1AC

The ocean is creative and life sustaining. Exploitation of the ocean

and the environment is parallel to the exploitation of women and
other Others as both are seen as passive and unproductive. Only by
affirming the ocean as a space in which all life intersects can we
combat the violation of nature. Only by affirming the feminine as
productive and valuable can we combat the violation of women.
This is key to changing resource extraction so that ways in which
gender, class, and race structure peoples interactions with nature
and their responses to it are taken into account. Changing our
relation to the natural world is a prerequisite to achieving an ethical
form of development.
Agarwal 1992 (Bina Agarwal, prize-winning development economist and Director and
Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in University of Delhi. The
Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, spring
1992, pp. 119-158 //MG)
Feminist Environmentalism. I would like to suggest here that women's and men's relationship with
nature needs to be under- stood as rooted in their material reality, in their
specific forms of interaction with the environment. Hence, insofar as there is a
gender and class (/caste/race)-based division of labor and distribu- tion of property
and power, gender and class (/caste/race) structure people's interactions with nature
and so structure the effects of environmental change on people and their
responses to it. And where knowledge about nature is experiential in its basis,
the divi- sions of labor, property, and power which shape experience also shape
the knowledge based on that experience. For instance, poor peasant and tribal
women have typically been responsible for fetching fuel and fodder and in hill and
tribal communities have also often been the main cultivators. They are thus likely
to be affected adversely in quite specific ways by envi- ronmental degradation. At
the same time, in the course of their everyday interactions with nature, they
acquire a special knowledge of species varieties and the processes of natural
regeneration. (This would include knowledge passed on to them by, for example, their mothers.) They
could thus be seen as both victims of the destruction of nature and as
repositories of knowledge about nature, in ways distinct from the men of their
class. The former aspect would provide the gendered impulse for their resistance
and response to environmental destruction. The latter would condition their
perceptions and choices of what should be done. Indeed, on the basis of their
experiential understanding and knowledge, they could provide a special
perspective on the pro- cesses of environmental regeneration, one that needs to
inform our view of alternative approaches to development . (By extension, women who are
no longer actively using this knowledge for their daily sustenance, and are no longer in contact with the natural environment in the same way, are likely to lose this knowledge over time and with it the possibility of its transmission
to others.) In this conceptualization, therefore, the link between women and the
environment can be seen as structured by a given gender and class (/caste/race)

organization of production, reproduction, and distribution. Ideological

constructions such as of gender, of nature, and of the relationship between the
two, may be seen as (interactively) a part of this structuring but not the whole of it.
This perspective I term "feminist environmentalism." In terms of action such a
perspective would call for struggles over both resources and meanings. It would
imply grappling with the dominant groups who have the property, power, and
privilege to control resources, and these or other groups who control ways of

thinking about them, via educational, media, religious, and legal institutions. On
the feminist front there would be a need to challenge and transform both notions
about gender and the actual division of work and resources between the genders.
On the envi- ronmental front there would be a need to challenge and transform
not only notions about the relationship between people and nature but also the
actual methods of appropriation of nature's resources by a few. Feminist
environmentalism underlines the necessity of addressing these dimensions from
both fronts.

Our method of ecological feminism includes recognition of how

concepts of femininity and naturalness have become a mechanism
of denigration toward dualistic cultures considered feminine or
natural. We present an analysis of the ways in which policies that
have hurt the environment have also inevitably been detrimental to
women and other Others, a critical reclamation of concepts such as
women or nature to counter how those concepts have
historically manifested in material oppression, and an inclusive reevaluation of traditional ideas. Ecological feminism takes an
intersectional approach that explicitly recognizes interlocking
oppression and thus would entail a critical analysis of policies and
women and other oppressed groups are unfairly burdened
Cuomo 2001 (Christine Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an
affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for
African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies. Feminism and
Ecological Communities: An ethic of flourishing //MG)
Though there are certainly common features among various examples of
ecofeminist and ecological feminist thought, the differences among them are
equally relevant to our discussion. As feminist theorists reject some versions of
feminism as inadequate, shallow, or inconsistent, so must we critically consider
the underlying principles and values to which ecofeminists implicitly or explicitly
subscribe. In the following pages I will sometimes be deeply critical of the theoretical underpinnings accepted
by a number of ecofeminist writers. None the less, I am favorably disposed toward the
ecofeminist project the attempt to bring together both feminist concerns,
analyses, and ethical insights and ethical concerns for the well-being of
nonhuman species and environments. Ecofeminists are preoccupied with
connections and intersections among different forms and instances of oppression,
and this focus can provide important insight and direction for environmental
ethics and feminist politics. The positions of feminist and other critical theorists who articulate
connections among various forms of human oppression without also analyzing and addressing the mistreatment of
nature are different from ecofeminist positions, because ecofeminism relies also on rejecting the belief that
membership in the human species should be the sole, ultimate designator of moral value. In fact,

ecofeminist arguments are meant not only to uncover the connections between
misogyny, sexism, or institutions of gender and the exploitation of the so-called
natural world, but also to make explicit connections among these and other forms
of oppression. Ecofeminists are particularly interested in the ways oppression
depends on hierarchical, dualistic thinking, and values that propagate the
glorification of qualities supposedly naturally held by those with economic,
sexual, racial, hegemonic power. FEMINISM AND ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES 36 Still,
ecofeminist methodologies are multifarious, and some are more useful and
accurate. A number of ecofeminists take discursive and practical connections
between women and nature at face value, believing them to be a result of
similarities among oppressed entities. Others ecological feminists theorize
such connections as indicators of similarities in subjugating ideologies and

constructions of the meanings of woman and nature. Among the latter in even her early
writings, Ynestra King asserts: We live in a culture which is founded on repudiation and domination of nature. This
has a special significance for women because, in patriarchal thought, women are believed to be closer to nature
than men. That gives women a particular stake in ending the domination of nature in healing the alienation
between human and nonhuman nature [my emphasis]. (Rothschild 1983: 18) Ecological feminist

emphasis, not on connections between women and nature, but on complex causal
explanations and implications of various, interlocking oppressions has been
similar to, and often relies on, work that makes explicit links among misogyny,
racism, class oppression, and heterosexism and homophobia. Ecological feminist
attention to connections, or to perceivable/constructable points of intersection
among understandings of woman, nature, race, and labor that help justify
devaluation, should not be presented, by ecofeminists or their critics, as a
totalizing or grand schema that attempts to explain and address the root cause of
all oppression. Rather, it is best seen as a perspective that can be uniquely
illuminative of some aspects of oppression, exploitation, mistreatment, and
degradation. For example, environmental racism is the term that has been used to refer to the ways in which
racism is perpetrated through environmental harm: On still days, when the air is heavy, Piedmont has the rottenegg smell of a chemistry class. The acrid, sulfurous odor of the bleaches used in the paper mill drifts along the
valley, penetrating walls and clothing, furnishings and skin. No perfume can fully mask it. It is as much a part of the
valley as is the river, and the people who live there are not overly disturbed by it. Smells like money to me, we
were taught to say in its defense, even as children. (Gates 1994: 6) The mostly African-American residents in the
85-mile area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, better known as Cancer Alley, live in a region which contains
136 chemical companies and refineries. A 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christs Commission for
Racial Justice found that two-thirds of all Blacks and Latinos in the United States reside in areas with one or more
unregulated toxic-waste sites. The THE ECOFEMINIST PROJECT 37 CRJ report also cited race as the most significant
variable in differentiating communities with such sites from those without them. Partly as a result of living with toxic
waste in disproportionate numbers, African-Americans have higher rates of cancer, birth defects, and lead poisoning
than the United States population as a whole. (Riley 1993: 192) Ecological feminist analyses of

environmental racism are crucial, as they help provide a theoretical framework

for detecting and analyzing the depth of correlation among various oppressions.
This is due mostly to its preoccupation with intersections a focus that any
theory or movement hoping to do something as simple as improve the lives of
women must have. Though we cannot underestimate the importance of getting
more people to notice (or care) that when the earth gets dumped on so do people of
color, ecological feminist analysis also pushes the following kinds of questions.
How does ethical, economic and aesthetic rhetoric help justify racist, toxic
policies? How do alienation and disempowerment make it particularly difficult for
communities to fight against a system that is poisoning them and their immediate
environment? How do current racist conceptions of people and urban spaces as unclean and hopeless help
justify mistreatment? How, in male-dominated contexts, are women disproportionately
affected by the minute and mundane effects of toxins? Regarding environmental racism and
injustice, ecological feminism can offer helpful questions, and perhaps point to promising alternatives. For example,

activists might draw on feminist empowerment and consciousness-raising models

to create community discussion of issues. Feminist politics also require that the
knowledge, insights, and questions of women of color are central in shaping
understandings of the problems and solutions at hand. A feminist lens might also
be necessary to create activist strategies that do not replicate oppressive gender
roles and identities. Without special attention to the needs and interests of girls
and women of particular races and classes, it is likely that their particular,
gendered experiences of, complicity in, and resistance to environmental harm will
not be noticed. Ecological feminist values and analyses also insure that
environmental racism is not thought of as just a problem for people, and that
the interests of the nonhuman life through which human communities are built
are considered as well. But the fact of its usefulness by no means implies that
ecological feminism is the only analysis needed. Any consideration of community
problems that does not include the lives of women and non-human beings is
grossly inadequate, as is any analysis that is not highly attentive to the racial
formations within environmental issues. Various lenses, concerning the history and meanings of

racism and economic oppression in the US, epidemiological patterns, workers issues with regard to toxic chemicals,
and urban and industrial planning and policy, and the relationships between domestic dumping of US waste and
global economic practices, must all inform theoretical and practical responses to environmental racism and
injustice. FEMINISM AND ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES 38 The power and promise of ecological

feminism lies in its challenges to the assumptions of various other political

ecological perspectives, its feminist philosophical foundations, and its positive
recommendations for options that take seriously intersections among different
systems of domination. This thinking at the crossroads can be an important
contributor to the kind of political and ethical discourse and conversation that we
need right now, not as the answer to all of our problems, or a primary bottom-line
analysis, but because its attention to patterns and connections forecloses dead
end single-issue politics and the acceptance of practices and policies that actually
contradict our goals. THE SUBSTANCE OF ECOLOGICAL FEMINISM By way of summary, I offer
the following synopsis of ecological feminist positions which ground the
discussion of ethics throughout the rest of this book. (1) Ethical systems and values born
out of conceptual universes that relegate what is considered feminine or natural
to an inferior status help justify and implement both that relegation and the
mistreatment of those groups and entities. The most obvious examples are ethical systems that
allow for no moral consideration of those entities, that specifically claim that women, nature, tribal people,
foreigners, or slaves are not included in a given moral universe. But it is also true that moral systems

based
on deeply rooted and exclusionary conceptions of moral agents and objects can
import problematic beliefs in more clandestine ways. Ecological feminist ethics
therefore follow in the footsteps of feminist ethics in exploring values and
practices that derive from a foundation that takes women, nature, and other
commonly excluded beings or groups seriously as morally relevant. This might include
focusing on their particularities as (for humans) moral agents, or as objects of ethical decision-making. (2) When
nature gets harmed, women and other Others (the poor, people of color, indigenous
communities, laborers, and members of other categorically disempowered social groups) are inevitably
harmed, or harmed more than the socially and economically privileged. The
devaluation of women and other oppressed groups justifies (a) devaluing, and
consequently harming, other feminine things; (b) disregarding their interests by
plundering or neglecting land that they own, control, or rely upon; (c) ignoring or
minimizing their assertions that land, water, or animals be treated more carefully
(even when women or agricultural workers, for example, may have more intimate knowledge of the objects in
question); THE ECOFEMINIST PROJECT 39 (d) preventing them from ownership and decision-

making that might result in less destructive practices. (3) Woman and nature
are socially created concepts, each referring to highly varied categories of beings
and objects. The concepts do not belie essential or necessary truths about beings
and objects, but their definitive power helps constitute and regulate material
realities. In Western and other hierarchical dualistic cultures, women and nature
are likened to each other and identified with femininity and corporealityopposite
and inferior to masculinity, reason, and their associates. These definitions render
the realm of the feminine suitable for domination, although the strange
mechanisms of oppression sometimes place the feminine in glorified positions
imbued with purity, mystery, and fertility. These and similar false generalizations
are also made concerning other groups who come to be metaphysically or
practically associated with femininity and/or nature, including primitives and
sexual deviants. (4) In the process of exploring and creating ethical options and
alternatives, reclamations of traditional ideas and practices might be helpful, but
they must be critically evaluated in terms of present contexts as well as their
historical embeddedness. When the substance of a moral claim cannot be logically
abstracted from problematic foundations or implications, it is not worth
reconsideration or reclamation. Likewise, evidence that an ethical imperative has proven emancipatory
in the past is inadequate proof that it can continue to do so. Hence, feminist ethics are not feminine
ethics. Feminist ethics help uncover and eradicate the devaluation and
mistreatment of women. Because nearly all women are influenced by conceptual

and material frameworks that are oppressive to women, efforts to eradicate

oppression involve criticizing concepts and institutions including femininity and
motherhood. Furthermore, since the oppression of women includes oppression
based on race, class, sexuality, physical ability, caste, and other factors, so all of
these are feminist issues. None the less, the focus of this approach is on female
humans is feminist for several reasons: (a) Womens oppression is nearly
universal, and therefore almost always visible and instructive in exposing various
frameworks and mechanisms of oppression at work in any given context . The
oppression of women is therefore a paradigm for the consideration of oppression
and exploitation in general.4 (b) The history of feminist thought provides a specific
cluster of analyses of oppression, exploitation, and resistance. Thinkers and
actors who call themselves feminist, including ecological feminists, place
themselves in agreement with some aspect of this history, though of course they
may also disagree with other aspects. (c) Many of the most influential
representatives in the history of thought including most of the builders of
Western modern science and technology and capitalism, have included, as a
central ideological and practical component, the systematic, direct devaluation
and/or oppression of women and whatever else comes to be, or to be considered
feminine. (d) Feminists are aware that when the focus is not on women, their
needs, interests, and perspectives tend to be severely neglected

The Western, patriarchal ocean narrative has failed to recognize the

interconnected nature of existence nature is viewed as existing
exclusively for human use and Others historically associated with
nature are devalued and exploited. The status quo view of the
ocean manifests in imperialist development discourse. Concepts of
development and resource utilization that emerged in the context of
colonialism have been raised to the level of the universal, leading to
the continuation of colonization and the destruction of the lives and
cultures of millions all in the name of a patriarchal progress
Shiva 88 (Vandana Shiva. Indian environmental activist and anti-globalization author.
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India 1-4 //MG)
'Development' was to have been a post-colonial project, a choice for accepting a
model of progress in which the entire world remade itself on the model of the
colonising modem west, without having to undergo the subjugation and
exploitation that colonialism entailed. The assumption was that western style
progress was possible for all. Development, as the improved well-being of all, was
thus equated with the westernisation of economic categories - of needs, of
Productivity, of growth. Concepts and categories about economic development
and natural resource utilisation that had emerged in the specific context of
industrialisation and capitalist growth in a centre of colonial power, were raised
to the level of universal assumptions and applicability in the entirely different
context of basic needs satisfaction for the people of the newly independent Third
World countries. Yet, as Rosa Luxemberg has pointed out, early industrial development in
western Europe necessitated the permanent occupation of the colonies by the
colonial powers and the destruction of the local 'natural economy'. 1According to her,
colonialism is a constant necessary condition for capitalist growth: without
colonies, capital accumulation would grind to a halt. 'Development' as capital
accumulation and the commercialisation of the economy for the generation of
'surplus' and profits thus involved the reproduction not merely-of a particular
form of creation of wealth, but also of the associated creation of poverty and
dispossession. A replication of economic development based on commercialisation
of resource use for commodity production in the newly independent countries

created the internal colonies.2 Development was thus reduced to a continuation of

the process of colonisation; it became an extension of the project of wealth
creation in modern western patriarchy's economic vision, which was based on the
exploitation or exclusion of women (of the west and non-west), on the exploitation and
degradation of nature, and on the exploitation and erosion of other cultures.
'Development' could not but entail destruction for women, nature and subjugated
cultures, which is why, throughout the Third World, women, peasants and tribals
are struggling for liberation from development just as they earlier struggled for
liberation from colonisation. The UN Decade for Women was based on the
assumption that the improvement of women's economic position would
automatically flow from an expansion and diffusion of the development process .
Yet, by the end of the Decade, it was becoming clear that development itself was
the problem. Insufficient and inadequate , participation in 'development' was not
the cause for women's increasing under-development; it was rather, their enforced
but asymmetric participation in it, by which they bore the costs but were
excluded from the benefits, that was responsible. Development exclusivity and
dispossession aggravated and deepened the colonial processes of ecological
degradation and the loss of political control over nature's sustenance base.
Economic growth was a new colonialism, draining resources away from those who
needed them most. The discontinuity lay in the fact that it was now new national elites, not
colonial powers, that masterminded the exploitation on grounds of 'national
interest' and growing GNPs, and it was accomplished with more powerful
technologies of appropriation and destruction. Ester Boserup3 has documented how
women's impoverishment increased during colonial rule; those rulers who had
spent a few centuries in subjugating and crippling their own women into deskilled, de- intellectualised appendages, disfavoured the women of the colonies
on matters of access to land, technology and employment . The economic and
political processes of colonial under- development bore the clear mark of modern
western patriarchy, and while large numbers of women and men were
impoverished by these processes, women tended to lose more . The privatisation
of land for revenue generation displaced women more critically, eroding their
traditional land use rights. The expansion of cash crops undermined food
production, and women were often left with meagre resources to feed and care
for children, the aged and the infirm, when men migrated or were conscripted
into forced labour by the colonisers. As a collective document by women activists, organisers and
researchers stated at the end of the UN Decade for Women, 'The almost uniform conclusion of the
Decade's research is that with a few exceptions, women's relative access to
economic resources, incomes and employment has worsened, their burden of
work has increased, and their relative and even absolute health, nutritional and
educational status has declined.4 The displacement of women from productive
activity by the expansion of development was rooted largely in the manner in
which development projects appropriated or destroyed the natural resource base
for the production of sustenance and survival. It destroyed women's productivity
both by removing land, water and forests from their management and control, as
well as through the ecological destruction of soil, water and vegetation systems
so that nature's productivity and renewability were impaired. While gender
subordination and patriarchy are the oldest oppressions, they have taken on new
and more violent forms through the project of development. Patriarchal
categories which understand destruction as 'production' and regeneration of life
as passivity have generated a crisis of survival. Passivity, as an assumed category
of the 'nature' of nature and of women, denies the activity of nature and life.
Fragmentation and uniformity as assumed categories of progress and
development destroy the living forces which arise from relationships within the
'web of life' and the diversity in the elements and patterns of these relationships.
The economic biases and values against nature, women and indigenous peoples

are captured in this typical analysis of the 'unproductiveness' of traditional

natural societies: Production is achieved through human and animal, rather than
mechanical, power. Most agriculture is unproductive; human or animal manure
may be used but chemical fertilisers and pesticides are unknown ... For the
masses, these conditions mean poverty.5 The assumptions are evident: nature is
unproductive; organic agriculture based on nature's cycles of renewability spells
poverty; women and tribal and peasant societies embedded in nature are
similarly unproductive, not because it has been demonstrated that in cooperation
they produce less goods and services for needs, but because it is assumed that
'production' takes place only when mediated by technologies for commodity
production, even when such technologies destroy life. A stable and clean river is
not a productive resource in this view: it needs to be 'developed' with dams in
order to become so. Women, sharing the river as a commons to satisfy the water
needs of their families and society are not involved in productive labour: when
substituted by the engineering man, water management and water use become
productive activities. Natural forests remain unproductive till they are developed into monoculture
plantations of commercial species. Development thus, is equivalent to maldevelopment, a
development bereft of the feminine, the conservation, the ecological principle.
The neglect of nature's work in renewing herself, and women's work in producing
sustenance in the form of basic, vital needs is an essential part of the paradigm of
maldevelopment, which sees all work that does not produce profits and capital as
non or unproductive work. As Maria Mies6 has pointed out, this concept of surplus has a
patriarchal bias because, from the point of view of nature and women, it is not
based on material surplus produced over and above the requirements of the
community: it is stolen and appropriated through violent modes from nature (who
needs a share of her produce to reproduce herself) and from women (who need a share of nature's produce
to produce sustenance and ensure survival). From the perspective of Third World women,
productivity is a measure of producing life and sustenance; that this kind of
productivity has been rendered invisible does not reduce its centrality to survival
- it merely reflects the domination of modern patriarchal economic categories
which see only profits, not life.

This separation from nature results in overexploitation of fisheries,

wasteful longlining, destructive trawling, careless pollution, and
unsafe drilling and mining practices all carried out without regard
to the impacts they might have on the environment and those who
depend on it.
Alaimo 2014 (Stacy Alaimo, Feminist Science Studies and Ecocriticism: Aesthetics and
Entanglements in the Deep Sea in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism edited by Greg
Garrard //MG)
As ocean sciences gain funding, attention, and access to new technologies, and more information and
images of the ocean and its creatures becomes publicized-in news stories, books, photographs, websites,
and films-it will be important to consider the imbrications between scientific knowledge production,
cultural narratives, and aes- thetic styles, as well as the environmental and political implications of
these factors. Robert D. Ballard, former Director of the Center for Marine Exploration at Woods Hole, concludes
his personal history of ocean exploration, for example, with a section enti- tled "Leaving the Body Behind," which
notes the drawbacks ofhuman-occupied diving machines and submersibles. Tethers, for example,
"remain a problem: They snap, they tangle, they restrict." Ballard argues that robotics and
telecommunications technologies will allow us to cut the ultimate tethcr-thc one that binds our
questioning intellect to vulnerable human flesh. . . . As Iacques Cousteau used to say, the ideal means of
deep-sea trans- port would allow us to move "like an angel." Our minds can now go it alone, leaving the body
behind. What could be more angelic than that? (Ballard 2000, 311) The desire to cut the tether,

severing the umbilical-cord connection between the tran- scendent scientific mind
and the vulnerable maternal flesh, betrays an epistemology that distances and
supposedly protects the knower from the realities, complications, and risks of the
material world. The predictably gendered dichotomies here, which presume the

possibility of freely oating minds, erase the materiality as well as the economic
and political entanglements of the very technologies that would allow scientists
to, osten- sibly, "cut the tether." Strangely, the figure of the angel transubstantiates the crushing
waters of the deep seas to ethereal atmospheres, magically shifting from one realm to another, without tracing the
scientific "cascade of mediations" that leads toward "what cannot be grasped directly" (Latour 2010: 123).

Invoking angels, or, as is more com- monly the case with the seas, aliens, and
promoting epistemologies in which the human remains separate from what he studies
is particularly problematic for ocean conserva- tion movements. It is all too easy
to ignore or dismiss the threats to ocean environments when they are conceived
as worlds apart from the human. Aptly, Tony Koslow opens his book The Silent Deep
with a New Yorker cartoon in which one woman at a tea party says to another, "I
don't know why I don't care about the bottom of the ocean but I don't" (Koslow 2007).
It is useful, particularly given widespread environmental devastation, to acknowledge "the fact
that we are part of the nature which we seek to understand" and to consider that
"taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part" may be
an ethical matter (Barad 2007, 352, 385). And yet tracing these entanglements, caring
about, feeling responsible for, or promoting the environmental health of remote
reaches of the ocean is, even for most environmentalists, an ethical-political
stretch. Out of sight, out of mind. A sea change, however, is in sight, as the start of the
twenty-first century experiences a seemingly sudden resurgence of interest in ocean conservation and
a concomitant push for more research on ocean creatures and ecologies, especially those of the deep
seas. The TED talks, available on the web, feature a thematic cluster about marine sci- ence and ocean
conservation, including Sylvia Earle's passionate plea to save the oceans. President Obama established the
Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force in 2010, creating a National Ocean Council, and several ocean advocacy
groups have gained prominence alongside Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherds, including Oceana, Ocean
Conservancy, Blue Ocean Institute, ORCA: Ocean Research Conservation Association, Institute for Ocean
Conservation Science, BlueVoice, the United Kingdom's Marine Conservation Society, the Chilean Centro de
Conservacion Cetacea, and the international Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. This is certainly overdue,

given the catastrophic overexploita- tion of most of the worlds fisheries; the
wasteful and cruel use of longlines; destructive beam-trawling for shellfish and
"finning" of sharks and rays; the toxic waste (includ- ing sewage, chemicals, and radioactive
waste); plastics suspended in the ocean waters as well as in the bodies of fish and
birds; and plans to increase ocean drilling and mining. Unlike most threatened
terrestrial ecosystems, however, aquatic environments remain a mystery. Little is
known, even by the scientific experts, about what creatures exist, what their life
cycles are, what they eat, and how various ecological systems work. Still less is
known about deep sea life. Biologists Michael A. Rex and Ron I. Etter muse that "Since most ofthe

deep sea remains unexplored we can hardly guess what other wonders exist there" (Rex and Etter 2010,
x). They explain that mainstream ecology has not incorpo- rated the deep-sea: "One can scarcely find the
term 'deep sea' in the indices ofecology textbooks and major reference works" (Rex and Etter 2010, x).
The early twenty-firstst century is clearly a turning point for oceanic ecology and conservation, yet

marine sciences are often entangled with the commercial enterprises that are
threatening the seas. The World Ocean Council , for example, comprised of '"the ocean
business community,' " promotes "improved ocean science," in part because,
"Increased, improved, and better coordinated ocean science is important to
industry operations in the marine environment, to help ensure the business
environment is as predictable as possible" (World Ocean Council 2010). While industries and
nations race to capitalize on technologies that allow for more extensive exploration and extraction
from the seas, others argue that science needs to undertake fundamental projects that will allow us to
have some understanding of ocean ecologies before they are disrupted by industrial fishing, dumping,
and mining. John D. Gage and Paul A Tyler conclude their dense, and otherwise utterly "objective," textbook on
Deep Sea Biology with this modest recommendation: "exploitation of [deep sea] resources should not be
attempted until we fully understand the natural history and ecology of this complex ecosystem" (Gage
and Tyler 1991, 406).

Structural violence is your priority its a requisite to all their

impacts
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 04 [Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely, and

Bourgois Professors of Anthropology @ UPenn, Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making

Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22]
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from
the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in
Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys
version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by
British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings
violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug
addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be
normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political
self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly
embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is

a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime

violence. Close attention to the little violences produced in the structures,
habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of
class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of

violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and
individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this
anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible genocides
(see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics,
emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers,
and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans

are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and
assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder . We realize that in

referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that
argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of
the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and
alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential

leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal

times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in

overextending the concept of genocide into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily
think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves,

in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as

normative behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes , such as
prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of
California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race
relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the small wars and invisible
genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland,
California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are invisible genocides not
because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As
Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right
before our eyes and therefore taken for granted . In this regard, Bourdieus partial and
unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our
task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social practices - in
the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu
forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of
everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes

suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of
public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of
war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the
legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal aliens versus the US governmentengineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday
forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal stability is purchased with the
currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangle-holds. Everyday
forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify
peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic
populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new

military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone
collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new

mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the
undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in
the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What
can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth
in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is

essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among

otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive
hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts
of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under
adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the
violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social
exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification
which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant selfmobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable
response to Benjamins view of late modern history as a chronic state of
emergency (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled
Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically
critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between
concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total institutions. Making that

decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the

capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical
technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against
categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass
violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday
social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often
fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm,
the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic
groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify
some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully
honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of
mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass
violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical
technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example,
include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic
priests who celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins
but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate,

and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and

political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence
that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what
Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between
violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977) finds
domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of
classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere
in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan
identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of
autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that
Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989).
Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct
aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to
Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with
violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we
are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of
persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader
1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray
zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on
genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and
acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume
we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially

incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders -

and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified . The preparations
for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals,
and the military. They harbor the early warning signs (Charney 1991), the priming (as Hinton, ed.,
2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call it) that push social consensus toward
devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane
care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare queens, undocumented immigrants, drug
addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the
technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed
feelings of victimization).

The root cause of all impacts from environmental degradation to

education crises to extinction is patriarchal dominationonly the
1ACs analysis of ecological feminism solves
Spretnak 87 [Charlene spretnak is an American author, known for her writings on ecology, politics, cultural
history and spirituality. She is a prominent ecofeminist and a cofounder of the U.S. Green Party movement,
Feminism our roots and flowering, Ecospirit, http://home.moravian.edu/public/relig/ecoSpirit/issues/Vol3No2.pdf
JMak]

Our society is facing a crisis in agriculture, a crisis in education and literacy, a

crisis in national security and the arms race, a crisis in the international debt
situation, and a crisis in the state of the global environment . For the first time in the
modern era, there is widespread agreement that something is very wrong. The assumptions of modernity, the
faith in technological "progress" and rapacious industrialism, along with the miltarism necessary to support it,
have left us very lost indeed. The quintessential malady of the modern era is free-floating anxiety, and it is

clear to ecofeminists that the whole culture is free-floating -- from a grounding

in the natural world, from a sense of belonging in the unfolding story of the
universe, from a healthy relationship between the male and female of the
species. We are entangled in the hubris of the patriarchal project , to dominate
nature and the female. The New York Times recently published a lead editorial titled
"Nature as Demon" (29 August 1986), reminding everyone that the proper
orientation of civilization is to advance itself in opposition to nature. (The rest of
that newspaper, as we've noticed during twenty years of feminism, is loaded with patriarchal reminders that the
proper role of men is to advance themselves in opposition to women!) The editorial advised that

disasters such as "Hiroshima, DDT, Bhopal, and now Chernobyl" require simply
"improving the polity," that is, fine-tuning the system. Such smugness, of course, is the
common response of guardians of the status quo: retrenchment and bandaids. But ecofeminists say
that the system is leading us to ecocide and species suicide because it is based
on ignorance, fear, delusion, and greed. We say that the people, male or
female, enmeshed in the values of that system are incapable of making rational
decisions. They pushed nuclear power plants when they did not have the
slightest idea what to do with the plutonium wastes that are generated
because, after all, someone always comes along later to clean up like Mom. They
pushed the nuclear arms race because those big phallic missiles are so
"technologically sweet." They are pushing reproductive technology with the
gleeful prediction that children of the future , a result of much genetic selection, will
often have a donor mother, an incubator mother, and a social mother who raises them making
motherhood as disembodied and discontinuous as is fatherhood, at last! They
are pushing high-tech petroleum-based agriculture, which makes the soil
increasingly brittle and lifeless and adds millions of tons of toxic pesticides to
our food as well as our soil and water, because they know how to get what they want from the
Earth -- a far cry from the peasant rituals that persisted in parts of Europe even up until World War I wherein
women would encircle the f LeLds by torchlight and transfer their fertility of womb to the land they touched.
Women and men in those cultures participated in the cycles of nature with respect and gratitude. Such attitudes
have no place in a modern, technocratic society fueled by the patriarchal obsessions of dominance and control.

They have been replaced by the managerial ethos, which holds efficiency of
production and short-term gains above all else above ethics or moral
standards, above the health of community life, and above the integrity of all

biological processes, especially those

female.

constituting the elemental power of the

Therefore, the United States federal government should increase its

sustainable development of the Earths oceans based on an
ecological feminism. We advocate a mindset shift in the USFG so we
can interrogate and analyze interactions between structures of
oppression.
Environmental law is the only way to translate a reconceiving of the
natural world into material reality

Mallory 99

[Chaone Mallory is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, where she

teaches courses in environmental ethics, environmental justice, green political theory, ecofeminism, food studies,
philosophy of place, science and technology studies, and other topics that relate environmental issues to
contemporary social, political, and cultural thought, and shes got a PhD yo, Toward an Ecofeminist Environmental
Jurisprudence: Nature Law and Gender, pp. 59-60, JMak] Environmental law as a field is dynamic

and alive and very much in the process of development. It is an area of social life
in which we can see active evidence of the human struggle to understand our
moral and ontological relationship with nature. Although environmental law is
largely founded on the same instrumentalist assumptions about nature that
characterize the scientific worldview, at this moment in historical reality a space
is being held open, by postmodern science and environmental philosophy, for a
reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and the natural world .
Such a reconceiving, expressed through ecofeminism, views the self as neither
completely separate from and (thus superior to) human and more- than-human others,
nor as completely, amorphically subsumed, but rather, as has already been noted,
embedded in relationships ; as existing socially and physically in webs of relationality. This ontological
perception, this embodied knowing, can be reflected and manifested through law. A jurisprudence, says feminist
legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon, is a theory of the relation between life and law.... Law actively participates in
[the] transformation of 60 perspective into being.94 Law is one powerful medium by which

human societies translate values and beliefs into material reality; it can provide
institutional approval and support for particular perceptions and activities, while
withdrawing nourishment from undervalued others. In a society structured and
determined largely through legal discourse, environmental law and policy should
be viewed as a necessary and important means of addressing the state of
ecosocial crisis being faced by the planets inhabitants . Environmental law has
been influenced by a variety of sources, especially standards of science as they
emerge through the dialectical interplay of history, nature, and culture. It is a
construct of language, which is not to say that it is not real; rather stating that
law is a linguistic construct implies that language is that through which our claims
to know reality can be stated and carried. Language, for human beings at least, thus becomes the
interface between our own individual consciousnesses and the rest of the blooming, buzzing confusion.95 It is
this capacity to express multiplicity, along with its open-endedness and
malleability, that I believe gives law its power and promise as a means of promoting
the spread of ecological ideas throughout society. But as I have noted, the law can tell
stories which impair the project of creating environmental sustainability as well.
This complexity and multi- faceted functioning of law is reflected in the words of feminist legal theorist Robin West,
who says that while law is to be understood by its content and its precedents, it is

also an ever-present possibility, potentially bringing good or evil into our

future.96 West, in her book, speaks of the narrativity of law, and claims that particular laws and stories can be
interpreted by reference to more than one text; that there is more the one source to which we
can refer in order to find the meaning or proper interpretation of a law.9 7 However,
under conventional theories of jurisprudence we rarely do so, instead preferring
to see established interpretations as fixed. Similarly, in environmental matters, we often
appeal to only one textthe atomistic, mechanistic, reductionistic picture of the world given to us by modern

science.

But another text to which we might refer would be the one presented by
ecofeminism. This narrative, or way of relating, says that we are ontologically
embedded; and it is a story of human connectedness to the natural world . This is
the story which law must tell about the nature/culture dyad in order to talkstory into being an existence in which both humans and nature can flourish.
The stories about nature that human beings like to tell have been divided by
environmental philosophers into two general categories: anthropocentric, or
human-centered, and nonanthropocentric. These approaches are mirrored in law .
Anthropocentric approaches typically view nature instrumentally, as a resource to
be utilized by humans for human benefit, and is the sort of understanding that
environmental law, policy, and regulation has typically incorporated and enforced.
Nonanthropocentric or ecocentric approaches, in contrast, view nature as something
possessing intrinsic worth, and thus an entitlement to have its interests count
in our moral and legal doctrines. But before exploring the narrative efficacy of one particular promising
new notion, that of a partnership ethic, developed by the ecofeminist environmental historian Carolyn Merchant,
we must briefly review present conceptions/narratives of nature held and expressed through law.

Debate is a space where we can break from the destruction of

critical learning and civic agency that occurs in other spaces- you
should embrace our discourse of ecological feminism as necessary
to solve the harms of the 1AC
Giroux 12 (Henry, Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University
in Hamilton, Ontario and Director of the McMaster Center for Research in the Public Interest, former Waterbury Chair
Professor at Penn State University, and former Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies,
8/27/2012, Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism)

progressives will invariably need to

take on the role of educational activists. One option would be to create
micro-spheres of public education that further modes of critical
learning and civic agency, and thus enable young people and others
to learn how to govern rather than be governed. This could be
accomplished through a network of free educational spaces developed
among diverse faith communities and public schools, as well as in secular
and religious organizations affiliated with higher educational institutions. These new
educational spaces focused on cultivating both dialogue and action
in the public interest can look to past models in those institutions developed
Addressing such challenges suggests that

by socialists, labor unions, and civil rights activists in the early twentieth century and later in
the 1950s and 60s. Such schools represented oppositional public spheres and functioned a
democratic public spheres in the best educational sense and ranged from the early networks
of radical Sunday schools to the later Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School
in Tennessee. Stanley Aronowitz rightly insists that the current system survives

on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the absence of a viable

political opposition with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its
intellectuals who, to a large extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the
academy; less secure private sector corporate jobs, and centrist and center-left media
institutions.[vii] At a time when critical thought has been flattened,

it

becomes imperative to develop a discourse of critique and

possibilityone that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle,
and dynamic social movements, hope for a viable democratic future will slip out of reach.