2NC

K outweighs and turns the case

a. Our Bell evidence indicates that the 1AC is rooted in a humanist
worldview whereby the issues worth fixing are dictated by the extent to
which they benefit human life that ensures their impacts continue and
transforms the non-human as something to be dominated
b. Their anthropocentric notions create a false dichotomy of the human vs.
non-human squo inequities become impossible to fix because we are
blinded by our humanist relations with the world we indict humanism
as being the creator of these issues of violence
Impact debate
Our Bell evidence indicates that this perpetuates the exploitation of nature in
the name of human progress that results in extinction and turns their impacts
Their calls for human rights only serve to perpetuate the man/nature
dichotomy the exclusionary frame through which they justify what life forms
are worthy of being saved. They create a dichotomy between humans and non-
humans by saying that anything that loses rights is not human anymore,
showing non-humans as lesser and worthless. This dichotomy allows for the
exploitation of the env. and other peoples that we classify as non-human.
Your silence is an independent link our Bell evidence indicates that
anthropocentric notions manifest themselves in the way people neglect
justifying their inherent anthropocentric bias that allows for atrocities to
continue
Human rights violations become inevitable Bell also indicates that a world in
which the humanist assumptions of the 1AC are not challenged their impacts
continue humans who are portrayed as closer to nature considered savages
become the subject of human domination and justify nature as something to be
brought under human control
Humans cannot be saved and we control the root cause the impacts they
outline are the result of humanitys capability to enact uniquely organized
forms of violence and destruction
Kochi, Queen's University School of Law lecturer, and Ordan, linguist, 08 (Tarik
and Noam, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for the Global
Suicide of Humanity," p. 9-10)
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are
considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as
an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman,
2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity might
comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such
actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing
ways in which the Holocaust was evil, then one must surely include along side
it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred
throughout human history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the
human heritage, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous
peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in which their
beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of the West generally consider to be the
content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how
normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human
life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the history of
colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal
institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves
on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon
colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003;
Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of
race war that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal
and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus
presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an
aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage
of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by
arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially inferior and in some
instances that they were closer to apes than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such
violence justified by an erroneous view of race is in many ways merely an
extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of
killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the
two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing human races) and inter- species violence, is well
expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans consider themselves the crown of creation, for animals
all people are Nazis and animal life is an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750). Certainly many organisms
use force to survive and thrive at the expense of their others. Humans are not
special in this regard. However humans, due a particular form of self-
awareness and ability to plan for the future, have the capacity to carry out
highly organised forms of violence and destruction (i.e. the Holocaust; the massacre and
enslavement of indigenous peoples by Europeans) and the capacity to develop forms of social
organisation and communal life in which harm and violence are organised and
regulated. It is perhaps this capacity for reflection upon the merits of harm and violence (the moral reflection upon the
good and bad of violence) which gives humans a special place within the food chain. Nonetheless, with these capacities come
responsibility and our proposal of global suicide is directed at bringing into full view the issue of human moral responsibility.

Human superiority is socially constructed and not factually accurate viewing
every being as significant allows for a radical change in the way we give
meaning to the world
Bell, York University department of education, and Russell, Lakehead
University associate professor, 2k (Anne C. and Constance L., department of
education, York University, Canada, and Canadian Journal of Environmental
Education, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy,
and the Poststructuralist Turn, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 25, 3
(2000):188203, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-
3-bell.pdf, p. 195-97)
The human/nature dichotomy is not a frame of reference common to all
cultures, and although it prevails today in Western societies, even here there
are and always have been alternative ways of understanding and giving
expression to a more-than-human world. These can be found, for example, in myth (Kane, 1994, p.
14), poetic expression, certain branches of philosophy and environmental thought, natural history, and childrens literature
and films (Wilson, 1991, pp. 128139, 154). Even within the natural sciences, voices attest to
the meaningful exist- ence of nonhuman beings as subjects (McVay, 1993). In animal
behaviour research, for instance, numerous studies have challenged the assertion of
human superiority based on a narrow definition of language that excludes
nonhuman communication. Chimpanzee Washoe and orangutan Chantek use American Sign Language, and
other primates, like bonobo Kanzi, are fluent in symbolic language, thereby altering the boundaries commonly drawn between
language and mere communication (Gardner, Gardner, & Canfort, 1989; Miles, 1994; Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, & Taylor,
1998). And though the bilingual great apes may exhibit language patterns the most
similar to those of humans, there are many examples of sophisticated
communication in other animals, including mammals, birds, and insects (Griffin,
1992). Meeting the criteria of language implies, of course, that these studies compare
and judge other animals against a human yardstick. In other words, a hierarchical
divide is still assumed, although its position may shift somewhat to include, on
humanitys side, some of the higher animals. For a more radical reframing, one that seeks to
acknowledge all life forms as subjects of significance, let us turn to the work of philosopher David Abram. Drawing from
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram (1996) argues that all sensing bodies are active,
open forms con- stantly adjusting to a world that is itself continually shifting
(p. 49). To demonstrate how all beings incessantly improvise their relations to
other things he describes the spontaneous creativity of a spider: Consider a spider
weaving its web, for instance, and the assumption still held by many scientists that the behavior of such a diminutive creature
is thoroughly programmed in its genes. Certainly, the spider has received a rich genetic in- heritance from its parents and
predecessors. Whatever instructions, however, are enfolded within the living genome, they can hardly predict the specifics of
the microterrain within which the spider may find itself at any particular moment. They could hardly have determined in
advance the exact distances between the cave wall and the branch that the spider is now employing as an anchorage point for
her current web, or the exact strength of the monsoon rains that make web-spinning a bit more difficult on this evening. And
so the genome could not explicitly have commanded the order of every flexion and extension of her various limbs as she
weaves this web into its place. However complex are the inherited programs, patterns, or predispositions, they must still be
adapted to the immediate situation in which the spider finds itself. However determinate ones genetic
inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that
necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of
that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and ones
inheritance) to those contours. (Abram, 1996, p. 50) An equally illuminating insect story, intended to
evoke, once again, the subjective world of a nonhuman being, is found in Everndens The Natural Alien (1985, pp. 7980).
Borrowing from the work of biologist Jakob von Uexkull, Evernden invites readers to imagine that we are walking
through a meadow and that we discern a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the
perceptions which it alone knows (p. 79). He then attempts to describe what might be the world
of a wood tick. The wood tick, he explains, is literally and figuratively blind to
the world as we know it. What we readily perceive about our environment
would be unknown, unknowable, and irrelevant to her. Her world is
composed of three elements: light, sweat, and heat. These are all that she
needs to complete her life cycle. Light will lead her to the top of a bush, where she will cling (for as long as
18 years!) until the smell of sweat alerts her to a passing animal. She will then drop, and if she lands on a warm animal, she will
indulge in a blood meal, fall to the ground, lay her eggs, and die. Like Abram, Evernden (1985)
challenges commonplace, mechanistic assumptions that reduce other life
forms to programmed automatons and intimates instead a meaningful life-world completely unlike and
outside our own: To speak of reflexes and instincts is to obscure the essential point
that the ticks world is a world, every bit as valid and adequate as our own. There
is a subject, and like all subjects it has its world . . . The tick is able to occupy a world that is per- ceptually meaningful to it. Out
of the thousands or millions of kinds of information that might be had, the tick sees only what is of significance to it. The world
is tailored to the animal; they are entirely complementary . . . This is quite a different view of existence from our usual one in
which the animal is simply an exploiter of certain natural resources. We are not talking just about observable interactions
between subjects and objects but rather about a very complete interrelation of self and world, so complete that the world
could serve as a definition of the self. Without the tick there is no tick-world, no tick-space, no tick-time, no tick-reality. (pp.
8081) Everndens remarks are significant for the possibilities they open up in our understanding both of the
nonhuman and of ourselves. On one hand, they contest the limited notion that awareness is a
specifically human attribute. On the other, they remind us that we humans too have bodies that respond to
light, sweat, and heat; we too know the world through our bodies in a way that is not entirely dependent upon language; and
this bodily knowledge plays an important role in defining our world and giving meaning to it.

And, we control root cause. The K is a prior question to the affirmative
otherwise challenging anti-blackness and racism gets corrupted by
anthropocentric discourse only the alternatives discourse solves.
Jackson, no date, studies the intersection of Animal Studies, Queer
Theory, and African Diasporic Feminism (Zakiyyah, UC Berkeley & Indiana University, quotation
from Zakiyyah Jackson posted in the comments section on April 10, 2011 (link to website broken),
http://www.theoria.ca/theoria/?p=1179, njw)
My dissertation Becoming Human: Gender, Sexuality, and Species in Afro-Modernity demonstrates that there is a strand of
black (anti)humanist thought that provides crucial interventions into the racialization of the human/animal border. Through
historical analysis, I reveal that the animal and the black are generic categories that
mutually reinforce each other, as one term lends credibility to the other, in the
history of western modernity. As we now know, what we deem animal includes
forms of life that have widely divergent physiognomic, cognitive, and
phenomenal experiences casting doubt over any notion of an animal essence. So, why do we need a
discourse on the animal ? What work is this generic construction doing culturally? What forms of knowledge
and power is it stabilizing? I contend that the bifurcation of forms of life as primarily or exclusively human or else animal is a
flashpoint in European anxieties about African slavery and colonial expansionism. In this context, the animal and the black
became conjoined and mutually reinforcing tropes in liberal humanist discourse and practice. Thus, if we want to
seriously interrogate our cultures continual investment in (anti)blackness,
we must go beyond perceiving bestialization as an unfortunate legacy of
racism that can be resolved conclusively through the expansion of universal humanity. When we present universal
humanity as a solution, we fail to appreciate that in a post-Darwinian context, inclusion
rather than exclusion, is the primary modality of reproducing blackness as the
animal within the human, black people as the lived border dividing human
and animal forms of life. Instead, we must include an interrogation of the
discourse of the animal as such, as the discourse of species is central to the
logic and practice of animalizing black gender and sexuality in law,
philosophy, science, neoliberalism, and popular culture. I argue that our failure to
interrogate the discourse of species has allowed blackness to remain
vulnerable to its appropriation by species discourse . As I show in my dissertation, African
diasporic culture provide models for disconnecting black personhood from the trope of the animal, while also questioning
the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. In the final analysis, I suggest
that the cultural production in my study exceed critique, by redefining what it means to be human from the perspective of
those animalized by the gendered and sexual discourses and practices of biopolitics.
Speciesism is the root cause of Eurocentrism seeing other cultures as
the primitive and exotic other closer to animals on the hierarchy of
species was used to justify imperial conquest and exporting European
culture to the colonies. Failure to begin with this starting point means
their understanding of Eurocentrism is epistemologically flawed and
reproduces the same mindset of racist and colonialist conquest that
they criticize only the alternatives interrogation of what it means to
be human can solve.
Huggan & Tiffin 10 (Graham & Helen, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, published by
Routledge, Google Books, p. 5-8, njw)
For Plumwood, these claims extend both to environmental and animal actors, since what she calls our [collective]
failure to situate dominant forms of human society ecologically [has been]
matched by our failure to situate non-humans ethically, as the plight of non-
human species continues to worsen (2001: 2). Hegemonic centrism thus accounts
not only for environmental racism, but also for those forms of institutionalised speciesism that
continue to be used to rationalise the exploitation of animal (and animalized
human) others in the name of a human- and reason-centred culture that is at least
a couple of millennia old (2001: 8). As Plumwood argues, the western definition of humanity
depended and still depends on the presence of the not-human: the
uncivilized, the animal and animalistic, European justification for invasion
and colonisation proceeded from this basis, understanding non-European
lands and the people and animals that inhabited them as spaces, unused,
underused or empty (2003: 53). The very ideology of colonisation is thus one
where anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism are inseparable, with the
anthropocentrism underlying Eurocentrism being used to justify those forms
of European colonialism that see indigenous cultures as primitive, less
rational, and closer to children, animals and nature (2003: 53). Within many culture and
not just western ones anthropocentrism has long been naturlised. The absolute
prioritisation of ones own species interests over those of the silenced
majority is still regarded as being only natural. Ironically, it is precisely through
such appeals to nature that other animals and the environment are often
excluded from the privileged ranks of the human, rendering them available
for exploitation. As Cary Wolfe, citing Jacques Derrida, puts it: [T]he humanist concept of
subjectivity is inseparable from the discourse and institution of a speciesism
which relies on the tacit acceptance that the full transcendence to the human
requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes
possible a symbolic economy in which we can engage in a non-criminal
putting to death, as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as well by
marking them as animal. (1998:39) The effectiveness of this discourse of species is
that when applied to social others of whatever sort, it relies upon the taking for granted of the
institution of speciesism; that is, upon the ethical acceptability of the systematic,
institutionalised killing of non-human others (39). In other words, in assuming a
natural prioritization of humans and human interests over those of other species on earth, we
are both generating and repeating the racist ideologies of imperialism on a
planetary scale . In working towards a genuinely post-imperial, environmentally based conception of community,
then, a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the human place in nature
necessitates an interrogation of the category of the human itself and of the
ways in which the construction of ourselves against nature with the hierarchisation of
life forms that construction implies has been and remains complicit in colonialist and racist
exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day.
Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as
central to the projects of European conquest and global domination, but also
as inherent in the ideologies of imperialism and racism on which those
projects historically and persistently depend. Not only were other people
often regarded as part of nature and thus treated as instrumentally as
animals but also they were forced or co-opted over time into western views
of the environment, thereby rendering cultural and environmental
restitution difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once invasion and settlement had been
accomplished, or at least once administrative structures had been set up, the environmental impacts
of western attitudes to human being-in-the-world were facilitated or reinforced by
the deliberate (or accidental) transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout
the European empires, instigating wide-spread ecosystem change under
conspicuously unequal power regimes.3 Despite the recent advances of eco/environmental criticism,
English studies in general, and postcolonial studies more particularly, have yet to resituate the
species boundary and environmental concerns at the centre of their enquiries;
yet the need to examine these interfaces between nature and culture, animal
and human, is urgent and never more pertinent than it is today . After all,
postcolonialisms concerns with conquest, colonisation, racism and sexism, along with its
investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader
societies and cultures, are also the central concerns of animal and environmental
studies . Moreover, as the American environmental historian Donald Worster acknowledges, it is in the myriad
relationships between material practices and ideas especially in cross-cultural contexts
that day-to-day planetary life is lived and futures are governed: practices and ideas that
are inseparable from issues of representation as will be made clear throughout this book. In his
historical studies The Columbian Exchange (1973) and Ecological Imperialism (1986), Alfred Crosby considers the ways in
which both materials and ideas were exchanged between Old World and New in a number of anything but even contexts. In
the colonies of occupation, these radical inequalities or exchanges seemed most evident or at least initially in the military
and political arenas, while in the settler colonies it was the results of environmental
imperialism that were often most immediately clear. Different conceptions of being-in-the-
world had indeed long been exchanged by individuals or groups under colonialist circumstances: eastern religions had
intrigued Europeans for several centuries, while the oral cultures of the Pacific Islands and Africa had provoked interest and
admiration in many westerners as well. But in Australia, North America, New Zealand and South Africa, genuine
curiosity about and respect for indigenous cultures, philosophies and
religions was rare, and even the most well-intentioned of missionaries, settlers and
administrators tended to conceive of themselves as conferring ( or imposing ) the
gifts of civilisation upon the benighted heathen with little or no interest in
receiving his or her philosophical gifts in return. Settlers arrived with crops,
flocks and herds, and cleared land, exterminating local ecosystems, while
human, animal and plant specimens taken to Europe from these new worlds
were, by contrast, few and often inert in form. (Interestingly enough, no human, animal or plant,
whether wild or domesticated, transported from the colonies to Europe was in a position to wreak comparable havoc on
European ecosystems.) Moreover, they did not arrive as part of traditional agricultural
or pastoral practices or with the authority of the normative; instead, they
were isolated exotics: Indians paraded before royal courts; like turkeys and
parrots in cages were the innocent signifiers of an otherness that was []
exotic , that is, non-systematic, carrying no meaning other than that imposed by the
culture to which they were exhibited (Wasserman 1984; 132). European imports to the
newly settled colonies humans, animals, plants were regarded on the other
hand as necessary and natural impositions on, or substitutes for, the local
bush or wilderness; and even if these invading species were initially difficult to
establish or acclimatize, they soon prospered in lands where their control predators were absent. The
genuinely natural ways of indigenous ecosystems were irretrievably undone
as wild lands were cleared for farming or opened up to pastoralism.

Only a complete rejection of all that is human can solve the impacts and is
morally justified
Kochi, Queen's University School of Law lecturer, and Ordan, linguist, 08 (Tarik
and Noam, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for the Global
Suicide of Humanity," p. 16-17)

How might such a standpoint of dialectical, utopian anti-humanism reconfigure a notion of action which does not simply
repeat in another way the modern humanist infliction of violence, as exemplified by the plan of Hawking, or fall prey to
institutional and systemic complicity in speciesist violence? While this question goes beyond what it is possible to outline in
this paper, we contend that the thought experiment of global suicide helps to locate this question the question of modern
action itself as residing at the heart of the modern environmental problem. In a sense perhaps the only
way to understand what is at stake in ethical action which responds to the
natural environment is to come to terms with the logical consequences of
ethical action itself. The point operates then not as the end, but as the starting
point of a standpoint which attempts to reconfigure our notions of action, life-
value, and harm. For some, guided by the pressure of moral conscience or by a practice of harm minimisation, the
appropriate response to historical and contemporary environmental destruction is that of action guided by abstention. For
example, one way of reacting to mundane, everyday complicity is the attempt to abstain or opt-out of certain aspects of
modern, industrial society: to not eat non-human animals, to invest ethically, to buy organic produce, to not use cars and
buses, to live in an environmentally conscious commune. Ranging from small personal decisions to the establishment of
parallel economies (think of organic and fair trade products as an attempt to set up a quasi-parallel economy), a typical
modern form of action is that of a refusal to be complicit in human practices that are violent and destructive. Again, however,
at a practical level, to what extent are such acts of non- participation rendered banal by their complicity in other actions? In
a grand register of violence and harm the individual who abstains from eating
non-human animals but still uses the bus or an airplane or electricity has only
opted out of some harm causing practices and remains fully complicit with
others. One response, however, which bypasses the problem of complicity and the
banality of action is to take the non-participation solution to its most extreme
level. In this instance, the only way to truly be non-complicit in the violence of the
human heritage would be to opt-out altogether. Here, then, the modern discourse
of reflection, responsibility and action runs to its logical conclusion the
global suicide of humanity as a free-willed and final solution. While we are not
interested in the discussion of the method of the global suicide of humanity per se, one method that would be the least violent
is that of humans choosing to no longer reproduce. [10] The case at point here is that the global suicide of
humanity would be a moral act; it would take humanity out of the equation of
life on this earth and remake the calculation for the benefit of everything non-
human. While suicide in certain forms of religious thinking is normally condemned as something which is selfish and
inflicts harm upon loved ones, the global suicide of humanity would be the highest act of
altruism. That is, global suicide would involve the taking of responsibility for
the destructive actions of the human species. By eradicating ourselves we end
the long process of inflicting harm upon other species and offer a human-free
world. If there is a form of divine intelligence then surely the human act of
global suicide will be seen for what it is: a profound moral gesture aimed at
redeeming humanity. Such an act is an offer of sacrifice to pay for past wrongs
that would usher in a new future. Through the death of our species we will
give the gift of life to others.


Solvency links
Its too late any attempt to reform results in merely an extension of
destruction by humanity
Kochi, Queen's University School of Law lecturer, and Ordan, linguist, 08 (Tarik
and Noam, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for the Global
Suicide of Humanity," p. 12)
Faced with what seems to be a looming environmental crisis spiralling out of
control and an awareness of a history of human action which has caused this
crisis, the reaction of many environmentalists is, contra Hawking, not to run
away to another habitat but to call for new forms of action. The call for urgent political and
social action to change human behaviour in relation to the environment is echoed globally not only by environmentalists and
activists but also by celebrities and politicians. [6] The response is highly modern in the sense
that a problem such as global warming is not considered to be something
ordained by fate or the outcome of divine providence. Instead it is understood
as something caused by human action for which humans bear the
responsibility and, further, that disaster may still be averted if we act in such a
way to change the course of history. [7] The move towards critical historical reflection, the assuming of
responsibility, and action guided by such an attitude, is certainly a better approach than shutting ones eyes to the violence and
errors of human history or placing blind faith in technology. Indeed, criticism of these latter views is heard from within eco-
ethics circles themselves, either by labelling such endeavours as technofix or technocentric (Smith, 1998), or by criticizing
the modes of action of green-politics as eco-bureaucracy and men-politics (Seager, 1993). However, even if we try
to avoid falling into the above patterns, maybe it is actually too late to change
the course of the events and forces that are of our own making. Perhaps a
modern discourse or belief in the possibilities of human action has run
aground, hamstrung by its own success. Perhaps the only forms of action
available are attempts to revert to a pre-industrial lifestyle, or a new radical
form of action, an action that lets go of action itself and the human claim to
continued habitation within the world. In this case, the action of cosmic
colonisation envisaged by Hawking would not be enough. It would merely
perpetuate a cycle of destructive speciesist violence. Further, general
humanist action, guided by some obligation of care for the environment,
would also not be enough as it could not overcome an individuals complicity
in systematic and institutional speciesist violence.

Perm
The perm still links, so its severance. They are kicking their advocacy of human
rights and preventing dehumanization. These inherent underlying truths that
you accept out of the 1AC are links. You can steal the entirety of the K while not
having to debate the underlying knowledge that you accept. Thats a voter for
fairness and ground wed lose all advocacies
If we win framework or root cause the perm does nothing
Framework debate proves that their starting point is flawed operating under
humanist notions reinforce the status quo and ensure worse forms of violence
any perm shifts the framing question their method is _____ - you cant shift
out of that

Every individual is complicit in speciesist violence only a complete rejection
solves
Kochi, Queen's University School of Law lecturer, and Ordan, linguist, 08 (Tarik
and Noam, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for the Global
Suicide of Humanity," p. 13-14)
What helps to render a certain type of action problematic is each individuals
complicity in the practice of speciesist violence. That is, even if one is aware of
the ways in which modern life destroys or adversely affects the environment
and inflicts suffering upon non- human animals, one cannot completely
subtract ones self from a certain responsibility for and complicity in this.
Even if you are conscious of the problem you cannot but take part in doing
evil by the mere fact of participating within modern life. Take for example the problematic
position of environmental activists who courageously sacrifice personal wealth and leisure time in their fight against
environmental destruction. While activists assume a sense of historical responsibly for
the violence of the human species and act so as to stop the continuation of this
violence, these actors are still somewhat complicit in a modern system of
violence due to fact that they live in modern, industrial societies. The activist
consumes, acquires and spends capital, uses electricity, pays taxes, and accepts the legitimacy of particular governments
within the state even if they campaign against government policies. The bottom line is that all of these actions
contribute in some way to the perpetuation of a larger process that moves
humanity in a particular direction even if the individual personally, or
collectively with others, tries to act to counter this direction. Despite peoples
good intentions, damage is encapsulated in nearly every human action in
industrial societies, whether we are aware of it or not. In one sense, the human individuals
modern complicity in environmental violence represents something of a bizarre symmetry to Hannah Arendts notion of the
banality of evil (Arendt, 1994). For Arendt, the Nazi regime was an emblem of modernity, being a collection of official
institutions (scientific, educational, military etc.) in which citizens and soldiers alike served as clerks in a bureaucratic
mechanism run by the state. These individuals committed evil, but they did so in a very banal manner: fitting into the state
mechanism, following orders, filling in paperwork, working in factories, driving trucks and generally respecting the rule of law.
In this way perhaps all individuals within the modern industrial world carry out a
banal evil against the environment simply by going to work, sitting in their
offices and living in homes attached to a power grid. Conversely, those individuals
who are driven by a moral intention to not do evil and act so as to save the
environment, are drawn back into a banality of the good. By their ability to
effect change in only very small aspects of their daily life, or in political-social
life more generally, modern individuals are forced to participate in the active
destruction of the environment even if they are the voices of contrary
intention. What is banal in this sense is not the lack of a definite moral intention but, rather, the way in which the
individuals or institutions participation in everyday modern life, and the unintentional contribution to environmental
destruction therein, contradicts and counteracts the smaller acts of good intention.



FW
The role of the ballot is to endorse the team that best challenges the
anthropocentric notions implicit in human experience
The K is a prior question policymaking fails to call into question the inherent
humanist filter through which all action of the 1AC happens means the 1AC
only produces bad policy disad to fiat
Their education will always be co-opted our Bell evidence indicates that
anthropocentric notions prop a flawed pedagogical system in which the focus is
shifted away from individual agency that ensures that the domination of non-
human life is perpetuated
Their calls for an active discussion simply link harder to the kritik their
movement creates a space for discussion that continues to exclude non-human
life which means their movements ultimately get co-opted anyways
Analyzing the linguistic construct of the 1AC is key to social change
Bell, York University department of education, and Russell, Lakehead
University associate professor, 2k (Anne C. and Constance L., department of
education, York University, Canada, and Canadian Journal of Environmental
Education, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy,
and the Poststructuralist Turn, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 25, 3
(2000):188203, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-
3-bell.pdf, p. 198-99)
So far, however, such queries in critical pedagogy have been limited by their neglect of
the ecological contexts of which students are a part and of relationships
extending beyond the human sphere. The gravity of this oversight is brought sharply into focus by
writers interested in environ- mental thought, particularly in the cultural and historical dimensions of the environmental
crisis. For example, Nelson (1993) contends that our inability to acknowledge our human
embeddedness in nature results in our failure to understand what sustains us.
We become inattentive to our very real dependence on others and to the ways
our actions affect them. Educators, therefore, would do well to draw on the
literature of environ- mental thought in order to come to grips with the
misguided sense of independence, premised on freedom from nature, that
informs such no- tions as empowerment. Further, calls for educational practices situated in the life-
worlds of students go hand in hand with critiques of disembodied approaches to education. In both cases, critical pedagogy
challenges the liberal notion of education whose sole aim is the development of the individual, rational mind (Giroux, 1991, p.
24; McKenna, 1991, p. 121; Shapiro, 1994). Theorists draw attention to the importance of nonverbal discourse (e.g., Lewis &
Simon, 1986, p. 465) and to the somatic character of learning (e.g., Shapiro, 1994, p. 67), both overshadowed by the
intellectual authority long granted to rationality and science (Giroux, 1995; Peters, 1995; S. Taylor, 1991). Describing an
emerging discourse of the body that looks at how bodies are represented and inserted into the social order, S. Taylor (1991)
cites as examples the work of Peter McLaren, Michelle Fine, and Philip Corrigan. A complementary vein of
enquiry is being pursued by environmental researchers and educators critical
of the privileging of science and abstract thinking in education. They
understand learning to be mediated not only through our minds but also
through our bodies. Seeking to acknowledge and create space for sensual,
emotional, tacit, and communal knowledge, they advocate approaches to
education grounded in, for example, nature experience and environmental
practice (Bell, 1997; Brody, 1997; Weston, 1996). Thus, whereas both critical pedagogy and
environmental education offer a critique of disembodied thought, one draws
attention to the ways in which the body is situated in culture (Shapiro, 1994)
and to the social construction of bodies as they are constituted within
discourses of race, class, gender, age and other forms of oppression (S. Taylor, 1991,
p. 61). The other emphasizes and celebrates our embodied relatedness to the more-than-human world and to the myriad life
forms of which it is comprised (Payne, 1997; Russell & Bell, 1996). Given their different foci, each stream of enquiry stands to
be enriched by a sharing of insights. Finally, with regard to the poststructuralist turn in educational theory, ongoing
investigations stand to greatly enhance a revisioning of environ- mental education. A growing number of environmental
educators question the empirical-analytical tradition and its focus on technical and behavioural aspects of curriculum (A.
Gough, 1997; Robottom, 1991). Advocating more interpretive, critical approaches, these
educators contest the discursive frameworks (e.g., positivism, empiricism,
rationalism) that mask the values, beliefs, and assumptions underlying
information, and thus the cultural and political dimensions of the problems
being considered (A. Gough, 1997; Huckle, 1999; Lousley, 1999). Teaching about ecological
processes and environmental hazards in a supposedly objective and rational
manner is understood to belie the fact that knowledge is socially constructed
and therefore partial (A. Gough, 1997; Robertson, 1994; Robottom, 1991; Stevenson, 1993).

Case
No spillover solvency Agambens theories dont answer key questions
solving just in the instance of Gitmo doesnt give us tools to solve the
harms elsewhere
Colatrella, 11 (Steven, taught at Bard College, the New School and the American
University of Rome, Fulbright scholar, Chair of the Department of Political and Social
Sciences at John Cabot University in Rome and President of the Iowa Sociological
Association, Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben, Journal for Critical Education
Policy Studies, vol.9. no.1, page 102-103, November 2011, Online,
http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf, accessed 7/23/13) PE
Agamben therefore seeks to explain the present danger to civil liberties, the
risk of special powers being taken over by governments declaring states of
emergency, the increasingly common turn to delegated democracy through
authoritarian methods by only formally elected leaders and the risk of physical
repression by state power even in liberal democratic countries. Despite its insight,
however, I think that this way of understanding is disastrously mistaken. For the
test of theories of this sort should be simple and twofold: 1) does the theory tell
us why this is happening when it does and where it does? 2) And does it tell us
what to do about it? I think Agambens analysis fails utterly on both counts and
therein lies the danger in its growing influence as a way of understanding the
undoubted rise in political repression and authoritarianism around the world. Part
of the appeal of a theory like Agambens to radical intellectuals is its sophistication.
That Agemben is erudite is undoubted, as his extensive knowledge of arcane facts of
Roman legal history indicate. But while he has added dimensions that no less
talented thinker, certainly myself included, could have come up with, originality,
despite its undoubted academic virtues, is not a reason for a theory or explanation to
be convincing to others. Rather an explanation of historical or political phenomena
must address the first question I pose: why? Why now and not later or before?
Why in this place and not the other? Why the differences in degree between
places or times? Why is this group under attack and not another one?