouble than it is worth. It may be in a person's interest to be imprisoned, even while he has a right to freedom. The explanation of this puzzle is that rights are vested in rightholders because they possess certain general characteristics: they are the beneficiaries of promises, nationals of a certain state, etc. Their rights serve their interests as persons with those characteristics, but they may be against their interests overall. Some rights are held by persons as the agents, or organs of others. Thus company directors have rights as directors of the company. In such cases it is the interest of the principal which the right reflects. The same applies to rights held by persons qua guardians, trustees and the like. The proposed definition of rights identified the interest on which the right is based as the reason for holding that some persons have certain duties. Later on I referred to the rights themselves as being the grounds for those duties. The explanation is simple. The interests are part of the justification of the rights which are part of the justification of the duties. Assertions of rights are typically intermediate conclusions in arguments from ultimate values to duties. They are, so to speak, points in the argument where many considerations intersect and where the results of their conflicts are summarized to be used with additional premisses when need be. Such intermediate conclusions are used and referred to as if they are themselves complete reasons. The fact that practical arguments proceed through the mediation of intermediate stages so that not every time a practical question arises does one refer to ultimate values for an answer is, as we saw when discussing rules in Chapter Three, of crucial importance in making social life possible, not only because it saves time and tediousness, but primarily because it enables a common culture to be formed round shared intermediate conclusions, in spite of a great degree of haziness and disagreement concerning ultimate values. For example, many who agree that people have a right to promise will disagree with my view, expressed above, of the interest on which it is based and will justify it only by reference to some other interests of the right-holders. The importance of intermediate steps like rights, duties, rules and the like to a common culture explains and justifies the practice of referring to them as reasons in their own right, albeit not ultimate reasons. An interest is sufficient to base a right on if and only if there is a sound argument of which the conclusion is that a certain right exists and among its non-redundant premisses is a statement of some interest of the right-holder, the other premises supplying grounds for attributing to it the required importance, or for holding it to be relevant to a particular person or class of persons so that they rather than others are obligated to the right-holder. These premisses must be sufficient by themselves to entail that if there are no contrary considerations then the individuals concerned have the right. To these premisses one needs to add others stating or establishing that these grounds are not altogether defeated by conflicting reasons .! Together they establish the existence of the right. One result of the fact that a right exists where the interests of the right-holders are sufficient to hold another to be obligated should be noted. Sometimes the fact that an action will serve someone's interest, while being a reason for doing it, is not sufficient to establish a duty to do it. Different moral theories differ on this point. Some utilitarian theories deny that there is a useful distinction between moral reasons for action and duties. Some moral views confine duties to matters affecting human needs, or human dignity, etc. Be that as it may, it is in principle possible that a person should not have a right that others shall act to promote a certain interest of his simply on account of the fact that while they should do so, while it is praiseworthy or virtuous of them if they do, they have no obligation so to act. These considerations help to explain how it is that even if a person has a right, not everyone is necessarily under an obligation to do whatever will promote the interest on which it is based. Rights are held against certain persons. Some rights are held against the world at large, i.e. against all persons or against all with certain specified exceptions. Thus the right to personal security is the ground of a duty on everyone not to assault, imprison or rape a person. Other rights are held against certain persons in virtue of a special relation they have to the right-holder . Thus children have a right to be maintained by their parents. The reasons many rights are against some definite people are varied. Sometimes the interests on which they are based can be satisfied only by some people and not by others. For example, since contractual rights are based on an interest in being able to create special relations, they give rise to rights against other parties to the agreement as they are the only ones who can satisfy that interest on that occasion. In other cases, even though many can satisfy the interests of the right-holder, these interests may be sufficient to establish a duty on some people and not on others.Just as rights may impose duties on some persons and not on others, so they can impose a duty to do certain things but not others. The right to life may impose a duty not to kill or endanger the life of another without imposing a duty to take whatever action is necessary to keep him alive. Which duties a right gives rise to depends partly on the basis of that right, on the considerations justifying its existence. It also depends on the absence of conflicting considerations. If conflicting considerations show that the basis of the would-be right is not enough to justify subjecting anyone to any duty, then the right does not exist. But often such conflicting considerations, while sufficient to show that some action cannot be required as a duty on the basis of the would-be right, do not affect the case for requiring other actions as a matter of duty. In such cases, the right exists, but it successfully grounds duties only for some of the actions which could promote the interest on which it is based.



AT: MORALITY

Rights calculations must be made in context of ecological destructionHardin, PhD in microbiology, Professor of Human Ecology, 2006 [Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980, “Limited World, Limited Rights,” http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]The principal intellectual opposition in our time comes from those who see the concept of translegal rights as a necessity for the evolution and rationalization of law. H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin are distinguished proponents of this view. Dworkin says we cannot understand statute law without presupposing deep principles which, though not stated explicitly in the statutes, pervade all laws and all proposals to change law. This is certainly a plausible view; yet a scientist cannot but note the family resemblance between this concept of natural law and the concept of the "ether" held to be indispensable in physics for more than two centuries. The wavelike properties of light were regarded as evidence of the existence of a medium – “ether" – in which waves could move, even though there was no positive evidence for the existence of such an ubiquitous, substanceless entity. Around the turn of the present century, the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's relativity theory removed the intellectual underpinnings of "ether," and physicists found they could get on quite well without the concept. Perhaps the concept of translegal rights will some day be recognized as being equally dispensable. Without settling the eventual fate of natural rights, we can usefully point out a number of the properties of rights, whether natural or legal. Rights imply more than they say. When a right is demanded by a human being from a. nonhuman universe, no controversy ensues. If Robinson Crusoe feels that he has a right to food, let him set about getting it. Either he will succeed and live, or fail and die; in neither case is controversy created. But when a human being in a world crowded with some four billion other human beings asserts a right, he asserts a claim upon his fellow beings, a claim that cannot be accepted without proof of its value to the community.

Doing good is defined as what is best for the Human SpeciesDyck, Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics in the School of Public Health, and a member of the Faculty of Divinity at Harvard University, 2K5 [Arthur J., Rethinking RIGHTS and RESPONSIBILITIES: The Moral Bonds of Community, Goodness Is More Powerful than Evil, Georgetown University Press, Revised Edition, p142-147] The term goodness here refers not only to what is being accomplished by morally responsible activities, but also to positive dispositions toward morally responsible actions and toward the powers necessary to carry them out. In our conversation, Hal was thinking of goodness as survival of the human species and the altruistic behavior necessary to actualize that survival. Evil would constitute maladaptive behavior, relative to survival; such behavior would be nonaltruistic or contrary to what altruism would demand of us. Hal believed that, in the struggle for survival, altruistic behavior has been powerful enough to produce progress. Increased altruism not only makes survival more likely, but also leads to increased self-consciousness and knowledge, and hence greater ability to adapt to our environment. This is one way to frame the greater relative power of goodness over evil. As noted earlier in this chapter, I am willing to affirm that we do attain a higher degree of self-consciousness and intelligence relative to other animals by means of the long period of altruistic nurture and education we provide for our young. In addition, we have made progress if that means self consciousness and knowledge have increased over time. However, more theoretical and technical knowledge brings with it a greater capacity for evil as well as for good. And, tragically, the twentieth century has been the arena for massive destruction of life and the enormous increase in firepower that makes such destruction quickly and efficiently possible. But that is not all. So much of the killing and maiming is inflicted on unarmed and helpless innocent persons; these are the victims of genocide, terrorism, or torture. My confidence that good is superior in power relative to evil is not based on any calculus that, in the world as we know it, the amount of good is increasing. I do not even know how to make such a quantitative assessment.. Who does?

We have an obligation to act toward the environment for future humanityHardin, PhD in microbiology, Professor of Human Ecology, 2003 [Garrett, “From Shortage to Longage: Forty Years in the Population Vineyards,” Originally written 1991, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_from_shortage_to_longage.html]With a few or no exceptions close examination of the economy of nations that chronically suffer from starvation reveals that the production factors are already severely over-stressed. In Ethiopia, land that should not be farmed is farmed, with a resultant loss of soil; too many animals are kept on the pasture lands, leading to the loss of soil and the replacement of "sweet grass" by weeds; and bushes and trees are removed from steep slopes resulting in a loss of soil that ultimately makes the reestablishment of woody plants impossible. (Internationalists should note that soil lost from the mountains of Ethiopia becomes silt in Egypt's Lake Nasser, thus shortening the useful lifetime of the High Aswam Dam.) When a country is overpopulated-when its population is greater than the carrying capacity of its land, whatever standard of living is used in reaching a judgementsaving lives today by direct gifts of food ensures that more lives will be lost tomorrow because of the increased environmental destruction made possible by the encouragement of population growth. The time-blind ideal, "Human life is sacred," is counterproductive. "'Sacred," like all old words, has many meanings and connotations. What we are concerned with here is its related meaning of sacrosanct or inviolable. When disputants say that human life is sacred they clearly mean that we should preserve every human being now living regardless of the cost, either now or in the future. Though not given to using emotionally charged words, an ecologist would be more inclined to say that the environment, not human beings, is sacrosanct. The moment this proposition is advanced the conventional moralist expostulates: "Oh! You mean you prefer the life of dickey-birds to human beings? You prefer redwood trees to people?"We have all heard such contemptuous questions. The questioner misses the point. Ecologists confer sacrosanctity on the carrying capacity of the environment in order to better the condition of men and women in the continuing future. When an ecological moralist proposes an Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity," he is trying to improve the quality of life over a long period of time. Redwood trees and dickey-birds are seen as the symbols of the good life for human beings. Environmental extremists may talk of an undefined intrinsic value of the environment, but we need not follow them down this dubious rhetorical path. When we recommend that Ethiopians refrain from overgrazing their pastures and overharvesting their woody mountains we need not demand that they worship the landscape, merely that they take thought of what the environment will have to offer their descendants. A time-sensitive system of ethics cannot be blind to environmental values.


http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_from_shortage_to_longage.html



AT: MORALITY

There won’t be a choice for your morality claimsOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, p. 164]

This raises a terrible specter: What if it goes on the rocks? What if the administrative despotisms of our time run out of ecological living space, implode under their own bureaucratic weight, encounter progressive technological failure, partially annihilate themselves with weapons of mass destruction, or find themselves unable to cope with declining morale and increasing madness among their subjects? Will they then abandon Huxley for Orwell? When they no longer deliver benefits, but mostly exact sacrifice and obedience, it will be to late to reverse the process that turned their peoples into flocks of sheep tended by wolves. And, at that point, our inherited political institutions will be of no avail—for, said Learned Hand, when liberty dies in “the hearts of men and women…no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”



A2: NO ALTERNATIVE

It’s try or die regardless of an alternativeOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 233-235]But we cannot now describe, much less prescribe, a "rule of life" for this future polity. The future contains not only many possibilities but many that we cannot now imagine, in large part because posterity will almost certainly think and act on premises radically different from our own. Indeed, it is all but impossible to stand in one paradigm and see into another. Thus we are bound to understand the future anachronistically. In other words, we never see a society on the verge of radical change in terms of what it will be in the future but, rather, primarily or even exclusively in terms of what it is now ceasing to be. Our very language betrays us: to talk in terms of "postmodern" or "postliberal" or "post" anything is necessarily to remain beholden to the intellectual constructs of the present. In addition, the crisis of modern civilization has no simple or straightforward solution; nor do we yet understand the problem well enough to think in terms of a solution. And the rationalist model of problem solving does not apply: "Cultural solutions," says Wendell Berry, "are organisms, not machines, and they cannot be invented deliberately or imposed by prescription."



AFF ANSWERS:


NINJA APPEARS IN FILE


NON UNIQUE – POPULATION STABALIZING

Populations are stabilizing – Birth rates are declining globallyShorto, contributing columnist to the New York Times and Author on Social Affairs of Europe and around the world, 2008 (Russel, No Babies?, The New York Times Magazine, (June 29th, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=no%20babies&st=cse&scp=1)

To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us. The invader species homo sapiens, we learned, was eating through the planet’s resources and irretrievably fouling and wrecking its fragile systems. Has the situation changed for the better since Paul Ehrlich set off the alarm in 1968 with his best seller “The Population Bomb”? Do current headlines — global food shortages, climate change — not indicate continuing signs of calamity? They do, as far as some are concerned, but things have changed somewhat. For one thing, around the world, even in developing countries, birthrates have plummeted — from 6.0 globally in 1972 to 2.9 today — as populations have shifted from rural areas to cities and people have adopted urban lifestyles, and the drop has perhaps lessened the urgency of the overpopulation cry. Meanwhile, in recent years another chorus of voices has sounded. Yes, we’re straining resources, they say, and it’s undeniable that some parts of the globe are overrun with humanity. But other regions now confront a very different fate. In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano. Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.To many, “lowest low” is hard evidence of imminent disaster of unprecedented proportions. “The ability to plan the decision to have a child is of course a big success for society, and for women in particular,” Letizia Mencarini, a professor of demography at the University of Turin, told me. “But if you would read the documents of demographers 20 years ago, you would see that nobody foresaw that the fertility rate would go so low. In the 1960s, the overall fertility rate in Italy was around two children per couple. Now it is about 1.3, and for some towns in Italy it is less than 1. This is considered pathological.”

Modern politics are causing populations to level off – empirical statistics show lower birth ratesShorto, contributing columnist to the New York Times and Author on Social Affairs of Europe and around the world, 2008 (Russel, No Babies?, The New York Times Magazine, (June 29th, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=no%20babies&st=cse&scp=1)

TO BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND the global meaning of the low-birthrate phenomenon requires first examining Europe’s “baby bust.” Maybe the most striking way to set up the issue is via a statistic that emerged from a 2006 Eurobarometer survey by the European Commission. Women were asked how many children they would like to have; the average result was 2.36 — well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work.As it turns out, the situation differs by region. “It’s a mistake to think of Europe as a single entity in this respect,” Alasdair Murray, director of CentreForum, a London-based research group, told me. “There are really four different population changes happening in Europe.” One concerns Eastern Europe, where trends date from the Communist period and portend a special, and especially virulent, class of social problems. Bulgaria’s birthrate is 1.37, and life expectancy for males is seven years less than in Belgium or Germany; the E.U. estimates that Bulgaria’s population will drop from 8 million today to 5 million in 2050. Since 1989, Latvia’s population has dropped 13 percent; its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and its divorce rate is among the highest in Europe, according to Linda Andersone, the deputy director of the Latvian Department of Children and Family Policy. Throughout most of Eastern Europe you see the same dark elixir of forces at play, which commentators attribute to Westernization, though it’s difficult to fix causes precisely. “We can see that birthrate declines date to the fall of the Soviet Union,” Murray said, “but is that due to the switch to a market economy or something else?”Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. They share many of the same characteristics of other Western European countries with regard to forces affecting family life, but in addition childlessness is peculiarly high in these countries, and has been for some time. A 2002 study found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.) When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered “none.” (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.) The main reason seems to be a basic change in attitudes on the part of some women as to their “natural” role. According to Nikolai Botev, population and development adviser at the United Nations Population Fund, many observers have been surprised to find that in recent years “childlessness emerges as an ideal lifestyle.” No one has yet figured out why some countries are more predisposed to childlessness than others.But the true fertility fault line in Europe — the fissures of which spread outward across the globe — runs between the north and the south. Setting aside the special case of countries in the east, the lowest rates in Europe — some of the lowest fertility rates in the world — are to be found in the seemingly family-friendly countries of Italy, Spain and Greece (all currently hover around 1.3). I asked Francesco Billari of Bocconi University in Milan, an author of the 2002 study that introduced the “lowest low” concept, to account for this. “If we look at very recent data for developed countries, we see that Italy has two records that are maybe world records,” he said. “One, young people in Italy stay with their parents longer than maybe anywhere else. No. 2 is the percentage of children born after the parents turn 40. These factors are related, because if you have a late start, you tend not to have a second child, and especially not a third.”Plenty of anecdotal evidence squares with this. When I visited a day-care center for 3-month-olds to 3-year-olds in Milan, the manager, Mara Vavassori, showed me her roster of enrollment sheets. On one line of each was a date — 1964, 1967, 1963: the birth years of the parents of her toddler-clients. She had been in this business for 20 years, she said. It used to be that first-time parents were in their early to mid-20s. Today, she said, more than half were in their 40s.



AFF – PLAN SOLVES SUSTAINABILITY

The Aff is a pre-requisite to sustainability – we must focus on the excluded to adapt to the world and allow for equality of power instead of authoritarianismViederman, former President of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, a middle size philanthropic foundation that supports organizing and advocacy at the intersections of the environment, reproductive rights, community and social justice, 1996 [Stephen, Part One, “Designing Sustainable Societies,” Ch 3 “Sustainability’s Five Capitals and Three Pillars,” Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages, p 46-48]

Sustainability is usually presented as a technical problem, but it is much more than that. It is ultimately a question of what a society values, not in the technical economic sense of valuation, but in the sense of human concerns. It is, as Peter Gleick reminded us, “a social construct.” It is a vision of the future. As such it is and must be as much the domain of the poets and painters, of “experts” and activists, as it is the domain of economists and ecologists. Women, people of color, the poor, and others must be included in the envisioning process in order to reflect the variety of our culture, and to reach a genuine consensus. This is not an issue of “political correctness” but of democratic necessity. While we should be concerned with the technical means of achieving sustainability, we cannot be preoccupied with them. Whether something we can define as “sustainable” is achievable is open to question. Still, the search for it is necessary if the present human condition is to be improved. The Capitals of Sustainability “Words, like eyeglasses,” observed the eighteenth-century French moralist Joseph Joubert, “blur everything that they do not make clearer.” Thus, yet another definition is offered in the hope of clarifying what we are about.: Sustainability is a community’s control and prudent use of all forms of capital – nature’s capital, human capital, human-created capital, social capital, and cultural capital – to ensure, to the degree of economic security and achieve democracy while maintaining the integrity of the ecological systems upon which all life and all production depends.Before proceeding, some definitions are in order. Capital is used broadly to define any form of wealth available for life and production. Its use here is not intended to diminish other aspects of the forms of capital identified, such as the aesthetic value of nature, or the spiritual purpose of humans. Neither is it assumed, as in conventional economics, that capital as a concept must be quantified. Nature’s capital is the stock that yields the flow of natural resources. It is both renewable and nonrenewable. It includes inputs into the economy, in terms of resources, and relates to the outputs of the economic system, in terms of the assimilation of wastes. Human capital refers to the people and the bodies of knowledge that contribute to community and to production. Human-created capital refers to products and technologies created by humans, including the built environment. Social capital is what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls the “civic-ness” of regional life, including such things as participation in the political life of the community, newspaper readership, and membership in associations from sports clubs to the Lions Club, from unions to choral societies. This is participation “that seems to depend less on who you are than on where you are,” and that underlines the importance of the relationship to place. Social capital is the reservoir of mutual trust, civic involvement, and reciprocity, which grows as “virtuous circles.” It is necessary, I would argue, for economic security and ecological integrity, particularly because of its connection to place, and it is at the heart of democracy .3 Cultural capital, as defined by Berkes and Folke, “refers to factors that provide human societies with the means and adaptations to deal with the natural environment and to actively modify it,” for better or worse.4 This includes the life stories and creation myths that are part of all cultures that can help or hinder our search for sustainability . Witness, for example, Native American views of the world, as opposed to what Richard Norgaard has observed are “the forces of modernity’s progressive, mechanical, hierarchical life story” that pauperized the coevolving natural and cultural worlds.5 Cultural capital is, in part, the dream of a universe. It is also at the core of the life of the community, giving the community its distinctive character. The Pillars of Sustainability To continue with the definitions within the definition:6 Economic Security is the control that individuals and communities have over their own economic lives, and the degree to which they are capable of shielding themselves from external economic shocks. The right of sustainable livelihood, for example, is central to economic security. Kenneth Dahlberg’s “buying locally and eating locally” (chapter 16) is an important aspect of economic security. Economic security involves recognition on the part of individuals and communities of the need to achieve a balance between the scale of the economic system and the limits of the ecosystem in which it operates. Economic security should contribute to a sense of interdependence among individuals and among communities based upon mutual interests and equality of power. Ecological integrity is maintained when individuals and communities live in harmony with natural systems. Clean air, clean water, and land use appropriate to meet human needs and the needs of the ecosystem are essential elements of ecological integrity, as is the prevention and recycling/reuse of waste. Democracy is characterized by citizen by citizen participation in community decision making through democratic processes supported by appropriate citizen education. Harmony is fostered through efforts to increase equity, justice, and political, religious, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, and gender tolerance. Diversity is accepted while a sense of wholeness is sought; equalization of power is a goal. These “pillars” of sustainability are created and supported by the forms of “capital” described above. There can no ecological security without prudent use of natural capital: the ways we use all the capitals will determine the degree to which we can attain economic security and democracy.



TECH LINK TURN

Technological Growth constitutes surrender of one’s will to the state and allows for authoritarian regimeOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 241-242]Second, by its very nature, and notwithstanding the claim of too many of its propagandists, technology is never neutral-a mere "tool" without a morality or politics of its own. Even if, contrary to fact, the context of our technological choice were not a political and economic order mad for power, technology's very rationality constitutes an intrinsic bias toward ~ efficiency and the "one best way" defined in narrowly technical terms that is, in favor of rational, bureaucratic, centralized control. For example, because nuclear power generation is so exacting and dangerous, it imposes a certain kind of political order: among other things, the civilian use of nuclear energy cannot be divorced from military applications, and ~ the industry must therefore be stringently regulated, either by international organizations or by central governments. Even technology that seems entirely benign at first glance may have profound political implications. Broadcasting, for example, expresses a fundamentally antidemocratic idea-the idea of a mass society in which the few talk, the many listen. And the current rush to computerization, in which algorithms I~ (problem-solving rules) are substituted for human judgment, has already ..i: unleashed one of Schumpeter's gales of "creative destruction" with political implications that loom very large. To reiterate, one's choice of a technological system is always a political act, because such decisions determine our social future. In the end, therefore, politically unconscious technological development all but guarantees that we will be ruled by Ellul's "dictatorship of test tubes."

Democratic Expansion through technology is simply a masked take-over by the state – We surrender our freedoms to the stateOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 243]The third point above warrants expansion. Modern men and women believe that they are freer than their ancestors, but this may be a delusion. Ancient monarchs and tyrants were certainly powerful: the simple words "Off with his head!” dispensed with a man. Yet their power, although absolute as far as it went, did not always extend very far. As the epigraph by Johnson suggests, the damage that can be done by one individual, no matter how vicious, is limited; whereas the destructive capacity of the modern state, however well intentioned, is "almost limitless." Only in modern times is something like Stalin's Gulag Archipelago orHitler's Final Solution possible. Fortunately, although too many in the developing nations still suffer torture and death at the hands of brutal tyrants, state power in the developed world is rarely turned to such horrendous ends (and even the Gulag Archipelago has now been washed by freedom's tide). In most modern states, therefore, direct and arbitrary political oppression is the exception, not the rule. In exchange, however, modern men and women are subjected to large and impersonal forces beyond any individual's ken, much less control- indeed, beyond any legislature's or executive's ken or control. In this light, much of our vaunted freedom is illusory, because these forces determine core policy in all modern states-and human beings, including the supposed "leaders," adjust as best they can. For example, especially in a borderless world increasingly devoted to accumulation and governed by the logic of "winner-take-all capitalism," the invisible hand of the market imperceptibly but implacably determines who will be rich and who poor-as well as the basic shape of the society inhabited by everyone, rich or poor. The same with technological change: the clock, for instance, has stealthily but radically restructured human life in the last several centuries, yoking us to mechanical time. Similarly, as noted in chapter 2, the political and the social power of the automobile has been all but absolute until very recently (now, at least, it is being questioned). Along these same lines we have seen how television has, in a few short decades, utterly transformed our lives and politics. But the worst is yet to come for impending technological developments, such as the biotechnical revolution, portend even more radical changes, changes that may transform the very meaning of human nature. The lives of individuals are therefore subject to vast, impersonal, and virtually uncontrollable forces, At the same time, as the growth of “energy despotism” illustrates, technological development constitutes the pretext for further extensions of centralized power, especially state power. Having overthrown the tyranny of kings we find ourselves ruled by Ellul’s "technique," by technologically driven forces that both create and undergird a political Leviathan. But the resulting "dictatorship of test tubes" is not perceived for what it is, so the illusion of freedom persists



TECH LINK TURN

Humanity is enslaved to the promise of technology – Makes us easily controlled by the state if need beOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 245]This latter point is crucial. One of the most insidious and ominous hidden costs of intensified economic development based on energy slavery this inexorable growth of the technocratic structure of governance that anthropologist Marvin Harris calls “energy despotism”. This is a necessary consequence of energy slavery and is based on human concentration and control of matter and energy resources; and magnified power in the physical realm has always been accompanied expanded power in the political realm. In short, and all other things

being equal, intensified exploitation of matter and energy must lead to tighter social and political controls. (Naturally, circumstances alter cases: we have we have

already seen how the exceptionally benign ecological conditions of early America helped to produce political democracy and social equality.) But modern

economic development based explicitly on an intensified exploitation of nature greatly exacerbates this tendency: it wrecks both biological and social communities and thus throws an increasingly heavy management burden on society. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the forces fostering energy despotism have therefore grown much faster than the general rate of development. In effect, energy slavery has begun to enslave the putative masters.

“Technology innovation” takes power and hope out of an Authoritarian government – undermines their power and controlOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 241]As have repeatedly seen in previous chapters, the modern paradigm is explicitly aim e d at power and control -in politics, in economics, and in

science. A primary vehicle through which this power drive is expressed is technology, which seems to contain an intrinsic logic that leads toward technocr acy -or, in Ellul's arresting phrase, "a dictatorship of test tubes ." Wh en the Hobbesian desire for " commodious living" is wedded to a Baconian science dedicated to "the effecting of all things possible," the result is bound to be a restl ess and perpetual quest to extend man's tech nological dominion over nature. The language we habitually use to describe many of our most cherished projects is profoundly revealing-not only "domination" and "co ntrol " but " war , " " conquest, " " crusade," and the like. Our clearly expressed intent is to use technology to overpower every thing that stands in the way of human supremacy -be it

natural barriers, bodily diseases, social problems, or mental limitations-so that we can fulfill the Cartesian dream of making ourselves "the masters and possessors

of nature." As many myths and stories remind us, however, the possession and exercise of power has a dangerous shadow side-and the greater the power, the bigger the shadow. Lord Acton’s famous dictum="Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” -is but one s uch warn ing . Hence, the tendency megalomania so characteristic of mod ern civilizat i on to be more specific, as eve n some of its foremost a dvo cates admit, technolog y’s shadow side is that the devil exacts a price for all that pow e r : our “technological fixes” involve a Faustian bargain.



HEGEMONY/MILITARY LINKS

“Democracy Promotion” through hegemony is a tool to spread domination and collapses our own democracyOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 247]Military power, which grows directly out of technological power, also pushes liberal policies toward totalitarianism. This dangerous trend is clearly visible in the United States, where a national security state characterized by a military-industrial complex and an imperial presidency has grown up during the last fifty years. The Cold War is usually blamed for this development. However, this is only one part of the story: as we saw earlier, militarism, if not imperialism, is intrinsic to liberalism. Because economic development is essentially predatory, it requires resources, markets, and spheres of influence or even control that rests on the ability and willingness of so-called haves to back up the market system and their position in it with force whenever necessary. Economic growth, technological development, and military power are therefore inseparably intertwined. Indeed, since modern political economy is driven by the will to power, we should not be surprised when development serves martial rather than humane ends. Or, to put it the other way around, if war is politics by other means, and if in modern times economics has also become politics by other means, then economics is now (or soon will be) a kind of war by other means. Hence, as virtually all of modern history attests, a struggle for resources, market shares, and influence is endemic to the modern way of life. So the Cold War's end will not usher in automatic peace. On the contrary, far from having come to an end, history has reawakened from nearly a half-century of hibernation: we have exchanged a kind of world order, however peculiar and perverse, for a new world disorder that will present us with far more complex and dangerous problems. Long-frozen political, ethnic, and religious passions have thawed, and the old basis for international cooperation is simultaneously melting away, as Countries focus on their own problems and needs instead of on the common threat. We are therefore entering a period of turbulence in which political borders and identities and the international rules of the game will be challenged across the board. Even the possibility of the possibility of a classic "hegemonic war” cannot be excluded. To use Hobbesian language, we are lapsing into an anarchic state of nature, with all the political and military consequences that follow from that fact. Hence international politics will be more than ever governed by raison d'etat, and statesmen will have to follow the principles enunciated by Lord Palmerston in 1848: no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only vital interests that must be asserted I with vigor and, when necessary, defended with force. But our world is more dangerous and less manageable than the one inhabited by Palmerston: the rapid proliferation of ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction; the even greater spread of a military technology that, paradoxically, facilitates terrorism, insurrection, and guerrilla warfare despite the existence of these weapons; the concentration of the most critical global resource, petroleum, in one of the most volatile global regions, the Middle East; exploding populations and increasing economic inequalities fueling a seemingly inexorable trend towards mass migration; the impact of instantaneous communications and the global media, especially on crowded masses in colossal "hypercities" these and a host of other complications have made the "game" of international politics much more difficult and deadly. In such a risky and competitive environment, there will certainly be a concerted effort to construct a stable world order based on transnational institutions-indeed, this is the only conceivable solution to the new world disorder-but there will also be continual diplomatic and military maneuvering, albeit of a kind different from that of the last five decades, as the various ~ nation-states (including many emerging regional powers in the Third World) struggle to advance their interests and to control their destinies from within an unstable neo-Palmerstonian world system.



HEG LINK TURN

Military Expansion gives control to the stateOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 247-248]This is very bad news indeed- especially for American democracy, the so-called leader of the free world has been on a war footing for more than half a century and has therefore acquired the antidemocratic attitudes and habits that accompany the prosecution of a war. As a consequence, the amoral ethos of the Hobbesian state of nature has not merely contaminated domestic political life, it has done so in the worst possible way-stealthily and covertly, as a protracted and morally dubious war has been waged as much as possible away from the glare of publicity and the vagaries of democratic debate. The result has been government by subterfuge, as the mentality of ends justifying means and the mind-set of a garrison state have infected American politics, particularly at the highest levels. Although the corruption and scandal produced by this infection require no elaboration or documentation, they do cry out for a better understanding of what has produced them: the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, was not so much an aberration to be blamed on particular individuals, however easy or attractive that might seem to be, as it was the logical consequence of living in a national-security state. In effect, making all due allowance for the differing degree of evil, America too has become an "evil empire" that tends to place state interests above other considerations. Although the United States is by no means alone among its former allies in pursuing raison d'etat to extreme ends, we are unfortunately one of the worst offenders, displaying a distressing tendency to betray our own principles for the sake of realpolitik by cozying up to dictators, subverting governments distasteful to us, and even invading nations that refuse to knuckle under. Thus, as in the old story of the pot calling the kettle black, we who denounce "terrorism" also carry it out; we who purport to be for "the rule of law" also flout it; we who condemn· "merchants of death" also sell arms to dictators; and we who complain of "disinformation" also practice systematic mendacity. This is more than garden-variety hypocrisy; It represents the triumph of a national-security Leviathan utterly incompatible with democratic principles and practices. That a garrison state is the enemy of an orderly democracy has been understood since the ancient times. A major part or the tragedy of Athenian politics was that the imperialism made necessary by commercial expansion could not in the end be reconciled with a stable democratic polis. The dilemma of national defense policy in our age is the same: too little, said Eisenhower, and you have no security; too much, and you risk "destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without," And if the aim is hegemony rather than mere self-defense, then the danger is obviously much greater. All this was well understood by the Founders, who warned strongly against military ventures that would concentrate power and thus encroach upon the liberty of the people. De Tocqueville summed up the lesson in one sentence: "All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." Alas, fifty-plus years of life in a national-security state have already done much to destroy our liberties, and I there is no relief in Sight.



WELFARE LINK TURNS

Expansion of social services coerces and enslaves citizens, making them the sheep to be sheparded by the stateOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 235]THOUGH MEN AND WOMEN OPPRESSED by loneliness may yet rush to embrace an Orwellian Big Brother or an electronic Bonaparte, this is regime is probably not the immediate threat to a nation whose attachment to the democratic ethos remains strong, at least in principle. However, a more gradual erosion of liberty and democratic control is indeed a serious danger, because the stealthy advance of the Huxleyan regime is both much less visible and harder to defend against. Any fool can spot a putsch, but the glacial creep of an administrative despotism is barely noticeable. Or, if noticed, not perceived as fundamentally dangerous, because a welfare state dedicated to solving the people's "problems" and making them “happy" seems on the surface to augur nothing but good. What harm in is increased state power if it becomes the benevolent provider of cradle-to grave benefits ? Surely none, unless what later becomes apparent is that the people have become the creatures of the state-"nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the “shepherd". Nor does the danger end there, for as pointed out by Bertrand de Jouvenel , "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." So let us conclude our discussion of liberalism's totalitarian propensities by examining the administrative despotism that has already begun to subvert American democracy.

Programs like welfare tie us to state enslavement and destroys democracyOphuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Association’s Sprout Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award, 1997 [William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 236-237]Tracing the process by which democracy might terminate in despotism, de Tocqueville accurately envisioned the emergence of a mass-consumption society: "an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives." And of the lonely crowd: confined "within the solitude of his own heart," each is separate and alone, "a stranger to the fate of all the rest." Such social conditions would make a powerful administrative state all but inevitable: Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities , facilitates their pleasures, manages their prinCipal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? De Tocqueville thus foresaw that men and women addicted to self-gratification would willingly sell their political souls to a government that promised them comfort and securily, in addition he argued, such a decayed public, lacking any basis for intellectual dependence from tradition or religion, could neither avoid conformity to majority will and opinion nor resist government manipulation and propaganda, What is worse, as an avalanche of social and economic change swept away not only tradition and religion but all the other "barriers which Formerly arrested tyranny," the hapless individual would be left with only "his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government." In such conditions, elections would become essentially meaningless: "The people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master" before lapsing again into political stupor. "Democratic despotism" under the aegis of "an immense and tutelary power" was thus the likely terminus of American Democracy



A2: OPHULS

Ophul’s predictions are fundamentally flawed – They don’t address three questionsDE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996 [Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls’ Solution., p192-194, Routledge Publishing]

Is it possible to save the environment without installing an ecodictatorship a la William Ophuls? His proposition that the sacrifice of individual liberties is clearly the lesser of evils compared to the annihilation of our spaceship earth and that only the introduction of an absolute state can preserve humankind from an approaching ecological catastrophe may sound plausible at first instance, but turns out to be untenable at closer analysis. Ophuls overlooks the following three questions: Who are exactly the main polluters in modern society? What do the individual liberties of the citizens constitute? What is the difference between an ‘absolute state’ and a ‘powerful and actively intervening society’?

First, Ophuls implicitly assumes that the individual citizens are the main polluters within society, not private companies and state enterprises. On the basis of this fundamental assumption he argues that individual freedoms must be restricted in order to secure the survival of humankind. This line of argument is flawed, however, when one notices the fact that in western liberal democracy the private companies and state enterprises are responsible for the overwhelming part of the environmental pollution, and not ordinary consumers themselves. The emission of greenhouse gasses (e.g. CO2, CH4, N2O), acidifying emissions (e.g. NH3, NOx, SO2), ozone-depleting chemicals (like CFCs and Halons) in the Netherlands are caused for the major part by chemical industries, oil refining works and electricity power stations (taken together) (Adriaanse 1990: 75-94). The introduction of strict environmental regulations for these polluters does not have to infringe on means only that the main polluters in society are held responsible. No freedoms of citizens need to be affected by these kinds of measures. (The figures also show that it is most effective to introduce stringent environmental measures for industry, rather than for the individual citizens: Adriaanse 1990: 75-94.)

Second, Ophuls starts from an ill-considered conception of ‘freedom’ and ‘individual rights’. He suggests that every infringement on the freedom of choice of the citizen in fact outs an end to the ‘freedom’ of the individual in the state. When, for instance, the state regulates that car drivers have to collect their motor oil carefully, this does not imply the end of their ‘freedom’ and ‘individual rights’, nor is this the case when returnable deposit systems on bottles, refrigerators, cars, etc., are introduced. Ophuls overlooks the fact that the essence of individual liberty in western liberal consumption but in having a right to participate in politics and to enjoy a protected position with regard to the state. Freedom of the citizen is first constituted by having social and economic rights in addition to the civil liberties of participation, assembly, conscience, etc. (positive freedom). Further, the liberty of the citizen takes shape by the enjoyment of a secured position. Being a member of a free political community, the citizen obtains privacy, a restriction of its domain of authority. Through this the individual is safeguarded against abuses of state authority. From a legally secure position citizens can actively call on their constitutional rights in relation to the state, In this conception the state is strictly bound by its own laws and the private sphere of the citizens is respected (negative freedom) (Berlin 1971: ch. 3). This positive and negative freedom that makes up the very heart of the liberal constitutional state, in principle does not have to be affected when the state adopts actively intervening and regulatory behavior in order to tackle the environmental crisis.

Third, Ophuls pretends that there is no substantial difference between an ‘absolute state’ and a ‘powerful and actively intervening state’. He does not seem to realize that an absolute state is governed by some unrestrained ruler or group of rulers, not bound by constitutional law, who can impose ‘any policies’ and who can restrict and violate the private sphere of the individual as they see fit. However, a state can just as well take stringent measures in the area of the environment, without adopting the characteristics of an absolute Leviathan, One can imagine a democratic constitutional state in which the rulers are feely chosen, are bound by the rule of law, and can initiate active environmental policies, while observing the private sphere of the individual. In this respect one can better speak of a freedom-oriented and strong ecostate, instead of a Hobbesian and absolute political structure.


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