1

Depicting the ocean as a vast space to be explored with speculative promise in new
information and research instrumentalizes nature and justifies the new market
manifest destiny
Helmreich 7 (Stefan, Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Blue-green
Capital, Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy,
BioSocieties (2007), 2, 287302 London School of Economics and Political Science)//rh
Abstract Examining the rise and fall of a publicprivate marine biotechnological enterprise in Hawaii, this
article analyses how promises to make products and profits from marine microbes in archipelagic
waters drew upon peculiarly American sentiments about the sea as a politically uncontested
treasure-chest of biodiversity . I argue that attention to the material process by which lab and legal
instruments are calibrated to one another to generate biotech exchange-value must be joined by
consideration of how scientists and their interlocutors imagine the meaning of biologyas discipline
and as corporeal substance and process. Without such symbolic analysis, theorizations of biocapital
remain incomplete. To discuss the genre of capitalism evidenced in marine biotechnological endeavors
in Hawaii, I develop the concept of blue-green capitalism, where blue stands for a vision of the
freedom of the open ocean and for speculative sky-high promise, and green for belief in ecological
sustainability as well as biological fecundity. I show that this vision, dominant in industryuniversity
settings, ran into direct conflict with Native Hawaiian legal epistemologies of the sea. Keywords
biocapital, biodiversity, bioprospecting, Hawaii, marine biotechnology, oceans The globe imagined in
globalization is a closed system, a finite sphere crisscrossed by flows of people, goods and media.
Such an encircling topology coalesced from circuits of mercantilism, capitalism and colonialism. With the
Cold War and the rise of environmentalism, the globe acquired a scientific icon in the image of Earth
from space, a blue-green orb of mostly oceans. At the millenniums turn, the Pacific, once the
westward limit of the American frontier, morphed into a futuristic force field holding together the
Pacific Rim, host to new currents of transoceanic market and telecommunication processes. For
believers in the end of history, West spiraled around to meet East, fulfilling a market manifest
destiny. The ocean has been a key stage for this tale since, as Philip Steinberg argues in The social
construction of the ocean, the West has developed an idealization of the deep sea as a great void of
distance, suitable for annihilation by an ever-expanding tendency toward capital mobility (2001: 163).
The ocean, writes Chris Connery, has long functioned as capitals myth element (1995: 289), a zone
of unencumbered capital circulation, most evident, perhaps, in oceanic vectors of conquest and
commerce, from the triangular trade to the transnational traffic of container ships. But the ocean has
been more than a channel for trade; it has also been a resource. Nowadays, it is being inspected for a
new kind of wealth that might travel into global markets: marine biodiversity transmogrified into
biotechnology. In this article, I consider biotechnology and globalization in the space of the sea,
examining a project at the University of Hawaii to create a center for marine biotechnology dedicated
to using marine microbes as raw materials for bioproducts and pharmaceuticals . Hawaiis Marine
Bioproducts Research Engineering Center, chartered in 1998 to broker cooperation between US
academic and industrial science, meant to deliver compounds that could yield what Catherine Waldby
names biovalue, generated wherever the generative and transformative productivity of living
entities can be instrumentalized along lines which make them useful for human projects (2000: 33).
Because this partnership intended to produce profit, such value was to be biocapital, defined by Sarah
Franklin and Margaret Lock as a kind of wealth that depends on a form of extraction that involves
isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts, particularly cells (2003:
8; see also Heller, 2001) and that also banks on promises about the commercial products such
mobilizations might deliver in the future (2003: 1415; on this second point, see also Fortun, 2002 and
Sunder Rajan, 2006).1 Biocapital would emerge when laboratory instruments could be calibrated with
market and legal instruments. The present article, based on ethnographic work I conducted at and
around the University of Hawaii in 2002 and 2003, recounts the rise and fall of academic and industry
scientists hopes that biocapital generated from sea creatures could circulate into world markets. In
describing how marine biotechnology in Hawaii was imagined as biocapital, I argue that theorizations of
biocapital remain incomplete unless they account for how biotech practitioners (and we, as social
analysts) imagine the mechanisms and meaning of biology. A belief in the irrepressible generativity of
biological life forms themselves is often called upon to warrant the promissory character of
biotechnology, as though biotech has inherited the potentiality associated with genes. Biotic substance
is considered to be the source of mutations and recombinations that create newness, a belief
described by Marilyn Strathern (1992) as a particularly Euro-American notion of biology as a platform for
reproducing the future. Such cultural-semiotic specificity or local biology (Franklin and Lock, 2003:
21) suggests that we should attend, as well, to how particular biological substancesmolecular,
cellular, embryonic or, in this article, marine microbialare made to matter in biocapitalisms and
their anticipated globalizations. In Hawaii, marine biotechnology calls upon the cultural force of
images of the islands as a tropical oceanic paradise full of natural promise for health and rejuvenation,
a view held by many mainland Americans, a pool from which biotechnologists in the islands are
mainly drawn. Here, marine biotechnology depends on a view of the sea as life writ large. A vision
of the ocean as endlessly generative mimes and anchors a conception of biology as always
overflowing with (re)productivity. Taking seriously the symbolic charge of marine biotechnology in
Hawaii leads me to describe a form of capitalism I term blue-green capitalism, where blue stands for
(a particularly American vision of) the freedom of the open ocean and for speculative sky-high promise,
and green for belief in ecological sustainability as well as biological fecundity (particularly, as we will
see, of populations of photosynthetic bacteria). Attention to such sentiments, and their contradictions,
leads me to a description of why legal instruments of biotech are fracturing in Hawaii, as some Native
Hawaiians challenge the right of biologists to turn Hawaiian marine life into an alienable resource. It
also allows me to situate the global dreams of American marine biotech alongside other national
projects, with different visions of biology, sea and globe.
Perpetuation of neolib guarantees environmental destruction well always default to
the cheap fuel and view the ocean as a pool of unexploited capital - overwhelming
thrist for wealth always guarantees environmental collapse and extinction.
Szentes 8 (a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest) 8 (Tams, Globalisation and prospects
of the world society, 4/22 http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/-Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-
_jav..pdf)

It s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace
countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took
place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and
powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing
enormous resources badly needed for development, --many invisible wars are suffered by the
poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and
oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence,
the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious
minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that
--the war against Nature, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of
natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses
and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and invisible wars we find striking
international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend
to generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and
visible wars. It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a
lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation,
but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of invisible wars, of the
structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and
oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic
transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people,
sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a
pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world
society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict
management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the
contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world,
peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war,
and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or
invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can
provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. Sustainability of development (both on national
and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need
for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with
overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can be ensured,
unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are
substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any zero-sum-games,
in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the negative-sum-games tend to predominate,
in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is
not about sustainability of development but rather about the sustainability of human life, i.e. survival of
mankind because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was
the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies.
We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as
the developed ones (as well as the former socialist countries) are also facing development problems, such
as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in
development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare
say that besides (or even instead of) development studies we must speak about and make survival
studies. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of
the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-
psychological, behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish
behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership
almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course,
that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as
decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former
fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international
organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of
international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of
sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-
change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis
of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts
an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common solution. Under the
circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society
cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing
today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew'
divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived,
starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be
negative-sum-games) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society.
Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world
society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible
and invisible wars, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by
demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real
dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming
years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to
irreversible changes in natural environment.

The alternative is to reject the neoliberal justifications for and action of the plan and
endorse an ethic of social flesh
An ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an
ecological view of relationships for the affs commodity thinking only the alternative
can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
Beasley & Bacchi 7
(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide,
Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of
`social flesh', Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)

The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it
conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied as interconnected mutually reliant flesh in a more
thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts
of political change as making transactions between the less fortunate and more privileged, more
trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which
fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect
the vulnerable from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth.
A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the
basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and
international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending
altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements
necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up the scope of what counts as relevant
(Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct
attention to the private sphere as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000:
350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future
papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to
offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a
new ethical ideal called social flesh. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies
canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of
atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency
within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active
self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing
conception of asymmetrical power relations between strong and weak, carers and cared for,
altruistic and needy. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around
which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we
suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer
progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh
as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment,
intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that
trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad,
complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be
acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, social flesh highlights human embodied
interdependence . By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people
across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-
liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already
given distinction between strong and weak. There is no sense here of givers and receivers; rather
we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our
diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over other bodies. Finally, because social flesh
necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take
on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a
politics beyond assisting the less fortunate. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of noblesse
oblige that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently
reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts
into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for
altruism . Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics,
professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.
Collapse of neoliberalism is inevitable because of economic and environmental trends
multiple structural trends make resuscitation impossible, which means its try-or-die
for the alt
Li 10
(Minqi, Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently an
associate professor of Economics at the University of Utah The End of the End of History: The
Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of Humanity, Science and Society Vol. 74, No. 3, July
2010, 290305)

In 2001, the U. S. stock market bubble started to collapse, after years of new economy boom. The
Bush administration took advantage of the psychological shock of 9/11, and undertook a series of
preemptive wars (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq) that ushered in a new era of intensified inter-
state conflicts. Towards the end of 2001, Argentina, which was regarded as a neoliberal model country,
was hit by a devastating financial crisis. Decades of neoliberalism had not only undermined the living
standards of the working classes, but also destroyed the material fortunes of the urban middle classes
(which remained a key social base for neoliberalism in Latin America until the 1990s). After the
Argentine crisis, neoliberalism completely lost political legitimacy in Latin America. This paved the way
for the rise of several socialist-oriented governments on the continent. After the 2001 global recession,
the global economy actually entered into a minigolden age. The big semi-peripheral economies, the
so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became the most dynamic sector. The neoliberal
global economy was fueled by the super-exploitation of the massive cheap labor force in the semi-
periphery (especially in China). The strategy worked, to the extent that it generated massive amounts of
surplus value that could be shared by the global capitalist classes. But it also created a massive
realization problem. That is, as the workers in the emerging markets were deprived of purchasing
power, on a global scale, there was a persistent lack of effective demand for the industrial output
produced in China and the rest of the semi-periphery. After 2001, the problem was addressed through
increasingly higher levels of debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist countries (especially
in the United States). The neoliberal strategy was economically and ecologically unsustainable .
Economically, the debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist countries could not go on
indefinitely. Ecologically, the rise of the BRICs greatly accelerated resource depletion and
environmental degradation on a global scale. The global ecological system is now on the verge of
total collapse . The world is now in the midst of a prolonged period of economic and political instability
that could last several decades. In the past, the capitalist world system had responded to similar crises
and managed to undertake successful restructurings. Is it conceivable that the current crisis will result
in a similar restructuring within the system that will bring about a new global New Deal? In three
respects, the current world historical conjuncture is fundamentally different from that of 1945. Back in
1945, the United States was the indisputable hegemonic power. It enjoyed overwhelming industrial,
financial, and military advantages relative to the other big powers and, from the capitalist point of view,
its national interests largely coincided with the world systems common and long-term interests. Now,
U.S. hegemony is in irreversible decline . But none of the other big powers is in a position to replace
the United States and function as an effective hegemonic power. Thus, exactly at a time when the
global capitalist system is in deep crisis, the system is also deprived of effective leadership.4 In 1945,
the construction of a global New Deal involved primarily accommodating the economic and political
demands of the western working classes and the non-western elites (the national bourgeoisies and the
westernized intellectuals). In the current conjuncture, any new global New Deal will have to
incorporate not only the western working classes but also the massive, non-western working classes.
Can the capitalist world system afford such a new New Deal if it could not even afford the old one?
Most importantly, back in 1945, the worlds resources remained abundant and cheap, and there was
still ample global space for environmental pollution. Now, not only has resource depletion reached an
advanced stage, but the world has also virtually run out of space for any further environmental
pollution.
2
Scientific exploration is incompatible with solving the environmental crisiscoupling
exploration with science will always devolve back into science that distances them
from an understanding of interconnectedness thats key to solve the aff

Science or exploration; Which one do we choose?
voting negative is a refusal to sign the petition on endless scientific exploration,
investing in ocean exploration from the view of the abyssal alien an imagination-
based thought experiment without the 1acs scientific justifications for KNOWING the
oceanthis shift from Manifest Destiny is the only way to counter technocracy and
solve their harms (P)
Montroso 14 (Alan, Graduate Teaching Assistant @ George Washington U, Ocean is the New East:
Contemporary Representations of Sea Life and Mandevilles Monstrous Ecosystems, March 23, 2014,
http://bacchanalinthelibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/ocean-is-new-east-contemporary.html)//mm

Spring Break was, well, hardly a break at all, but I celebrated its conclusion with some friends from Ohio
who were visiting for the weekend. We dined, we drank, we danced and we toured a few of the MUST
SEE sights of DC. Our last stop was the Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History, where I
reveled in the gorgeous new exhibit: The Sant Ocean Hall. The only one of our cadre enamored of
oceanic discoveries, I hurried from display to display, basking in bioluminescent beings, awe-struck at
extremophiles and trembling before the model of Phoenix, the North Atlantic right whale. Deeply
affected by these strange strangers, I stretched my imagination towards the inconceivable and
wondered at the sheer breadth of possibilities for ways of living in these still-occult abyssopelagic
regions. I found solace in the evidence that so many vast and heterogeneous lives can flourish without
the intrusive light of the sun or human reason, and that such animacy is possible in the darkness, in a
world where the Copernican revolution is irrelevant. (1) I attempted to think with and alongside such
creatures, to make myself uncomfortable by imagining myself breathing without oxygen, thriving at
thermal vents, manifesting light with my own body, an aqueous and somewhat amorphous body
squeezed and strangled by the only just bearable pressures of the deep sea. I attempted a
posthumanist thought project similar to what Stacy Alaimo describes in Violet-Black, her contribution
to Prismatic Ecology, in which she insists that Thinking with and through the electronic jellyfish, seeing
through the prosthetic eye, playing open-ended, improvisational language games with deep-sea
creatures, being transformed by astonishment and desire enact a posthumanist practice. (2)
Responding to the highly-stylized illustrations in books from the Census of Marine Life, Alaimo finds in
such affective imagery an invitation to new ways of thinking life, and consequently the possibility for the
dethronement of terrestrial ideas of sovereignty. Each Smithsonian display, like each vibrantly hued
illustration of marine life, defamiliarizes this planet and renders a world that simply will not surrender
to humanitys hubristic desire for authority. Each impossible way of being, now proven possible, works
to dismantle what Mel Y. Chen calls the animacy hierarchy by begging us to reconsider just what the
hell comprises an animate body anyway. (3) And yet, as I wandered from station to station
examining these oceanic bodies summoned from the abysses of the sea, lifeless, entombed in glass
jars and carefully arranged for an American viewing public, I could not forget the relation between
observers and observed, nor that human science and politicking still fashion a sovereign/subject
relation between humans and the myriad strangers that populate the seas . Thus as I wandered the
Sant Ocean Hall, I thought about what it means to wander, who gets the privilege of wandering
(Americans, human knowledge-seekers), and what remains the stationary object of scrutiny (the
nonhuman body, the foreign object, the subject of scientific knowledge). These marvelous displays are
discrete islands of monstrous creatures that underscore humanitys desire to safely navigate strange
waters. I chose the adjective marvelous very carefully, for my wandering about the various exhibits
reminded me of a medieval journey to the marvels of the East and, more specifically, of Mandevilles
travels around the monstrous islands just past the Holy Lands and off the coasts of Africa and India. For
the ocean, it seems, is the new East, compared against the way the medieval Western hegemony
represented the East in its travel literature. The inhabitants of Earths oceans are put on display to be
navigated, plundered, studied and represented by the sovereign powers of Western thought. Like
Mandevilles tale of fish that deliver themselves to the shore for human consumption, we expect the
seas to divulge their mysteries for our ravenous desire to control by means of knowledge-making. In Chapter
13 of the Defective Version of The Book of John Mandeville (ed. Kohanski and Benson), the narrator announces that, having
completed his tour of the Holy Lands, he intends to telle of yles and diverse peple and bestes (1380). This rather lengthy
chapter is rich in peculiarity and marvel, a veritable encyclopedia of the monstrous. An allegory-generating female spirit grants
riches and doles out commensurate consequences for her supplicants greed. Gendered diamonds mate and spawn resplendent
children, challenging notions about the inertness of lithic objects. Nudists, cannibals, blood drinkers, as well as
pygmies, dog-headed creatures and headless bodies with ocular and oral orifices on their chests and
shoulders roam these foreign shores. Mandeville fulfills the European desire to believe the East is
wholly Other, a monstrous and invitingly dangerous land abundant in resources and passively
awaiting representation by the Western imagination. Yet, although his descriptions of the diverse
beings of the East are certainly mythical, Mandeville also lends a certain scientific explanation for the
monstrous by repeatedly attending to the extreme heat of this region; Mandeville offers a
climatological cause for the wonders he claims to encounter. Ethiopians hide from the sun under feet large
enough to shield their bodies; men on the isle of Ermes suffer their ballockys hongeth doun to her shankes (1557). In such
intolerable climates precious stones spill from river banks, reptiles grow to enormous proportions and, as I mentioned above,
fish are so plenteuous that they offer themselves up for consumption. Heat is generative, and the corporeal
peculiarities of the deserts as well as the fecundity of the tropical East are, in Mandeville, responses to
extreme climate - much like the extremophiles surviving sulfuric blasts of scorching heat from deep sea
vents. Each coastal country and island in The Book of John Mandeville is a unique ecology, an oikos or
home to the various and varying creatures that inhabit these spaces, and like contemporary scientific
attempts to understand the porosity between bodies and ecosystems once thought uninhabitable,
Mandeville offered something like a medieval ecological justification for the diversity of beings he
describes. Thus I wonder if we can assume that the imaginative spaces and the marvelous creatures
inhabiting those spaces drawn by medieval travel literature generated new ways of thinking about
an environmentally and ecologically complex world. Can we not find in such texts an anxiety and
ambivalence about an earth more vast and verdant than Gods rubric allowed? Although giants erupt
from Biblical origins, and blood drinkers, flesh eaters and necrophiliacs may mark anxieties about their obvious
Catholic analogues remember, Christians believe a man came back from the dead, a man whose actual body and blood
Catholics consume at every Mass what of the other strange strangers that emerge from the pages of Mandeville, the
Cynocephales and headless figures with sensory organs in their chest? Are these curious beings the imagined consequences of
thinking through previously un-thought ecosystems? Although fictitious, these tropical creatures seems to signal the
disorienting encounter with evidence that the Earth and its beings are more heterogeneous than
previously believed. There is something disanthropocentric, then, to Mandevilles imagining the wondrous
creatures of the East, just as Alaimo insists that encountering the enchantingly strange creatures of
the oceans depths is a sort of posthumanist practice. The Smithsonians website might argue that Its
hard to imagine a more forbidding place than the icy cold, pitch black, crushing environment of the deep
sea ocean. Its even hard to imagine anything living there, (4) yet, like Mandeville, we MUST imagine
new possibilities of living on this Earth, we must see through the eyes of the abyssal aliens, feel the
torturous heat with medieval monsters, if we are ever to dethrone Humanity from the heights of
ecological sovereignty.

Environment
Climate Change Alt cause to bio-diversity laundry list of reasons it affects all levels of
ecosystems
Bellard et al, 12 (Celine PhD; postdoc work on impact of climate change at the Universite Paris ,
Cleo Bertelsmeier, Paul Leadley, Wilfried Thuiller, and Franck Courchamp, Impacts of climate change on
the future of biodiversity, US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health accepted for
publication in a peer reviewed journal, January 4,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880584/, AW)
The multiple components of climate change are anticipated to affect all the levels of biodiversity,
from organism to biome levels (Figure 1, and reviewed in detail in, e.g., Parmesan 2006). They primarily
concern various strengths and forms of fitness decrease, which are expressed at different levels, and
have effects on individuals, populations, species, ecological networks and ecosystems. At the most
basic levels of biodiversity, climate change is able to decrease genetic diversity of populations due to
directional selection and rapid migration, which could in turn affect ecosystem functioning and
resilience (Botkin et al. 2007) (but, see Meyers & Bull 2002). However, most studies are centred on
impacts at higher organizational levels, and genetic effects of climate change have been explored only
for a very small number of species. Beyond this, the various effects on populations are likely to modify
the web of interactions at the community level (Gilman et al. 2010; Walther 2010). In essence, the
response of some species to climate change may constitute an indirect impact on the species that
depend on them. A study of 9,650 interspecific systems, including pollinators and parasites, suggested
that around 6,300 species could disappear following the extinction of their associated species (Koh et
al. 2004). In addition, for many species, the primary impact of climate change may be mediated
through effects on synchrony with species food and habitat requirements (see below). Climate
change has led to phenological shifts in flowering plants and insect pollinators, causing mismatches
between plant and pollinator populations that lead to the extinctions of both the plant and the
pollinator with expected consequences on the structure of plant-pollinator networks (Kiers et al. 2010;
Rafferty & Ives 2010). Other modifications of interspecific relationships (with competitors,
prey/predators, host/parasites or mutualists) also modify community structure and ecosystem functions
(Lafferty 2009; Walther 2010; Yang & Rudolf 2010) At a higher level of biodiversity, climate can induce
changes in vegetation communities that are predicted to be large enough to affect biome integrity.
The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment forecasts shifts for 5 to 20% of Earths terrestrial ecosystems, in
particular cool conifer forests, tundra, scrubland, savannahs, and boreal forest (Sala et al. 2005). Of
particular concern are tipping points where ecosystem thresholds can lead to irreversible shifts in
biomes (Leadley et al. 2010). A recent analysis of potential future biome distributions in tropical South
America suggests that large portions of Amazonian rainforest could be replaced by tropical savannahs
(Lapola et al. 2009). At higher altitudes and latitudes, alpine and boreal forests are expected to expand
northwards and shift their tree lines upwards at the expense of low stature tundra and alpine
communities (Alo & Wang 2008). Increased temperature and decreased rainfall mean that some lakes,
especially in Africa, might dry out (Campbell et al. 2009). Oceans are predicted to warm and become
more acid, resulting in widespread degradation of tropical coral reefs (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2007).
The implications of climate change for genetic and specific diversity have potentially strong
implications for ecosystem services. The most extreme and irreversible form of fitness decrease is
obviously species extinction. To avoid or mitigate these effects, biodiversity can respond in several
ways, through several types of mechanisms.
Conservation projects with alarmist justifications are ruses for neoliberal
expansionism and control of the environment guarantees that the aff fails.
Bscher et al. 12 (Bram, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the
Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan
Brockington, Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation, Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism, Volume 23, Issue 2, 2012)//rh
Among critics of the neoliberal project, however, there is a notable absence of this kind of analysis with regards to conservation. David
Harvey (2003, 166-168), for example, tends to view environmental conservation as providing alternatives that actively
counter neoliberal capitalism. In The New Imperialism, his list of struggles against accumulation by dispossession is also a litany of
environmental protest. Yet he only glancingly acknowledges that peasants might be dispossessed from their
land as effectively for a national park as by a new sheep run. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he describes a
sprawling environmental movement hard at work 3 promoting alternative visions of how to better connect political and
ecological projects without tracing the complex politics that tie some elements of this movement
firmly into mainstream political economy (Harvey 2005, 186; Dowie 2006). He does clearly recognize the role of NGOs in
promoting neoliberalism but does not mention conservation NGOs among their number (Harvey 2005, 177). Indeed, conservation does not
appear in these books as a focus of interest. The casting of almost any form of conservation as progressively
opposed to the forces creating environmental crisis is especially problematic when an alarmist
language of crisis is used to justify policies and practices that are injurious to local livelihoods (often
in the name of capturing landscapes for environmental conservation) (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Mearns
1996; Stott and Sullivan 2000).5 Crisis-driven critiques also often miss the larger point that environmental (and
other) crises increasingly are themselves opportunities for capitalist expansion. Martin OConnor thus writes in
1994 that environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life. Now, through
purporting to take in hand the saving of the environment, capitalism invents a new legitimation for
itself: the sustainable and rational use of nature (OConnor 1994, 125- 126). So, while conservation conventionally is
conveyed as something different, as saving the world from the broader excesses of human impacts under capitalism, in actuality it
functions to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic
possibilities for capitalist expansion. Markets expand as the very resolution of environmental crises that other market forces
have produced. Capitalism may well be the Enemy of Nature, as Kovel so aptly put it. Conserving nature, paradoxically, seems
also to have become the friend of capitalism. Thus we see that 1) conservation is vitally important to
capitalism; and 2) that this importance is often not recognized. These are compelling reasons for a
synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation. In the next section we explain more clearly our emphasis on neoliberal
conservation, before attempting to pull together the threads of critique in such a way as to clarify key concerns and positions. 2Why Focus on
Neoliberal Conservation? One of neoliberalisms raison-dtres is to expand and intensify global capitalism
(Harvey 2005). Capitalism, in turn, is at the heart of the dramatic ecological changes and crises unleashed
in the last two centuries (OConnor 1998; Foster 2007; Kovel 2002; Burkett 2006).6 With the rise of capitalism, the means for, scale of,
and drive towards ecosystem transformation has grown dramatically. In dialectical interaction with technological
developments and the intensification of colonial extraction (amongst other factors), emerging capitalist
societies became more adept at offsetting local and regional ecological transformations extra-
locally and extra-regionally, hence laying the foundations for ecological crisis on a world-scale, or a
crisis in the world-ecology, as Moore (2010) puts it. Across space (extensification) and within spaces (intensification), capitalism
has disrupted and changed the metabolism of ecological processes and connections (Kovel 2002, 82). Bearing in mind our comments on
environmental crises above, here we emphasize two key aspects of capitalisms propensity to stimulate large-scale ecological crises. The first
has to do with the nature of ecological crisis. Diversity, connectivity and relationships are crucial for the resilience
of ecosystems. Ecology 101 teaches students that everything hangs together with everything else, which is both the reason why
studying ecosystems is both such a joy and so complex. Capitalisms drive to turn everything into exchange value (into
commodities that can be traded) cuts up these connections and relationships in order to produce, sell
and consume their constituent elements. Hence, as Kovel (2002, 130-131) shows, capitalism separates, splits
andbecause in principle everything can be bought and or soldalienates and estranges. To
further bring conservation into capitalism, then, is to lay bare the various ecosystemic threads and
linkages so that they can be further subjected to separation, marketization and alienation, albeit in
the service of conservation rhetoric. The second point has to do with the nature of capital, which, as Marx (1976, 256) pointed
out, is value in process, money in process: it comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation,
emerges from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again. Capital is always on the move; if it ceases
to move and circulate, the whole system is threatened. The recent financial crisis has made this abundantly clear. From
Washington via London to Tokyo, all leaders of rich countries were primarily concerned with making sure that banks would start lending again
in order to get money back into circulation. As such, capitalism is inherently expansionist, striving continuously to
bring more and more facets of life into its orbit, including natural worlds at multiple scales.7 Making
clear the (monetary) exchange value of nature so as to calculate what price has to be paid in order to
conserve its services, then, is not just about trying to preserve ecosystems, as the currently popular
adagio payments for environmental services would have it. It is about finding new arenas for markets to
operate in and thus to expand the remit, and ultimately the circulation of capital. Payments go to those able
to capture them, rather than directly to nature, and this explains why conservation responses to
ecological crises, although popularly understood as in contestation to the environmental effects of capitalism, now are providing
such fruitful avenues for further capitalist expansion (Sullivan 2010). One of the key ways in which this has
occurred has been through infusing conservation policy and practice with the analytical tools of
neoliberal economics, without recognizing that these are themselves infused with, and reinforce,
particular ideological positions regarding human relationships with each other as well as with non-
human natures. It is to this point that we now turn.
Environmental protection unpopular once they gather the information there is no
political will to implement climate policies.
Valentine, 7/15, (Katie, reporter for Climate Progress, Congressional Candidate: Most Energy
Problems Are Caused By Environmentalists, Climate Progress, JULY 15, 2014,
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/15/3460398/congressional-candidate-environment/)//erg

In the eyes of one candidate running for office in Washington, environmentalists arent the ones looking to
solve the countrys energy problems theyre the ones at fault for them. George Cicotte, a Republican candidate
for Washingtons fourth congressional district, said at a candidate forum Saturday that if environmentalists hadnt stopped
nuclear in its tracks in the 1970s, there would be a lot less greenhouse gas pollution today. Really, when
we talk about energy problems, most of the energy problems are caused by environmentalists, he said. Cicottes
comments came as part of a longer statement on his views on environment and energy issues, during which
he spoke of his all of the above energy preferences but made comments that were dismissive of
wind energy a resource he claims to support on his campaign website. Wind energy? Ill be honest give me a break, he said.
There would not be a single windmill in this entire state were it not for tons of irrational federal
government spending. Theyre trying to light a brush fire for wind and it aint working.
Zoonotic diseases being solved in status quo specific to the pathogen that their
evidence highlights.
Science Codex 12 (Super cool and accurate science website, Preserved Frogs Hold Clues to Deadly
Pathogen, June 20, 2012,
http://www.sciencecodex.com/preserved_frogs_hold_clues_to_deadly_pathogen-93651)//rh
A Yale graduate student has developed a novel means for charting the history of a pathogen deadly to
amphibians worldwide. Katy Richards-Hrdlicka, a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies, examined 164 preserved amphibians for the presence of Batrachochytrium
dendrobatidis, or Bd, an infectious pathogen driving many species to extinction. The pathogen is found
on every continent inhabited by amphibians and in more than 200 species. Bd causes chytridiomycosis,
which is one of the most devastating infectious diseases to vertebrate wildlife. Her paper, "Extracting
the Amphibian Chytrid Fungus from Formalin-fixed Specimens," was published in the British Ecological
Society's journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution and can be viewed at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00228.x/full. Richards-Hrdlicka swabbed
the skin of 10 species of amphibians dating back to 1963 and preserved in formalin at the Peabody
Museum of Natural History. Those swabs were then analyzed for the presence of the deadly pathogen.
The frog being swabbed is a Golden Toad (Cranopsis periglenes) of Monteverde, Costa Rica. The species
is extinct as a result of a lethal Bd infection. (Photo Credit: Michael Hrdlicka) "I have long proposed that
the millions of amphibians maintained in natural-history collections around the world are just waiting
to be sampled," she said. The samples were then analyzed using a highly sensitive molecular test called
quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) that can detect Bd DNA, even from specimens originally
fixed in formalin. Formalin has long been recognized as a potent chemical that destroys DNA. "This
advancement holds promise to uncover Bd's global or regional date and place of arrival, and it could also
help determine if some of the recent extinctions or disappearances could be tied to Bd," said Richards-
Hrdlicka. "Scientists will also be able to identify deeper molecular patterns of the pathogen, such as
genetic changes and patterns relating to strain differences, virulence levels and its population
genetics." Richards-Hrdlicka found Bd in six specimens from Guilford, Conn., dating back to 1968, the
earliest record of Bd in the Northeast. Four other animals from the 1960s were infected and came from
Hamden, Litchfield and Woodbridge. From specimens collected in the 2000s, 27 infected with Bd came
from Woodbridge and southern Connecticut. In other related work, she found that nearly 30 percent of
amphibians in Connecticut today are infected, yet show no outward signs of infection. Amphibian
populations and species around the world are declining or disappearing as a result of land-use change,
habitat loss, climate change and disease. The chytrid fungus, caused by Bd, suffocates amphibians by
preventing them from respiring through their skin. Since Bd's identification in the late 1990s, there has
been an intercontinental effort to document amphibian populations and species infected with it.
Richards-Hrdlicka's work will enable researchers to look to the past for additional insight into this
pathogen's impact

Virulent diseases cannot cause extinction because of burnout theory
Gerber 5 (Leah R. Gerber, PhD, Associate Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Sciences,
Ecological Society of America, Exposing Extinction Risk Analysis to Pathogens: Is Disease Just Another
Form of Density Dependence? August 2005)//rh
The density of a population is an important parameter for both PVA and hostpathogen theory. A fundamental principle of epidemiology is that
the spread of an infectious disease through a population is a function of the density of both
susceptible and infectious hosts. If infectious agents are supportable by the host species of
conservation interest, the impact of a pathogen on a declining population is likely to decrease as the
host population declines. A pathogen will spread when, on average, it is able to transmit to a susceptible host before an infected host
dies or eliminates the infection (Kermack and McKendrick 1927, Anderson and May 1991). If the parasite affects the
reproduction or mortality of its host, or the host is able to mount an immune response, the parasite
population may eventually reduce the density of susceptible hosts to a level at which the rate of
parasite increase is no longer positive. Most epidemiological models indicate that there is a host threshold density
(or local population size) below which a parasite cannot invade, suggesting that rare or depleted
species should be less subject to host-specific disease. This has implications for small, yet increasing, populations. For
example, although endangered species at low density may be less susceptible to a disease outbreak, recovery
to higher densities places them at increasing risk of future disease-related decline (e.g., southern sea otters; Gerber et al. 2004). In the absence
of stochastic factors (such as those modeled in PVA), and given the usual assumption of disease models that the chance that a susceptible host
will become infected is proportional to the density of infected hosts (the mass action assumption) a hostspecific pathogen cannot
drive its host to extinction (McCallum and Dobson 1995). Extinction in the absence of stochasticity is possible if alternate hosts
(sometimes called reservoir hosts) relax the extent to which transmission depends on the density of the endangered host species. Similarly, if
transmission occurs at a rate proportional to the frequency of infected hosts relative to uninfected hosts (see McCallum et al. 2001),
endangered hosts at low density may still face the threat of extinction by disease. These possibilities suggest that the complexities
characteristic of many real host pathogen systems may have very direct implications for the recovery of rare endangered species.
STEM
STEM labor crisis rhetoric reproduces neoliberal inequality and causes water
shortages, ecological destruction, and economic inequality labor shortages are a
myth constructed to control worker wages by creating a surplus of STEM workers
Pierce 14
(Clayton Pierce, assistant professor in the Education, Culture, & Society Department at the University of
Utah, STEM Crisis Myth Revealed: Industry Leaders and Politicians Need a Surplus Army of STEM
Workers, March 26, 2014, http://educationalbiocapital.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/stem-crisis-myth-
revealed-industry-leaders-and-politicians-need-a-surplus-army-of-stem-workers/)
Over the past 10 years especially, calls to increase Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering (STEM)
output from our countrys schools has been deafening. It is impossible to listen to almost any policy
maker or CEO speaking on the topic of education reform in the U.S. who does not couch their entire
analysis on the STEM worker shortage crisis the country is currently facing. Schools and universities in
the U.S., if they are to do one thing, so the story goes, is to produce a massive STEM workforce that can
help the economy roll past fast moving competitors such as India and China (insert any other country
that scores better on the trends in international mathematics and science study [TIMSS] test). The
problem with this story, as Harvard Law School senior research associate Michael S. Teitelbaum has
recently pointed out in his study on the STEM workforce shortage, is that it does not match the facts
on the ground. Teitelbaums as well as other recent studies on the STEM workforce show that, in fact,
STEM workers in most fields are suffering from the same rates of unemployment as other professional
degree fields. The constructed perception of a vast open horizon of employment opportunities
awaiting the 21st century student/worker is exactly that: a manufactured discourse driven by
politicians and industry leaders who want to manage the STEM worker population in this country to
their advantage . Given this new data on the STEM workforce in the U.S. it is time to reassess what I
have called the Neo-Sputnik narrative driving current neoliberal educational reform in the U.S.
through the actual verifiable contours of the STEM workforce. Here is what I see as the most
compelling and insightful findings from the recent research done on the STEM crisis in this country as it
relates to major K-12 educational reform policy initiatives such as Race to the Top or Rising above the
Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. Wages are
stagnate or falling in many STEM fields. This finding is telling because, as Teitelbaum rightly asserts, if
there were truly a STEM work shortage companies would increase wages in order to draw bright young
people into the workforce Wages are not increasing (which should follow if worker demand is high
and supply is low) because STEM industry lobbyists and politicians have passed legislation that allows for
a steady stream of lower-wage workers from other countries (see the legislation for international
student visa waivers that has accompanied many economic recovery acts of late) The few areas
where STEM degree holders are enjoying raises is in booming industries such as the petroleum
fracking industry Finally, STEM careers are actually among the most unstable and volatile
employment types in the economy given the short-term, project based nature of the work (1-3 year
post-doctorate work for example makes up a large segment of the STEM workforce). Given these
conclusions what are we to make of the unrelenting STEM driven educational reform drumbeat that
continues to seize public discourse around school failure and economic recovery in this country?
Moreover, how can corporate actors such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other STEM
reliant industry leaders continue to have credibility in calling for hyper STEM focused education reform
to be the centerpiece for addressing long term social/political problems associated with the so-called
achievement gap and the overall growth of racial and economic inequality in this country? Michael
Anfts Chronicle of Higher Education article makes questions like these more relevant by emphasizing
one of the most important findings in Teitelbaums study. In particular that Most of the claims of such
broad-based shortages in the U.S. STEM work force come from employers of STEM personnel and
from their lobbyists and trade associations, says Michael Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow in science
policy at Harvard University and a senior adviser at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Such claims have
convinced some politicians and journalists, who echo them. But if there truly were an across-the-STEM-
spectrum labor shortage, Mr. Teitelbaum and others note, wed be seeing an overall rise in wages in
technology and science fields. And that isnt happening. One of the most important findings from
Teitelbaum and Anfts analyses of the STEM workforce data in terms of its impact on K-12 education
reform is that STEM industry actors in fact benefit from the perception of a STEM workforce shortage in
the U.S. and the reality of not having to pay higher wages for a relatively uncompetitive labor pool. But
how could this be? Heres one way I offer to interpret the intersection of the STEM crisis myth and K-12
Neo-Sputnik school reform (and really K-graduate school) within the context of this new data. To start
with, I think we have to ask the question of who benefits (profits) most from generating the perception
of a STEM workforce crisis in the U.S.? There are many historical examples one could point to suggest a
possible way to answer this question. One I would suggest comes from a classic early critique of
industrial capitalism formulated by a man with an impressive beard and ability to sit for long hours at
the British Museum Library in London. In his classic critique of capitalism, notably in Volume 1 of Capital,
Karl Marx argued (and provided strong evidence on the subject) that one important developmental
aspect of capitalist growth was the establishment of disciplining mechanisms (schools being an
important one) in society capable of shaping the working class population within a competitive wage
labor situation . That is, peasants and farmers didnt just drop their rakes and ploughs and walk
peacefully into urban factoriesthey had to be coerced and disciplined into a worldview where they
(and in most cases were left with no alternative) had to accept their fate as competitive economic actors
trying to survive on the new productive playing field brought into existence through industrial capital
and wage labor. One of the most effective ways workers were disciplined into participating in society
as a competitive economic actor set against other workers who were also selling the only commodity
available to them (their bodys energy as labor power) was, as Marx points out in Volume 1 of Capital,
through the industrial owners/politicians actor network that governed laws such as the working day,
amount of education child workers should be allowed, health and safety of workers, and minimum
amount of pay. For any or all of these governing strategies over the working class in England (and other
parts of the world) to work however there needed to be segmented groups of workerspopulations of
wage workers that could be pitted against one another to get around pesky work reform laws such as
the limitation of the working day to 10 hours or a minimum amount of hours children had to spend in
school. Marx of course named this phenomenon, the disciplining and creation of different segments of
the working population, reserve, floating, and semi-permanent worker populations among other
categories. The pattern Marx was onto that is important and relevant to understanding the STEM
myth today and why schools play such an important role in it is that powerful economic industries
always need to create and regulate working populations in order to maintain and maximize
profitability and growth. If workers went on strike to increase wages in Birmingham or London, for
instance, it was handy for factory owners to simply compel the reserve working class (or a surplus of
workers) in nearby towns to work in the factory for what the owners wanted to pay or perhaps even
drop wages (thereby increasing the golden egg of surplus value that originates from human labor).
Having an escape valve to release the pressure of exploitative work relations, in other words, is part of
how a capitalist economy is organized and regulated as Marx showed us 150 years ago in his analysis of
industrial capital and the creation of surplus working populations. I think this is one important (if not the
most) explanation as to why high-tech industry leaders in fields such as pharmaceuticals, biomedical,
biotechnological, and information technologies have taken control of educational reform policy and
based it upon the false premise of a STEM workforce labor shortage. K-12 schools, as it turns out, are
one of the most important and influential spaces in society that such a strategy can play out, one that is
interested in producing not necessarily 21st century skilled workers but 21st workers that can be put
into competition with one another. The STEM crisis in other words and the call for a total curricular
overhaul to address this need should be read, I am suggesting, as a crisis in the reserve STEM working
population a role that has largely been filled by workers from other countries. What seems to be
missing, and is what I see as one of the driving forces behind the STEM crisis myth, is the need to grow
out a larger domestic surplus in the STEM workforce in order to increase the overall pool of available
labor that can be set into competitive relation to each other. But the project to create and regulate a
surplus population of STEM workers does not work exactly the same as it did during the industrial period
of capital. As researchers (such as Kaushik Sunder Rajan and Melinda Cooper) who have looked at the
nature of capitalism in its high-tech/biocapitalist phase have pointed out, production in knowledge
society is largely based on some promissory or speculative future. Things like the next wonder drug, for
example, are years down the road and investments need to be made now in order to realize their
potential value or at least to participate in the high risk/reward economic gamble that many
biocapitalist ventures are based upon. The domestic STEM workforce similarly is built on the same
speculative bubble: the jobs will eventually come some time in the future and we (biocaptialist
actors/policy maker networks) need to start building the promissory workforce to meet this perceived
labor demand. Schools , in other words, have become a hedge fund site for the speculative needs of
industries with an eye toward the futureone where a whole new standing and reserve army of
workers needs to be created so profitability and growth can be realized. Instead of being held
hostage by the speculative agents of the countrys educational future, shouldnt we be focused on the
present that is beset with real social and ecological crises like global climate change , water
shortages , widespread environmental injustices in working class and communities of color or simply
let communities decide for themselves what problems should be addressed? In our present moment
the educational future is being decided by those who are focused on solving very different problems ,
and for them, all we need to do is fall in line to help our country recover by doing our part to stem the
STEM crisis.
Doesnt lead to peacestatistics show unipolarity actually leads to war
Montiero 12--Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University
Nuno, Unrest Assured, International Security, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Winter 2011/12),
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Unrest_Assured.pdf
How well, then, does the argument that unipolar systems are peaceful account for the first two
decades of unipolarity since the end of the Cold War? Table 1 presents a list of great powers divided
into three periods: 1816 to 1945, multipolarity; 1946 to 1989, bipolarity; and since 1990, unipolarity.
46 Table 2 presents summary data about the incidence of war during each of these periods.
Unipolarity is the most conflict prone of all the systems, according to at least two important
criteria: the percentage of years that great powers spend at war and the incidence of war involving
great powers. In multipolarity, 18 percent of great power years were spent at war. In bipolarity, the
ratio is 16 percent. In unipolarity, however, a remarkable 59 percent of great power years until now
were spent at war. This is by far the highest percentage in all three systems. Furthermore, during
periods of multipolarity and bipolarity, the probability that war involving a great power would
break out in any given year was, respectively, 4.2 percent and 3.4 percent. Under unipolarity, it is
18.2 percentor more than four times higher. 47 These figures provide no evidence that
unipolarity is peaceful .48
Hegemony is the superpower syndromea fear of vulnerability that breeds
unnecessary violence to showcase Americas omnipotence impact is an imperial
wake of destruction
Lifton, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, 3 [Robert Jay Lifton, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School, previously Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the
Graduate School and Director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, 2003 (Superpower Syndrome: Americas Apocalyptic
Confrontation With The World, Published by Thunders Mouth Press / Nation Books, ISBN 1560255129,
p. 125-130)]
It is almost un-American to be vulnerable. As a people, we pride ourselves on being able to stand up to anything, solve all
problems. We have long had a national self-image that involves an ability to call forth reservoirs or strength when we need it, and a sense of a
protected existence peculiar to America in an otherwise precarious world. In recent times we managed, after all, to weather the most brutal
century in human history relatively unscathed. THE BLESSED COUNTRY Our attitude stems partly from geography. We have always claimed a
glorious aloneness thanks to what has been called the Free security of the two great oceans which separate us from dangerous upheavals in
Europe and Asia. While George Washington was not the isolationist he is sometimes represented to be, he insisted on his celebrated Farewell
Address of 1796, Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world. That image has been
embraced, and often simplified or distorted, by politicians ever since. (He warned against permanent alliances, not alliances in general).
The idea of our separateness and safety from faraway conflicts has had importance from the time of the early settlers, many of whom left
Europe to escape political religious, or legal threats or entanglements. Even if one came as an adventurer or an empire-builder, one was leaving
a continent of complexity and conflict for a land whose remoteness could support new beginnings. Abraham Lincoln absolutized
that remoteness and security from outside attack in order to stress that our only danger came from ourselves: All the armies
of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their
military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or
make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. However much the world has shrunk technologically in
the last half century, and however far-ranging our own superpower forays, that sense of geographic invulnerability has
never left us. We have seen ourselves as not only separate from but different from the rest of the world, a special nation
among nations. That sense of American exceptionalism was intensely observed by Alexis de Tocqueville, the brilliant French politician and
writer, in the early nineteenth century. In de Tocquevilles view of America, A course almost without limits, a field without horizon, is revealed:
the human spirit rushes forward and traverses *it+ in every direction. American exceptionalism has always been, as the
sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has pointed out, a double-edged sword. In the psychological life of Americans it
has been bound up with feelings of unique virtue, strength, and success. But this has sometimes led
Americans to be utopian moralists, who press hard to institutionalize virtue, to destroy evil people,
and eliminate wicked institutions and practices. That subjective exceptionalism has been vividly expressed in the historian
Richard Hofstadters observation, It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one. At the
time of the Puritans, sentiments of exceptionalism were expressed in biblical terms: America was an Arcadian image of the New World an
Eden from which the serpent and forbidden trees had been thoroughly excluded, and a new Promised Land and a New Jerusalem. The
language was that of a postapocalyptic utopia, and remnants of such sentiments persist whenever we speak of ourselves in more secular terms
as the new world. Important to this feeling of exceptionalism has been a deep sense that America offered unparalleled access to regenerative
power. As Richard Slotkin explains: The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate *end page 127+ their fortunes, their spirits,
and the power of their church and nation, though the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence. Even when
Americans played what has been called a shell game of identity, they could experience an unlimited capacity for renewalendless new
beginnings as individuals or as a nation. Slotkin speaks of a new relationship to authority in this new world. While in Europe all men were
under authority; in America all men dreamed they had the power to become authority. These claims of new authority extended to the country
as a whole, to Americas authority among nationsa claim to new national authority that was expanded over time thanks to Americas
considerable achievementseconomic, technological, scientific, and cultural. American exceptionalism has often had the
overall psychological quality of a sense of ourselves as a blessed people, immune from the defeats
and sufferings of others. But underneath that sense there had to be a potential chink in our
psychological armorwhich was a deep-seated if hidden sense of vulnerability. OMNIPOTENCE AND VULNERABILITY
Ironically, superpower syndrome projects the problem of American vulnerability onto the world stage. A
superpower is perceived as possessing more than natural power. [end page 128] (In this sense it comes closer to resembling the
comic-strip hero Superman than the Nietzschean Superman.) For a nation, its leaders, or even its
ordinary citizens to enter into the superpower syndrome is to lay claim to omnipotence, to power that is
unlimited, which is ultimately power over death. At the heart of the superpower syndrome then is the need to
eliminate a vulnerability that, as the antithesis of omnipotence, contains the basic contradiction of the
syndrome. For vulnerability can never be eliminated, either by a nation or an individual. In seeking its
elimination, the superpower finds itself on a psychological treadmill. The idea of vulnerability is
intolerable, the fact of it irrefutable. One solution is to maintain an illusion of invulnerability. But the
superpower then runs the danger of taking increasingly draconian actions to sustain that illusion. For to do
otherwise would be to surrender the cherished status of superpower. Other nations have experiences in the world that render them and their
citizens all too aware of the essential vulnerability of life on earth. They also may be influenced by religious and cultural traditions (far weaker in
the United States) that emphasize vulnerability as an aspect of human mortality. No such reality can be accepted by those clinging to a sense of
omnipotence. At issue is the experience of death anxiety, which is the strongest manifestation of vulnerability. Such a deep-seated [end
page 129] sense of vulnerability can sometimes be acknowledged by the ordinary citizens of a
superpower, or even at times by its leaders, who may admit, for instance, that there is no guaranteed defense against
terrorist acts. But those leaders nonetheless remain committed to eliminating precisely that
vulnerabilitycommitted, that is, to the illusory goal of invulnerability. When that goal is repeatedly undermined
whether by large-scale terrorist acts like 9/11, or as at present by militant resistance to American hegemony in Iraq and elsewhere in the
Middle Eastboth the superpower and the world it acts upon may become dangerously destabilized.
Their STEM advantage is rooted in an ideology of economic competitiveness makes
environmental and economic collapse inevitable
Bristow (School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University) 10
(Gillian, Resilient regions: re-placeing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and
Society 2010, 3, 153167)

In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of
competitiveness, such that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and
practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage through superior productivity performance, or
the attraction of new rms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the developing
ubiquitication of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This
reects the status of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely
signicant rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005;
Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is such that many policies previously
considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to be hijacked in support
of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue,
however, that a particularly narrow discourse of competitiveness has been constructed that has a
number of negative connotations for the resilience of regions. Resilience is dened as the regions
ability to experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive, works within
environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such,
resilience clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversication, and the
developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specic
development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is
placeless and increasingly associated with globalised, growth-rst and environmentally malign
agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper will argue that the relationships between competitiveness
and resilience are more complex than might at rst appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy
(CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic
policy discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional
development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and the more
nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly
overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now
structured as follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and
policy discourse around regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework
to explain both how a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development
policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging
critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development rstly, with
reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show
the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience
Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and
regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of
transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from
above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable
development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster
planning with, for example Regional Resilience Teams established in the English regions to support and co-
ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the threat of a swine u
pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable local and regional
development activities and strategies. The recent global credit crunch and the accompanying in-crease in
livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater
resilience by virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities, hav-ing greater economic
diversity, and/or having a de-termination to prioritise and effect more signicant structural change (Ashby et
al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the grey literature
spawned by thinktanks, consul-tancies and environmental interest groups around the consequences of
the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for
localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled economies,
cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled triple crunch (New Economics
Foundation, 2008) has power-fully illuminated the potentially disastrous material consequences of
the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in the
form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current system
to manage global nancial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising
previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and
political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example
Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008).
No STEM crisis we already have a huge excess of STEM grads.
Roberts 13
(Robert N. Charette, Posted 30 Aug 2013, The STEM Crisis Is a Myth Forget; the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of
scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, Charette is a Fellow with Cutter's Business Technology Strategies
practice. He is also President of ITABHI Corporation, a business and technology risk management consultancy. With 35 years
experience in a wide variety of international technology and management positions, Dr. Charette is recognized as an
international authority and pioneer regarding IS, IT, and telecommunications risk.)
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States,
or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelors degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce
Departments definition of STEM to the NSFs annual count of science and engineering bachelors
degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings
were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelors holders could compete for them,
that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field. Of course, the pool of U.S.
STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM masters and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009,
around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa
holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical
certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then
theres the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades. Even in
the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow
the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one . A recent study by
the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more
than a third of recent computer science graduates arent working in their chosen major; of that group,
almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available. Spot shortages for certain STEM
specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data
scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to
address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in
cant assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
Whats perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have
directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology,
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there
was no evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the
horizon.
Alt cause to Asian War - Senkaku Islands
Tisdall 13 (Simon, The Guardian, China escalates islands dispute with Japan US warns Beijing it will
back up Tokyo as China sets up 'defence zone' around Senkakus, November 24, 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/us-warns-beijiing-island-dispute-senkanus)//rh
A simmering territorial and maritime dispute in Asia erupted at the weekend as Washington warned
Beijing it would back Japan militarily in any confrontation arising from China's latest unilateral
assertion of its claims. The Obama administration weighed in after China moved to in effect "rope off"
the seas and skies around the disputed Japanese-administered Senkaku islands in the east China Sea.
In a tough statement reflecting the surprise and alarm felt in Washington and Tokyo at China's perceived
sudden escalation of the dispute, Chuck Hagel, defence secretary, said the US was "deeply concerned"
at the development, in which China appears to be trying to control who can enter and leave the area.
The imposition of the zone was a "destabilising attempt to alter the status quo in the region", Hagel
said. "This unilateral action increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations ... We are in close
consultation with our allies and partners in the region, including Japan. We remain steadfast in our
commitments." Map - Senkaku Islands Hagel reminded Beijing that the remote Senkaku islands, known
as Diaoyu in China, are covered by the 1952 US-Japan security treaty, under which the US is committed
to fighting alongside Japan to repel any "common danger". On Monday China's foreign ministry said it
had complained to the US about its "irresponsible remarks". Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said
in a statement China had asked the US through its ambassador, Gary Locke, "to correct its mistakes and
stop making irresponsible remarks on China". Defence ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said the ministry
had complained to the US embassy's military attache on Sunday evening. Japan's deputy chief cabinet
secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters on Monday that China's declaration had escalated a tense
situation. "It can invite an unexpected occurrence and it is a very dangerous thing as well," he said.
"The step just announced unjustly interferes with the freedom to fly above the open sea, which is a
general principle under the international law. The measure is not enforceable to our country."
Washington's swift intervention showed just how easily a little local difficulty in the volatile east
Asian region could potentially trigger a superpower clash . The Senkaku stand-off is but one of
several similar disputes pitting a more assertive China against its less powerful neighbours. Vietnam,
the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan (all US allies) are like Japan enmeshed in arguments
with Beijing over relatively obscure but potentially strategic bits of maritime real estate . These
numerous flashpoints have led the Japanese government to describe the regional security environment
as "increasingly severe". In response, Tokyo has been busily building up mutual defence and security
ties across south-east Asia, and with Australia and India, as a hedge against Beijing. For its part, China
has sought to enlist Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and Myanmar as de facto buffer states while
projecting itself as a rival to the US as a "blue-water" Pacific power. Japan has denounced the zone set
up by China on Saturday as "totally unacceptable", and indicated that aircraft from its self-defence
force would ignore Beijing's attempt to oblige aeroplanes to obtain its permission before entering.
Fumio Kishida, foreign minister, warned that China's action "could well lead to an unforeseen situation".
He called the development "very dangerous". Hagel said that US forces in the Pacific theatre, including
those based in Japan and South Korea, would also ignore China's strictures. China's foreign ministry
called Japan's objections "absolutely groundless and unacceptable". It said it had made solemn
representations to the Japanese embassy in Beijing. The Chinese government-run Xinhua news agency
published map co-ordinates for what it called the "East China sea air defence identification zone"
covering most of the sea and the skies over the islands. It said China's armed forces would take
"defensive emergency measures" against aircraft that failed to identify themselves properly or follow
its radio instructions. Xinhua claimed the "air zone could contribute to regional peace and security by
curbing the increasing rampancy of Japan's right-wing forces, as well as the continuous and dangerous
provocations of Japanese politicians, which even Washington should be vigilant against". The statement
was an apparent reference to Shinzo Abe, Japan's conservative prime minister, who was elected last
December on a platform of standing up for Japan's rights. Abe, who says he is intent on making a
"proactive contribution to peace", has been denounced in China and South Korea as a reckless
nationalist and historical revisionist. Although China and Japan share two-way trade worth $250bn
(150bn) a year and maintain many other bilateral links, Abe and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, have
yet to hold a summit meeting, and other high-level contacts remain frozen. The dispute over the
Senkakus, situated south-west of the Japanese mainland, dates back to 1971 when China claimed
sovereignty. Up to that point, the islands had been under unchallenged Japanese control since the 19th
century, although Taiwan also has a claim.The row escalated last year when Tokyo effectively
nationalised some of the chain, purchasing two islands from private owners. The takeover provoked
street protests in China and furious official condemnation. Since then there have been almost daily
incursions by Chinese fishing boats and other non-military vessels. Although tiny in size, the Senkakus
are thought to sit on top of valuable energy deposits. But analysts say the outcome has broad
implications for regional security, given that an ever more assertive China is prosecuting similar disputes
with several other neighbours. Akio Takahara, professor of international relations and law at Tokyo
university, said: "[Senkaku] must be viewed as an international issue, not just a bilateral issue... and it
is very, very dangerous. They [China] must stop the provocations. If Japan did buckle, it would send a
very bad message." In a foretaste of what could happen in the weeks ahead, China sent an air patrol into
the zone shortly after the official announcement. Later on Saturday afternoon, Japan scrambled fighter
jets after two Chinese reconnaissance planes appeared over the East China sea.