Kritik Update (Climate, Colonization, Gender) - ENDI 2011

***Climate ...... 3 Link – Climate Reps...... 3 Link – Space (General)...... 5 Link – Space Commericalization...... 6 Link – Space Mining...... 7 Link – Solar Energy...... 8 Link – Space Colonization...... 10 Link – Terraforming...... 11

*Impacts ...... 11 Impact – Objectification...... 12 Impact - Environment...... 13 Impact – Radiation (Generic Colonization)...... 14 Impact – Apocalypse...... 15 Impact – Ethics...... 16

*Alternatives ...... 17 Alt – Paradigm Shift...... 18 Alt - Discourse...... 19 Alt – Social Justice...... 20 Floating Pic...... 21 A2: Alt Does Nothing...... 22

*Representations ...... 22 Reps 1st...... 23

**NEG ...... 23

*A2s ...... 23 A2: Perm...... 24 A2: Eco-Prag...... 25 A2: Convincing People Key...... 27 A2: Predictions Good...... 28 A2: Imperial Mindsets Inevitable...... 29 A2: Climate Change Real...... 30

*Links ...... 30 Link – Imperialism...... 31 Aff Reps Fail – Lack of Trust...... 34 Aff Reps Fail – Lack of Action...... 36 Aff Reps Fail – Not Sustainable...... 37

**Aff ...... 37 No Link – SPS...... 38

*AT: Alternative ...... 38 Alt Fails – Cap better...... 39 Alt Fails – No Utopia...... 40 Alt Fails – Can’t Shift...... 41 Alt Fails – Takes Too Long...... 43 A2: Floating Pic...... 44

*AT: Representations Prior ...... 44 A2: Reps 1st...... 45 Our Reps Good – environment...... 46

*Other ...... 47 Dickens & Ormrod Indict...... 48 Climate Discourse Good...... 49 Climate Change Real...... 50 A2: Root Cause...... 51 Perm...... 52

***Colonization ...... 53

**Neg ...... 53

*1nc ...... 53

*A2s ...... 55 A2: Perm...... 56

*Links ...... 56 Link – Generic...... 57 Link – Rhetoric...... 58 Link – Colonization...... 59 Link – Exploration...... 61 Link – SPS...... 63 Link – Space Mining...... 64 Link – Hegemony...... 65 Link – Machines...... 66

*Impacts ...... 66 Impact – Environment...... 67 Impact – Abandonment...... 69 Impact – Extinction...... 70 Impact – Awareness...... 71 Impact Turns Case...... 72 Impact Turns Warming...... 73

**Aff ...... 73

*Link Debate ...... 74 No Link...... 75 No Link – Double Bind...... 76

*Other ...... 76 A2: Value To Life...... 77 Climate Science True...... 78 Rhetoric Inevitable...... 79

***Surveillance ...... 79

**Neg ...... 80

*Links ...... 81 Link – Monitoring...... 82 Link – Climate Research...... 83 Link – Data Collection...... 84

*Impacts ...... 84 Impact – Value to Life...... 85 Impact – Environment...... 86 Impact – Lack of Boundaries...... 88

*Alts ...... 88 Alt – New Thinking...... 89

***Gender ...... 90

**Neg ...... 91

*Links ...... 92 Link – Development...... 93 Link – Technology...... 94 Link – Science...... 95 Link – Climate...... 99 Link – Risk Analysis...... 101

*Impacts ...... 102 Impact – Value to Life...... 103 Impact – Social Division...... 104

*Alts ...... 104 Alt – Re-thinking...... 105 Alt – Critical Sociology...... 106 Alt – Change Risk Analysis...... 107 Alt – Public Involvement...... 109

*Representations ...... 110 Reps Shape Reality...... 111

*A2s ...... 111 A2: Females in NASA...... 112

*Links ...... 112 Link – NASA...... 113 Link – Human Space-flight...... 115 Link – Space NMD...... 117 Link – Star Wars Performance...... 118

**Aff ...... 118

*Other ...... 119 A2: Eco-Fem...... 120

***Science ...... 121

**Neg ...... 122

*A2s ...... 123 A2: Need Realism...... 124

**Aff ...... 124

*Alt Debate ...... 125 Alt Fails – Need Institutions...... 126

*Other ...... 126 Author Indicts...... 127

***Public Health ...... 128

**Public-Health/Disease Links ...... 128

***Climate Link – Climate Reps

Apocalyptic framing of climate change eliminates political response in favor technological management. Their framing prevents changes in distribution and consumption required to cope with climate change.

Erik SWYNGEDOUW Geography @ Manchester ’10 “Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change” Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2-3) p. 216-219

The Desire for the Apocalypse and the Fetishization of CO2 It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. (Jameson, 2003: 73) We shall start from the attractions of the apocalyptic imaginaries that infuse the climate change debate and through which much of the public concern with the climate change argument is sustained. The distinct millennialist discourse around the climate has co-produced a widespread consensus that the earth and many of its component parts are in an ecological bind that may short-circuit human and non-human life in the not too distant future if urgent and immediate action to retrofit nature to a more benign equilibrium is postponed for much longer. Irrespective of the particular views of Nature held by different individuals and social groups, consensus has emerged over the seriousness of the environmental condition and the precariousness of our socio-ecological balance (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). BP has rebranded itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ to certify its environmental credentials, Shell plays a more eco-sensitive tune, eco-activists of various political or ideological stripes and colours engage in direct action in the name of saving the planet, New Age post-materialists join the chorus that laments the irreversible decline of ecological amenities, eminent scientists enter the public domain to warn of pending ecological catastrophe, politicians try to outmanoeuvre each other in brandishing the ecological banner, and a wide range of policy initiatives and practices, performed under the motif of ‘sustainability’, are discussed, conceived and implemented at all geographical scales. Al Gore’s evangelical film An Inconvenient Truth won him the Nobel Peace price, surely one of the most telling illustrations of how eco - logical matters are elevated to the terrain of a global humanitarian cause (see also Giddens, 2009). While there is certainly no agreement on what exactly Nature is and how to relate to it, there is a virtually unchallenged consensus over the need to be more ‘environmentally’ sustainable if disaster is to be avoided; a climatic sustainability that centres around stabilizing the CO2 content in the atmosphere (Boykoff et al., forthcoming). This consensual framing is itself sustained by a particular scientific discourse.1 The complex translation and articulation between what Bruno Latour (2004) would call matters of fact versus matters of concern has been thoroughly short-circuited. The changing atmospheric composition, marked by increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is largely caused by anthropogenic activity, primarily (although not exclusively) as a result of the burning of fossilized or captured CO2 (in the form of oil, gas, coal, wood) and the disappearance of CO2 sinks and their associated capture processes (through deforestation for example). These undisputed matters of fact are, without proper political intermediation, translated into matters of concern. The latter, of course, are eminently political in nature. Yet, in the climate change debate, the political nature of matters of concern is disavowed to the extent that the facts in themselves are elevated, through a short-circuiting procedure, on to the terrain of the political, where climate change is framed as a global humanitarian cause. The matters of concern are thereby relegated to a terrain beyond dispute, to one that does not permit dissensus or disagreement. Scientific expertise becomes the foundation and guarantee for properly constituted politics/ policies. In this consensual setting, environmental problems are generally staged as universally threatening to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature termination of civilization as we know it and sustained by what Mike Davis (1999) aptly called ‘ecologies of fear’. The discursive matrix through which the contemporary meaning of the environmental condition is woven is one quilted systematically by the continuous invocation of fear and danger, the spectre of ecological annihilation or at least seriously distressed socio-ecological conditions for many people in the near future. ‘Fear’ is indeed the crucial node through which much of the current environmental narrative is woven, and continues to feed the concern with ‘sustainability’. This cultivation of ‘ecologies of fear’, in turn, is sustained in part by a particular set of phantasmagorical imaginaries (Katz, 1995). The apocalyptic imaginary of a world without water, or at least with endemic water shortages, ravaged by hurricanes whose intensity is amplified by climate change; pictures of scorched land as global warming shifts the geopluvial regime and the spatial variability of droughts and floods; icebergs that disintegrate around the poles as ice melts into the sea, causing the sea level to rise; alarming reductions in biodiversity as species disappear or are threatened by extinction; post-apocalyptic images of waste lands reminiscent of the silent ecologies of the region around Chernobyl; the threat of peak-oil that, without proper management and technologically innovative foresight, would return society to a Stone Age existence; the devastation of wildfires, tsunamis, diseases like SARS, avian flu, Ebola or HIV, all these imaginaries of a Nature out of synch, destabilized, threatening and out ofcontrol are paralleled by equally disturbing images of a society that continues piling up waste, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, deforesting the earth, etc. This is a process that Neil Smith appropriately refers to as ‘nature-washing’ (2008: 245). In sum, our ecological predicament is sutured by millennial fears, sustained by an apocalyptic rhetoric and representational tactics, and by a series of performative gestures signalling an overwhelming, mind-boggling danger, one that threatens to undermine the very coordinates of our everyday lives and routines, and may shake up the foundations of all we took and take for granted. Table 1 exemplifies some of the imaginaries that are continuously invoked. Of course, apocalyptic imaginaries have been around for a long time as an integral part of Western thought, first of Christianity and later emerging as the underbelly of fast-forwarding technological modernization and its associated doomsday thinkers. However, present-day millennialism preaches an apocalypse without the promise of redemption. Saint John’s biblical apocalypse, for example, found its redemption in God’s infinite love. The proliferation of modern apocalyptic imaginaries also held up the promise of redemption: the horsemen of the apocalypse, whether riding under the name of the proletariat, technology or capitalism, could be tamed with appropriate political and social revolutions. As Martin Jay argued, while traditional apocalyptic versions still held out the hope for redemption, for a ‘second coming’, for the promise of a ‘new dawn’, environmental apocalyptic imaginaries are ‘leaving behind any hope of rebirth or renewal . . . in favour of an unquenchable fascination with being on the verge of an end that never comes’ (1994: 33). The emergence of newforms of millennialism around the environmental nexus is of a particular kind that promises neither redemption nor realization. As Klaus Scherpe (1987) insists, this is not simply apocalypse now, but apocalypse forever. It is a vision that does not suggest, prefigure or expect the necessity of an event that will alter history. Derrida (referring to the nuclear threat in the 1980s) sums this up most succinctly: . . . here, precisely, is announced – as promise or as threat – an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation . . . without message and without destination, without sender and without decidable addressee . . . an apocalypse beyond good and evil. (1992: 66) The environmentally apocalyptic future, forever postponed, neither promises redemption nor does it possess a name; it is pure negativity. The attractions of such an apocalyptic imaginary are related to a series of characteristics. In contrast to standard left arguments about the apocalyptic dynamics of unbridled capitalism (Mike Davis is a great exemplar of this; see Davis, 1999, 2002), I would argue that sustaining and nurturing apocalyptic imaginaries is an integral and vital part of the new cultural politics of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) for which the management of fear is a central leitmotif (Badiou, 2007). At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms. As such, apocalyptic imaginations are decidedly populist and foreclose a proper political framing. Or, in other words, the presentation of climate change as a global humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another, one that is not articulated with specific political programs or socio-ecological project or revolutions. It is this sort of mobilization without political issue that led Alain Badiou to state that ‘ecology is the new opium for the masses’, whereby the nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations (Badiou, 2008; Žižek, 2008). We have to make sure that radical techno- managerial and socio-cultural transformations, organized within the horizons of a capitalist order that is beyond dispute, are initiated that retrofit the climate (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). In other words, we have to change radically, but within the contours of the existing state of the situation – ‘the partition of the sensible’ in Rancière’s (1998) words, so that nothing really has to change.

Scientific framing of climate change stalls social change. We need to develop and alternative frame to respond to climate change. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus]

Significantly, we can note the open-endedly experimental nature of this original commitment – (paraphrasing) ‘is long-term climate prediction a scientifically do-able problem?’ (Clarke and Fujimura, 1994). This is not unlike many other such large and ambitiously open-ended scientific research commitments. However, it is also notable how the original meaning of the intellectual enterprise changes in light of the large and long-term organization and the proliferating commitments involved, which were at the original moment of commitment unknown and unknowable. With the scientific modelling which became the central currency of the later IPCC and its definitive global scientific advice to policy leaders, media and civil society networks, pragmatic commitments and choices were necessarily made along the way. The original perfectly explicit founding question, ‘Is long-term climate prediction scientifically do-able?’, has been answered by default, and is no longer explicitly posed. Yet neither has it been deliberately and directly resolved as the attention has necessarily switched to more detailed technical questions. Strictly speaking, we still do not know the answer. In one sense the answer seems to be positive – after all, long-term climate prediction is ‘being done’ and, moreover, momentous, even unprecedentedly ambitious attempted political authority is being invested in a positive answer to that question. But these predictions can claim authority to predict credibly and reliably only in very complex and indirect ways – effectively only by default of evident failure. As Douglas (1971) suggested, like any other science these attempts at long-term prediction cannot require assent, as if a universal intellectual necessity. This is especially so when normative ‘requirements’ are woven into and confused with the propositional assertions about future climate-states and their causes. Indeed what it would mean to demonstrate the answer – do-able or not? yes or no? – is itself negotiable. Is the key aim to show the future effect on climate (which variables and scales?) of human-emitted greenhouse gas increases? Or of the aggregate of these and natural changes? How might excluded but credible factors like abrupt discontinuous changes from known positive climate feedbacks (which are omitted from existing models) influence the perceived validity and success or failure of IPCC long-term predictions? Ultimately these scientific frames of meaning and ‘demonstration’ depend partly on broader human frames of meaning, such as whether we attach significance to multiple independent possible influences on observed climate changes, both slow and relatively abrupt ones, or only those for which human society is responsible. If the relative importance of the human contributions compared with the non-human ones is unknown, perhaps unknowable, do we then still assume responsibility for our part, or fatalistically declare that there can be no human responsibility if sun-spots and other factors way beyond human agency are also influencing climate? Link – Space (General)

Using space as a “means to an end” re-entrenches its exploitation. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 143 [Marcus]

Our point is that ‘the heavens’ are now being envisaged, at least by dominant social orders, in a form very similar to Earthly nature. They too are being made into Baconian objects, as means towards ends. They exist to be used, to be lived in, to be worked on and to be domesticated and dominated by society. Such a view has long been prevalent in human society, especially Western society. But now that access to outer space is becoming feasible the same values and orientation are being extended to outer space by extremely influential classes of people. The exploitation of space continues apace. Mary-Ann Elliott, for example, is a ‘space broker’ working in this sector. She has recently announced that ‘over the last five years we’ve grown 1061 per cent’. Jim Benson is another space broker. ‘Natural resources in space’, he informs us, ‘are on a first come first served basis’ (ABC Australia 2005). Link – Space Commericalization Space commercialization supports a flawed US profit only mindset. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 144 [Marcus]

Private corporations have always been used to make and maintain space activities funded by the US government, but there is a trend towards increasing private sector participation, especially through new competition schemes. This process is part of a much more general trend that has been experienced by almost all societies since the 1980s. Now, as we have seen, it is being extended to the military and to surveillance. Previously state-run activities are being contracted out to the private sector. But, furthermore, space activities are now being envisaged as profitable in themselves, and so space activity is now becoming increasingly commercialized as well as privatized. This is another stage of Luxemburg’s restless search for further profits or of what Harvey (2003) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Using outer space as a source of raw materials is one suggestion under very active consideration. Harnessing the Sun’s rays with solar panels in space and beaming the energy to electricity grids via Earth-bound receivers is another kind of outer spatial fix under discussion, though it is not seen as profitable within the next twenty years. In the more distant future humanization will further encroach on its ‘outside’, making planets into zones appropriated for the further expansion of capitalism. Link – Space Mining

The idea that we can mine outer space for minerals is based on a flawed world approach. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 144 [Marcus]

Outer space is now increasingly envisaged as providing inputs to the Earthly production process. It is, for example, seen as an unlimited source of metals for human use. Private companies have also been established working on the research and design for asteroidal and lunar mines. This is discussed in a number of books elaborating the commercial potential of outer space (e.g. Lewis 1996; Zubrin 1999; Hudgins 2002). The expansion of industry into space has been referred to by Harry G. Stine (1975) as the ‘third industrial revolution’ and by Krafft Ehricke (1972) as ‘the benign industrial revolution’ (as there were supposedly no environmental issues associated with it). Asteroids are receiving special attention (Lewis 1996). The Moon might seem an obvious first target for the acquisition and mining of resources, but asteroids are currently seen as a better bet thanks to their metallic density. They have three hundred times as much free metal as an equal mass taken from the Moon. Metals found on the Moon are just the dispersed debris from asteroids. In the mid-1990s the market value of metals in the smallest known asteroid, known as 3554 Amun, was about $20 trillion. This included $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion worth of cobalt, and about $6 trillion in platinum-group metals (ibid.). As and when it is possible to launch thousands of people into orbit and build giant solar power satellites, Lewis argues, it should be possible to retrieve this and mine other asteroids to supply Earth with all the metals society will ever need. Extracting valuable helium-3 from the Moon is another possibility. One metric ton of helium-3 is worth $3 million, and one million tons could be obtained from the Moon. This has led Lawrence Joseph to question in a New York Times article whether the Moon could become the Persian Gulf of the twenty-first century (cited in Gagnon 2006). Needless to say, we need to remain cautious in accepting these highly optimistic forecasts. Even the most enthusiastic pro-space activists see materials in space as useful only for building in space. The cost of returning materials to Earth would add so much to the cost of extracting them that this would never be financially viable. Research is also being conducted, however, into the production of fuel for further humanization from space materials (Zubrin and Wagner 1996). NASA has recently given the chemical engineer Jonathan Whitlow a grant of nearly $50,000 to develop computer models that could lead to the production of propellant from the lunar regolith or rock mantle (SPX 2004). The issue of ownership of means of production is again vitally important here. United Nations legislation and the most optimistic proponents of space exploitation assume that space resources are infinite and there will be enough for everyone to own plenty of space. Considering the immensity of space as a whole, this is of course true. But it is overlooked that the nearer parts of space are those which are most profitable and viable to exploit. In reality, the part of space that is not yet owned and exploited will always become further and further from the Earth, and as this happens investors will need to be increasingly wealthy to afford to exploit it. Link – Solar Energy

Giant technological projects like SPS foreclose our social relations that guide energy usage. Trying to maintain more of the same encourages environmental degradation.

John BYRNE Center for Energy & Environmental Policy, University of Delaware ET AL ‘9 “Relocating Energy in the Social Commons” Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 29 (2) p. 81-82

Interestingly, Tierney (and all but one of the article’s 114 commenters) missed a key aspect of the soft path critique. Lovins’ (1977) soft path calls for the “rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy quality to end use needs” (p. 25) By design, hard path systems supply, rather than match, needs and intentionally disregard social definitions of scale and quality in favor of technical and, when it suits, certain environmental factors. In this way, hard path strategies ignore what soft paths insist on—a significant rethinking of the social relationship to energy (Byrne & Toly, 2006). Whether the response to our energy and climate challenges should be nuclear or some other option, contemporary debates about these issues have almost entirely focused on them as technology questions. With a looming climate crisis caused in large part by the energy sector,2 one might hope that social concerns would rival technical ones. But so far, this has not been the case. Instead, technology fixes of various kinds appear to have the momentum. An unexpected ally supporting technology-based answers has emerged in middle class environmentalism. Backed by the Sierra Club and others who have partnered with renewable energy business lobbies such as the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), mainstream environmentalism is calling for a renewable energy version of the Manhattan Project (see, e.g., AWEA, 2008; Wilson, 2008). Although the choice of technology differs, the prescriptions of Tierney and large environmental organizations agree on several points. There is consensus that a quick end to modern use of fossil fuels is necessary; the sooner, the better. As a business proposal, this naturally spells good news for the two industries. A second shared belief is that the new energy order must represent a dramatic shift to electricity, powering everything from home heating to factories and vehicles with electrons. A third component of the shared ideology is to construct the new Manhattan Project on the foundations of the modern electric grid. Ubiquitous, sophisticated, and, above all, centralized in architecture from technical design to management, the grid represents our best hope, according to the renewable energy and nuclear power proponents, for speedy, large action. Other strategies are thought to be impractical and costly if they require a different infrastructure; time and money are in short supply, precluding a solution before environmental and, now, economic calamity hits. As the two industries vie for primacy in creating a green energy system, many see a cause for celebration. Whoever wins, a low-carbon future sustained by green jobs and a green economy of consumption and production awaits. Indeed, a breathtaking confidence bubbles forth as the global financial meltdown and ecosystem collapse are both forecast to be overcome. In the hearts and minds of enthusiasts, there can be no excuse for inaction (compare AWEA, 2008 and Tucker, 2008). For all the celebration, though, there is a disconcerting feature: the energy revolution summoned by the two camps appears to proceed without serious social change. The hard path preference to supply energy rather than transform society-energy relations informs the new vision. Curiously, the leaders of the revolt are to be the same actors who built the modern (now disgraced) energy scheme. Huge electric utilities, megatechnical companies such as Siemens and General Electric (making nuclear plants and giant wind turbines), and finance mammoths like Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan Stanley (who have been equally prepared to underwrite nuclear and renewable energy monuments as long asthe dollar amounts are in the billions) are to save the planet, maintain economic growth, and, of course,make money. The prospect of yet another corporate-led technology revolution (alongside the “dot.com,” “information highway,” “biotechnology,” and “microelectronic” revolutions of recent times), in this instance to decarbonize the energy sector, is welcomed by some and skeptically viewed by others. Still, momentum rests with the oddly allied proponents of the new energy order. Why? Embedded in the urgent call-to-action is a shared, near-desperate sense that without a “Manhattan Project for 2009” (Wilson, 2008), collapse is certain. One might think this would lead to an expectation of social sacrifice. However, the middle class roots of the call-to- action work against such a result, shifting attention instead to technology as the source of salvation. As discussed below, the modern energy system gained and has retained political power through this promise. In combination, a curious mix of social fatalism and technological positivism define the current aspiration for an energy revolution and its search for the answer that can avert ruin . . . and yet also forego major social change.

Solar energy only is profitable and usable for the rich – the poor are essentialized. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 145 [Marcus]

Outer space is also being seen as an unlimited source of energy for industrial and domestic production. Solar panels are already allowing electricity to be generated in outer space. The International Space Station provides itself with around 80 kilowatts continuously from an acre of solar panels. The principle can in theory be extended to cover much larger satellites generating huge amounts of electrical power (Macauley and Davis 2002). A further suggestion is that this could be converted to microwaves and beamed to Earth via laser beams, providing electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions or toxic waste of any kind. A long-standing dream is for Earth’s power to be projected directly from space, ‘simultaneously providing a large profitable business and dramatically reducing pollution on Earth’ (Globus 2005). Solar panels in space are never obstructed by weather conditions and benefit from the greater intensity of the Sun outside Earth’s atmosphere. If there is a desperate demand for electricity, energy companies could stand to make substantial profits; the station receiving the laser beam would become a new Middle East! On the other hand, they would be transmitting such energy back to Earth via giant laser beams, a prospect likely to generate major risk, especially for those Earthlings near to the point of reception. The idea of using satellites for harnessing solar power was introduced by Glazer (1968), and became central to Gerard O’Neill’s space colony plans discussed below. But we need again to remain cautious. The main criticism is the expense of the electricity they would produce. There are serious questions about its profitability, at least in the short to medium term (Macauley 2000). Those who do not write off the idea completely believe that it will become profitable and viable and may actually happen fairly soon, though requiring some form of private– public partnership or World Bank funding (Collins 2000; Kassing 2000; Woodell 2000). But this will only be at the point when the unit cost of electricity produced by Earthly power sources rises above the unit cost of satellite solar power. According to many estimates this will not be until reserves on Earth are much more depleted. Only then will this particular outer spatial fix become profitable. If it were ever to happen, the energy produced would be extremely expensive and, because of the massive investment it would require, would very likely be monopolized. However, it can be argued that it will simply never be viable because it is cheaper to produce renewable energy on Earth than it would be in space. One commentator (Launius 2003) outlines the argument that equivalent electricity could be produced by covering a section of the Sahara in solar panels, and it would be a great deal cheaper, safer and easier to maintain (Collins (2000) disagrees). To Launius, outer space collectors of solar power look like an excuse for a space programme rather than a legitimate solution to energy problems. Link – Space Colonization Colonization is just another form of “humanizing” the universe Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 148 [Marcus]

But it is little appreciated that the colonization of outer space has already started with the International Space Station. Here are living quarters for human beings. And here experiments are being conducted on the effects of gravity loss on human beings and other species. George W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative includes plans for a permanent lunar base manned in six-month shifts. Other still less exotic forms of humanization are already well in place. We have already encountered humanization in the form of militarization and, via satellites, the surveillance of society and broadcasting information and propaganda. It now seems clear that this process is to be extended, with outer space being envisaged as a source of energy and materials. In the longer term the ‘terraforming’ of nearby planets, making them into environments suitable for human beings, may be possible.

Space Colonization is rooted in an imperial and gendered frame. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 150 [Marcus]

Whatever we may think of this equation between gender and types of ‘mastering’, the potential dangers of making new Earth-like planets seem obvious. Here again, humanity’s submission of the planets is being applied on a quick-fix basis and generating potential risks. The planetary engineering project rings alarm bells as the kind of ‘deadly manifestation of bigness’ that Ehrenfeld (1981) had in mind in The Arrogance of Humanism. Indeed, it is a project he cites in that book. It relies on humans’ complete confidence in their ability to master nature for the better. Ehrenfeld says of the history of humanism as he defines it: ‘we have chosen to transform our original faith in a higher authority to faith in the power of reason and human capabilities. It has proved a misplaced trust’ (1981: viii). He points to the failure of other great human projects aimed at controlling nature, though he does not seem to be implying a reversion to a mediaeval deference to religion. As a solution for Earthly problems, planetary engineering also reverberates with Beck’s theory of late modernity (1992, 1994), according to which society is characterized by escalating projects of unprecedented scale and high- consequence risk manufactured by an increasingly global social system. We return to Beck shortly. Link – Terraforming Terraforming ignores social and environmental considerations. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 148 [Marcus]

The central idea of terraforming is to enhance the capacity of a planetary environment to support human life (literally to make it Earth-like). This would entail making the surface temperature appropriate for human beings, increasing the mass of the atmosphere, making water available in liquid form, reducing ultraviolet and cosmic rays and making an atmosphere that humans could breathe. If plants are to survive, higher levels of atmospheric oxygen would be needed to enable root respiration (Fogg 1995a,b; Zubrin and Wagner 1996). Mars is usually seen as the most obvious ‘bio-compatible’ candidate for terraforming and eventual occupation by human beings. It appears to contain considerable amounts of frozen water and large quantities of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. These four elements are the basis of food and water and of plastics, wood, paper and clothing, and even of rocket fuel (Zubrin and Wagner 1996). It is also the right distance from the Sun to be neither too hot nor too cold to rule out life surviving (the so-called ‘Goldilocks effect’). Making a planet such as Mars into a fully terraformed and colonized setting for human beings entails doing the opposite of what many scientists, activists and political regimes are attempting on Earth. While many individuals and governments on Earth are trying to overcome the destabilization of the climate because greenhouse gases are trapping too much of the Sun’s heat, terraformers are actively attempting to make a new greenhouse effect. What are the environmental and social implications of terraforming? These are matters almost wholly missing in the optimistic accounts of scientists and prospace advocates. There are a number of potential risks, dependent on how such planetary engineering is achieved. Perhaps most drastically and dangerously, one proposal is to terraform Mars by using war- surplus bombs.

*Impacts Impact – Objectification

Technological approaches toward solving environmental concerns lead to nature and human objectification. Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657 [Marcus]

Sandra Rosenthal and Rogene Buchholz also regard Pragmatism as the ‘radical correction of modernity’, however they seem to cope with the sceptical divide of nominalism slightly better than their co-authors. Their critique is that the modern scientific view objectifies nature and separates humanity from the natural world. Science is better understood as creative human activity, rather than the excavator of the essence of things. These are important ideas for confronting the belief that technology and science can sort out environmental problems (should they be so employed). Rosenthal and Buchholz emphasise a relational context, or organic unity, such that the individual is embedded in the locality. Biological creatures are continuous with nature, so there is no need for dualisms such as anthropocentricism/biocentrism, individual/holism, intrinsic/ instrumental and so on. They explain the rational and conscious organisation of experience to produce future value as a basis of Pragmatic ethics. Rationality and consciousness gets underlined here, to produce a ‘correctness’ of world view that only Pragmatism can provide (Rosenthal & Buchholz, in Light & Katz, 1996). Impact - Environment

An epistemological shift is necessary to solve environmental concerns. Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657 [Marcus]

If the environmentalist project is to generate action, then a genuine epistemological shift amongst the global population is required. The piecemeal pockets of revegetation, nature ‘enhancement’, isolated national parks, sustainable management, urban recycling and so on may only contribute very limited environmental ‘good’ and preserve narrow ecological niches, but at the same time, they contribute ideas towards a paradigm shift that normalises concern for ecology rather than the present atomised alienation of humanity from our surroundings. Impact – Radiation (Generic Colonization) Attempts to colonize space lead to radiation consequences on Earth. Peter Dickens Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge, 10 Monthly Review, “The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?” 11/1/10, Volume 62, Issue 06 [Marcus]

Space colonization brings a number of other manufactured risks. The farther space vehicles penetrate the solar system, the more likely it is that they will be powered by nuclear, rather than solar, energy. It is not widely appreciated, for example, that the 1997 Cassini Mission to Saturn’s moons (via Jupiter and Venus) was powered by plutonium. One estimate is that if something had gone wrong while Cassini was still circling the earth, some thirty to forty million deaths could have occurred.22 No plans were in place for such an eventuality. Yet, as early as 1964, a plutonium-powered generator fell to earth, having failed to achieve orbit. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, then argued that there was probably a direct link between that crash and an increase of lung cancer on Earth. Both President Obama and the Russian authorities are now arguing for generating electricity with plutonium in space, and building nuclear-propelled rockets for missions to Mars.23 Impact – Apocalypse Focus on climate change externalizes human relations and makes an apocalypse inevitable. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus]

Passing these global issues pertaining to climate, but very far from only about climate and greenhouse gases, through the eye of the needle of GCMs and long-term climate simulation science has – with absolutely no deliberate intent so far as can be seen – produced its own global policy climate which externalizes the larger human-relational issues which contribute to the global apocalypse which is already upon us, regardless of what may happen to the climate. The moral discomforts which minority affluent world citizens feel when reminded of the grotesque poverty and desperate conditions of the majority distantly hint at this reality. Meanwhile rich-world politicians state that the only way that they can mobilize electoral support for even marginally progressive climate greenhouse gas policies is to have climate impact models which show such citizen-electors that their own self-interests are threatened, like sea-level rise inundating their local areas, or extreme weather events causing flooding to devastate their homes. Of course, self-interest will always be with us, and politics will always have to recognize its various manifestations. However, to act as if politics cannot change the moral and behavioural outlook of citizens, by identifying their more generous and relational human spirit and giving collective articulation, hope and public presence – and material policy form – to these elements of human nature, is timid, wrong, and maybe even selfdefeating in this domain. Elsewhere I have suggested that mainstream social science tends to reinforce an atomized and instrumental, rational choice self-interest model of the human subject, and while this is real for sure, it is not at all exhaustive (Wynne, 2007). Contrary dimensions of human subjectivity – intrinsically and ontologically as well as epistemically relational, responsible, and other-oriented – are also real, if also contingent. It can be seen as a responsibility of social science to bring out and encourage these realities, in a manner which is anyway unavoidably interventionist. A severe problem for this more complex and contingent, emergentrealist constructivist programme in social science is that in those many domains, such as climate, where social and human issues are interwoven with scientific-technical ones, the dominant prevailing scientific knowledge already carries tacit imaginations of human and social actors and capacities, and also (usually by default, without deliberate intent) imposes ‘the’ public meaning on the situation and its actors. These imaginaries are strongly normative, and they are typically instrumental, self-interest only visions, as with neo-classical economistic ideologies. Of course these cannot be blamed on climate science; but they do mutually reinforce themselves, in an implicit model of the science-policy order. Impact – Ethics Pro-space advocates project ideologies of Western dominance into space. The elitist narcissistic perspective of the affirmative negates ethical relations with others.

Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 615-618

Some preliminary indications of an extreme form of this kind of self come from an ethnographic study of citizens actively promoting and advocating the extension of society into space (Ormrod, 2006). There is a ‘pro-space’ social movement, largely operating out of the USA, numbering approximately 100–150,000 members. These activists (many from the quasi-technical new middle class identified at the heart of the culture of narcissism [Sennett, 1974]) are paid- up members of one or more pro-space organizations, who meet to discuss the science and technology necessary to explore, develop and colonize the universe, as well as lobbying politicians in favour of both public and private programs aimed at accomplishing this. We now draw upon our research into the movement, not as conclusive proof of a general condition of narcissism, but merely as illustrations of how some individuals relate to the universe.1 There are strong indications that these pro-space activists are amongst those most affected by late modern narcissism. Early on in life, these activists come to project infantile unconscious phantasies (those relating to omnipotence and fusion with the infant’s ‘universe’) into conscious fantasies2 about exploring and developing space, which increasingly seem a possibility and which now achieve legitimacy largely through the ideology of the libertarian right. Those who have grown up in the ‘post-Sputnik’ era and were exposed at an early date to science fiction are particularly likely to engage in fantasies or daydreams about travelling in space, owning it, occupying it, consuming it and bringing it under personal control. Advocates talk about fantasies of bouncing up and down on the moon or playing golf on it, of mining asteroids or setting up their own colonies. These fantasies serve to protect the unconscious phantasy that they are still in the stage of infantile narcissism. Of course not all of those people growing up in late modern societies come to fantasize about space at such an early age like this, and are less single minded in their attempts to control and consume the universe, but we argue that this is nonetheless the way in which some dominant sectors of Western society relate to the universe. It is not only pro-space activists, but many well-to-do businesspeople and celebrities who are lining up to take advantage of new commercial opportunities to explore space as tourists. The promise of power over the whole universe is therefore the latest stage in the escalation of the narcissistic personality. A new kind of ‘universal man’ is in the making. Space travel and possible occupation of other planets further inflates people’s sense of omnipotence. Fromm (1976) discusses how in Western societies people experience the world (or indeed the universe) through the ‘having’ mode, whereby individuals cannot simply appreciate the things around them, but must own and consume them. For the narcissistic pro-space activist, this sentiment means that they feel a desperate need to bring the distant objects of outer space under their control: Some people will look up at the full moon and they’ll think about the beauty of it and the romance and history and whatever. I’ll think of some of those too but the primary thing on my mind is gee I wonder what it looks like up there in that particular area, gee I’d love to see that myself. I don’t want to look at it up there, I want to walk on it. (25-year-old engineering graduate interviewed at ProSpace March Storm 2004) Omnipotent daydreaming of this kind is also closely linked to the idea of regaining a sense of wholeness and integration once experienced with the mother (or ‘monad’) in the stage of primary narcissism, counterposed to a society that is fragmenting and alienating. Experiencing weightlessness and seeing the Earth from space are other common fantasies. Both represent power, the ability to ‘break the bonds of gravity’, consuming the image of the Earth (Ingold, 1993; Szersynski and Urry, 2006) or ‘possessing’ it through gazing at it (Berger, 1972). They also represent a return to unity. Weightlessness represents the freedom from restraint experienced in pre-oedipal childhood, and perhaps even a return to the womb (Bainbridge, 1976: 255). Seeing the Earth from space is an experience in which the observer witnesses a world without borders. This experience has been dubbed ‘the overview effect’ based on the reported life-changing experiences of astronauts (see White, 1987). Humans’ sense of power in the universe means our experience of the cosmos and our selves is fundamentally changing: It really presents a different perspective on your life when you can think that you can actually throw yourself into another activity and transform it, and when we have a day when we look out in the sky and we see lights on the moon, something like that or you think that I know a friend who’s on the other side of the Sun right now. You know, it just changes the nature of looking at the sky too. (46-year-old space scientist interviewed at ProSpace March Storm 2004) In the future, this form of subjectivity may well characterize more and more of Western society. A widespread cosmic narcissism of this kind might appear to have an almost spiritual nature, but the cosmic spirituality we are witnessing here is not about becoming immortal in the purity of the heavens. Rather, it is spirituality taking the form of self-worship; further aggrandizing the atomized, self-seeking, 21st-century individual (see Heelas, 1996). Indeed, the pro-space activists we interviewed are usually opposed to those who would keep outer space uncontaminated, a couple suggesting we need to confront the pre-Copernican idea of a corrupt Earth and ideal ‘Heaven’. For these cosmic narcissists, the universe is very much experienced as an object; something to be conquered, controlled and consumed as a reflection of the powers of the self. This vision is no different to the Baconian assumptions about the relationship between man and nature on Earth. This kind of thinking has its roots in Anaxagoras’ theory of a material and infinite universe, and was extended by theorists from Copernicus, through Kepler and Galileo to Newton. The idea that the universe orients around the self was quashed by Copernicus as he showed the Earth was not at the centre of the universe and that therefore neither were we (Freud, 1973: 326). However, science has offered us the promise that we can still understand and control it. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, trumpets Kepler’s role in developing the omniscient fantasy of science (it was Kepler who first calculated the elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun): Kepler did not describe a model of the universe that was merely appealing – he was investigating a universe whose causal relationships could be understood in terms of a nature knowable to man. In so doing, Kepler catapulted the status of humanity in the universe. Though no longer residing at the centre of the cosmos, humanity, Kepler showed, could comprehend it. Therefore […] not only was the universe within man’s intellectual reach, it was, in principle, within physical reach as well. (Zubrin with Wagner, 1996: 24) Thus Zubrin begins to lay out his plan to colonize Mars. The Universe as Object for the Exercise of Power While pro-space activists and others are daydreaming about fantastical and yet seemingly benign things to do in outer space, socially and militarily dominant institutions are actively rationalizing, humanizing and commodifying outer space for real, material, ends. The cosmos is being used as a way of extending economic empires on Earth and monitoring those individuals who are excluded from this mission. On a day-to-day level, communications satellites are being used to promote predominantly ‘Western’ cultures and ways of life. They also enable the vast capital flows so crucial to the global capitalist economy. Since the 1950s, outer space has been envisaged as ‘the new high ground’ for the worldwide exercise of military power. The ‘weaponization of space’ has been proceeding rapidly as part of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ (Langley, 2004). The American military, heavily lobbied by corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, is now making new ‘Star Wars’ systems. These have been under development for over 30 years but are now being adapted to root out and destroy ‘terrorists’, if necessary with the aid of ‘smart’ nuclear weapons. American government spending on the Missile Defence Program jumped by 22 percent in 2004, reaching the huge sum of $8.3 billion (Langley, 2004). The unreal and almost certainly unobtainable objective is to create a new kind of ‘pure war’ in which terrorists are surgically pinpointed and killed while local civilians remain uninjured (Virilio, 1998; Virilio and Lotringer, 1998). Meanwhile, and paralleling the weaponization of space, surveillance satellites have also been much enhanced. Although originally developed for military purposes, they are now increasingly deployed to monitor nonmilitary populations, creating a global, orbital panopticon. Workers in British warehouses are even being tagged and monitored by satellite to ensure maximum productivity (Hencke, 2005). For those elites in positions of power over the universe, as for pro-space activists, the universe is experienced as an object to be placed in the service of human wants and desires. However, for those with less privileged access to the heavens, the universe is far from being such an object – their relationship with it is more fearful and alienated than ever before. Alt – Paradigm Shift

Our alternative avoids their one-size fits all. Only a paradigm shift in our social relationship to renewables activates their critical capacity.

Paradigm Shift Shedding the institutions that created the prospect of climate change will not happen on the watch of the green titans or extra large nuclear power. The modern cornucopian political economy fueled by abundant, carbon-free energy machines will, in fact, risk the possibility of climate change continually because of the core properties of the modern institutional design. Although the abundant energy machine originated and matured in the United States and industrial Europe, the logic of unending growth built into the modern model has promoted its global spread. Today, both extra- large nuclear power and industrial-scale renewables are at the forefront of the trillion dollar clean energy technology development and transfer process envisioned for the globe (International Energy Agency, 2006). Nuclear energy is seen as offering unlimited potential for rapid development in India and China, while large-scale renewables seamlessly fit into existing international financial aid schemes. A burgeoning renewables industry boasts economic opportunities in standardization and certification for delivering green titans to developing countries. If institutional change is to occur, if energy-society relations are to be transformed, and if the threat of global warming is to be earnestly addressed, we will have to design and experiment with alternatives other than these. Given the global character of the challenge, cookie cutter counter-strategies are certain to fail. Often, outside the box alternatives may not be sensible in the modern context. Like a paradigm shift, we need ideas, and actions guided by them, which fail in one context (here, specifically, the context of energy obesity) in order hopefully to support the appearance of a new context. The concept and practice of a sustainable energy utility is offered in this spirit.11 The sustainable energy utility (SEU) involves the creation of an institution with the explicit purpose of enabling communities to reduce and eventually eliminate use of obese energy resources and reliance on obese energy organizations. It is formed as a nonprofit organization to support commons energy development and management. Unlike its for-profit contemporaries, it has no financial or other interest in commodification of energy, ecological, or social relations; its success lies wholly in the creation of shared benefits and responsibilities. The SEU is not a panacea nor is it a blueprint for fixing our energy-carbon problems. It is a strategy to change energy-ecology-society relations. It may not work, but we believe it is worth the effort to invent and pursue the possibility. There should be little doubt about the difficulty of the task. Regimes develop through the interplay of technology and society over time, rather than through prescribed programs. They alter history and then seek to prevent its change, except in ways that bolster regime power. Of specific importance here, obese utilities will not simply cede political and economic success to an antithetical institution—the SEU. That is why change is so hard to realize. Shifting a society towards a new energy regime requires diverse actors working in tandem, across all areas of regime influence. Economic models, political will, social norm development, all these things must be shifted, rather than pulled, from the current paradigm. The SEU constructs energy–ecology-society relations as phenomena of a commons governance regime. It explicitly reframes the preeminent obese energy regime organization—the energy utility—in the antithetical context of using less energy. And, when energy use is needed, it relies on renewable sources available to and therefore governable by the community of users (rather than the titan technology approach of governance by producers). In contrast to the cornucopian strategy of expanding inputs in an effort to endlessly feed the obese regime, the SEU focuses on techniques and social arrangements which can serve the aims of sustainability and equity. It combines political and economic change for the purpose of building a postmodern energy commons; that is, a form of political economy that relies on commons, rather than commodity, relations for its evolution. Specifically, it uses the ideas of a commonwealth economy and a community trust to achieve the goal of postmodern energy sustainability. The meanings of commonwealth, community trust, and commons, relevant to a SEU, are explored below.

*Alternatives Alt - Discourse

Fearful representations of climate change are ineffective at changing public mindset – we must use non-threatening discourse to induce real change O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html] Fear-inducing representations of climate change are widely employed in the public domain. However, there is a lack of clarity in the literature about the impacts that fearful messages in climate change communications have on people’s senses of engagement with the issue and associated implications for public engagement strategies. Some literature suggests that using fearful representations of climate change may be counterproductive. The authors explore this assertion in the context of two empirical studies that investigated the role of visual, and iconic, representations of climate change for public engagement respectively. Results demonstrate that although such representations have much potential for attracting people’s attention to climate change, fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement. Nonthreatening imagery and icons that link to individuals’ everyday emotions and concerns in the context of this macro-environmental issue tend to be the most engaging. Recommendations for constructively engaging individuals with climate change are given. Alt – Social Justice The alternative is to reject unilateral action in space while embracing social justice. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 615-618 [Marcus]

Society’s relations with the cosmos are now at a tipping point. The cosmos could be explored and used for primarily humanitarian ends and needs. Satellites could continue to be increasingly used to promote environmental sustainability and social justice. They can for example be, and indeed are being, used to track the movements of needy refugees and monitor environmental degradation with a view to its regulation (United Nations, 2003). But if this model of human interaction is to win out over the use of the universe to serve dominant military, political and economic ends then new visionaries of a human relationship with the universe are needed. In philosophical opposition to the majority of pro-space activists (though they rarely clash in reality) are a growing number of social movement organizations and networks established to contest human activity in space, including the military use of space, commercialization of space, the use of nuclear power in space and creation of space debris. Groups like the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space and the Institute for Cooperation in Space are at the centre of this movement. The activities and arguments of these groups, to which we are by and large sympathetic, demonstrate the ways in which our understanding and use of outer space are contested in pivotal times. Floating Pic Only in a world of the Alt can space be successfully developed. Peter Dickens Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge, 10 Monthly Review, “The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?” 11/1/10, Volume 62, Issue 06 [Marcus]

Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we should take a longer, harder, and more critical look at what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of space humanization, and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to the deeper, underlying processes which are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which are generating this demand for expansion into outer space. Although the humanization of the cosmos is clearly a new and exotic development, the social relationships and mechanisms underlying space-humanization are very familiar. A2: Alt Does Nothing Our alternative doesn’t mean inaction—it means careful thinking about how and why we act.

Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 653-654

Light argues that the antagonism towards anthropocentricism is so pervasive in environmental ethics it has become dogma. His complaint is that theories about the environment based on non-anthropocentric values (or non- Utilitarian values) are mere ‘intramural’ word-play. They do not ground the actions of most environmental activists. Instead, using the example of the Amazon Rainforest, Light notes that the environmentalist Chico Mendes was motivated to protect the Rainforest because it was the livelihood of his entire community. Light looks to American Pragmatism to sort out the theory versus practice debate. The many different theoretical approaches in environmental ethics, whether they be anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric, all seem to end up in a practical ‘convergence’ which tends towards protecting or creating ecological habitats. Bryan Norton developed this theory of ‘convergence’, arguing that in the end, if taken in their ‘pure’ form, both anthropocentric and ecocentric environmentalisms would eventually turn up the same policy results (Norton, 2005: 508). So, even the animal rights theorists such as Singer will prudently advise the humane hunting of exogenous rabbits, for example, for the larger good of the Australian Outback. While I sympathise with the desire for urgent and practical action, I do not think careful thinking requires postponing all environmental care. It is naive and even dangerous to relegate the myriad debates about Utilitarian versus intrinsic value, or anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric, or individualist versus community aims, and even monad versus pluralist beliefs, to a ‘ convergent’ interest in environmental protection. Norton believes that nonanthropocentric ethics will turn out to converge with anthropocentric ethics because in the end both are politically contested by humans (Norton, 2005: 508). While I think his point that political dualism may collapse towards the same ends, the notion of a mature political convergence, or dialectical synthesis is not necessarily going to be the case. Clearly not all political views are interested in environmental protection. Some interest groups claim to be environmentally motivated, such as big business including ‘sustainability’ in their mission statements and advertising without any genuine attempt to alter capitalist practices in a far-reaching way. Conflicting strategies produce divergent politics that play out in the practices of activists, politicians, citizens and schoolteachers. Theoretical premises affect the organising paradigms, selfunderstanding and the actions of societies, communities, and individuals. In a global world, anthropocentric capitalism dominates the ‘view’ that the media, advertising, education, work ethic, consumerism and so forth take on the environment. As Heidegger cogently argues, everything in the modern world is enframed and understood as potential resource. So thinking our way out of these conundrums is vitally important, in both the short and long term, for realigning the relationship that humanity as a whole has with the earth in all its aspects. Diverging ideas about how the relationship between humanity and the earth can be best cared for is a constructive way forward (and impossible to annihilate) because different contexts generate different relationships. Thought is like biodiversity; difference shelters contingent possibilities for unexpected problems, monoculture fails when confronted with new disease, or new weather conditions, new predators, new constraints, and new conditions of possibility.

*Representations Reps 1 st

Mindset shift is a prerequisite to learning about climate change. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus]

While the political controversies invested in global climate science have raged back and forth, over whether human-induced climate change is real and threatening or not, a different perspective on this question of the social construction of scientific knowledge and meaning has been largely ignored. This is whether IPCC as the key scientific authority here may have understated the risks, and may also have in effect obscured the crucial commonsense question of error costs. The furore generated on the eve of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) Climate Research Unit, a leading global scientific IPCC contributor, was effectively a tale of ‘social construction means error and falsehood’ – either incompetence or dishonesty, or both, as social explanations of that falsehood. However, a less superficial examination when science is facing such hideous natural and social system complexities indicates (a) that whatever human failings prevailed in the specific language and perhaps practice of the UEA scientists, the forms of validation of IPCC scientific conclusions and judgements are far more substantial, multi-dimensional and robust than can be seriously damaged by one such allegedly illegitimate specific instance; and (b) the dominant institutional social construction of the scientific knowledge and its meaning for policy can be seen to have been operating in the opposite sense to that of falsification and denial – in other words, to have constructed a representation of future climate change and its human causes which presents it as reassuringly gradual: in terms of rate and scale, within the bounds of policy manageability using existing cultural habits and institutional instruments; and requiring no more radical re-thinking of, for example, the powerful normatively-weighted cultural narratives of capitalist consumer modernity and its self-affirming (and other-excluding) particular and parochial imaginaries of ‘progress’, rationality, policy and knowledge. Thus, for example, when Simon Shackley and I were researching climate modelling in the 1990s, we conducted ethnographic research at the UK Hadley Centre for Climate Modelling and Prediction, and in addition interviewed leading IPCC scientists, there and internationally.

**NEG A2: Perm Turn: the permutation is more of the same, not pragmatic learning. Harnessing renewables into the dominant system appropriates environmental and atmospheric commons for imperialism.

A final problem specific to an extra-large green energy project is the distinctive environmental alienation it can produce. The march of commodification is spurred by the green titans as they seek to enter historic commons areas such as mountain passes, pasture lands, coastal areas, and the oceans, in order to collect renewable energy. Although it is not possible to formally privatize the wind or solar radiation (for example), the extensive technological lattices created to harvest renewable energy on a grand scale functionally preempt commons management of these resources.10 Previous efforts to harness the kinetic energy of flowing waters should have taught the designers of the mega-green energy program and their environmental allies that environmental and social effects will be massive and will preempt commons-based, society-nature relations. Instead of learning this lesson, the technophilic awe that inspired earlier energy obesity now emboldens efforts to tame the winds, waters, and sunlight— the final frontiers of he society-nature commons—all to serve the revised modern ideal of endless, but low- to no- carbon emitting, economic growth. Their permutation creates theoretical monoculture. It cultivates attention only to the immediate and ignores the importance of theoretical frameworks for approaching environmental issues.

*A2s A2: Eco-Prag Turn: eco-pragmatism is anti-practical—it only caters to the american middle class. voting negative is the only way to ensure that critical questions about global equity and imperialism get priority.

Light is intrigued by the need to ‘convince people’ to pursue environmental ends. Unfortunately this is the only element of interest in his essay, ‘The case for a practical pluralism’, which is a superficial skate over what is for him familiar terrain. He does little to explain the various forms of pluralism apparently advocated by the authors he surveys. He blithely avoids any engagement with ‘deconstructive poststructuralist differance’ (Light, 2002b: 15) by naming and shaming it as moral relativism. Relativism entails abandoning the view that there are some moral stances better than others that could guide our ethical claims about how we should treat nature. If we admit relativism then, one could argue, we would give up on attempts to form a moral response to the cultural justifications put forward to defend the abuse or destruction of other animals, species or ecosystems. Relativism entails that ethics is relative to different cultural traditions. (Light, 2002b: 7) Light maintains a North American faith in the ‘normative force’ of American cultural superiority. This criticism of relativism neglects the emphasis on critique, where evaluation based on mutual respect for differing viewpoints can still come to an ethical decision – but quite possibly not a consensus. ‘Pragmatic’ resignation to Western prejudice avoids the hard ‘development’ questions about uneven global wealth distribution, skewed global economic and environmental policy. Avoiding theory results in ignoring the absorption of old liberal and more recent environmental terms, such as ‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘sustainability’ into the neoliberal lexicon and its resultant policy initiatives that are being implemented in nations around the planet. Ignoring theory is to ignore what is actually going on. A2: Convincing People Key We have an oppoturnity for a sea-change that voting affirmative quashes. Voting negative builds a positive radical vision instead of their conservative pessimism.

Misgivings aside, it is effectively the educational project that engages Light. I agree that ‘convincing people’ is central to the protection of the environment. But it is important not to underestimate the potential for human society to change. Light’s pluralism is based on a despondent view that the American status quo is insurmountable: ‘when possible we should work within the traditional moral psychologies and ethical theories that most people already have and direct them, where we can, at the same environmental ends’ (Light, 2002b: 15). This social conservatism is combined with a very modern sense of urgency – an urgency to avert impending doom immediately. ‘Given the environmental crisis we face, how could we afford the sorts of delays seemingly implicit in such talk of ‘‘cultural experiments’’?’ (Light, 2002a: 7). This feeling of crisis dominated popular psychology of environmental books in the late 1980s. Books like James Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia Hypothesis, Schumacher’s (1973) Small is Beautiful and many others gave voice to the widespread misgivings of the Cold War’s nuclear proliferation, together with growing but largely disbelieved body of evidence about global warming. At the same time, the realisation that fossil fuels might become exhausted, Ehrlich’s exponential population estimates, and mounting numbers of species extinctions and habitat destruction contributes to the discourse of crisis. By now the majority of people in every nation have become somewhat familiar with the discourse of environmental crisis. I think Light underestimates the significance of this familiarity. The general acceptance that there is a massive, global, environmental problem is providing the conditions for a ‘ sea change’ in the ways humanity interacts with the earth. If we are merely pragmatic and remain with the traditional common sense ideas, then we will not be ‘urgently’ helping environmental protection and enhancement to take place. We will be inhibiting the potential for a dramatic and irreversible change, a recognition of the anomalies not described by the modern, Idealist view of nature, an epistemological shift, for which the world is increasingly ready. A2: Predictions Good Climate should be viewed in the realm of objective truths, not predictive claims. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus]

Firstly, the simple validation of scientific model-simulated outcome against empirical reality which is possible for a 15- day wait is no longer available. More indirect forms of attempted validation are required, and independent testing of assumptions built into the model becomes more tenuous since the constructs required to test the model predictions may involve the same assumptions as those being ‘tested’. One way round this circularity is to test the model’s ability to ‘retro-predict’ empirically-known past climate states from present climatology, a validation on which state-of theart GCMs do creditably well in practice. In addition, cross-corroboration between independently generated forms of climate science, for example with palaeoclimatology which does not rely upon the general circulation models (GCMs), does provide substantial separate forms of validation of (but also some differences from) what are called the climate sensitivity GCM model-experiments.5 Secondly, for long-term climate futures as distinct from numerical weather forecasting, ocean dynamics become important and have to be modelled into climate dynamics. This is because most of the energy in the global biosphere is contained in the denser ocean mass, as compared with the less dense but more rapidly circulating atmosphere. Over a period of days, as for numerical weather forecasting, the oceans move so relatively slowly that they can be treated as immobile and thus ignored. However, for the GCMs and equivalent models used for simulating long-term future climate states, ocean dynamics and their interactions with the global atmosphere become crucial, so coupled ocean-atmosphere dynamic models have to be built and run, and validated. One of the key problems encountered with such coupled models was the instability or unexplained ‘drift’ of the unperturbed simulated coupled ocean-atmosphere system, so that obtaining a stable value for average sea-surface temperature with unperturbed existing atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, to use as baseline against which the effects of perturbation through increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations can be measured, was impossible. With improved understanding, models and data, this problem has been significantly reduced since 2001. A third fundamental difference between short-term weather forecasting and long-term climate prediction concerns the trade-offs between spatial resolution and time-horizon. Numerical weather forecasting, having remained within the same short time-horizon, has been able to drive for greater and greater resolution (smaller spatial grid-spacing) of its models and prediction outputs, as both data and computing power have improved. Given its extremely ambitious implicit starting aim of encompassing and simulating any global processes – biological, physical, chemical, human – relevant to climate futures, over long timescales, long-term climate prediction has instead changed little in spatial resolution (for example, stable climate-simulative atmospheric grids of about 200– 300km) but has (necessarily) added ocean dynamics into its complex systems. It also remains relatively empty of biological and chemical feedbacks, some of which are known to be important to climate6 – and most of which, being positive feedbacks, would indicate that actual climate futures may be worse than those advanced by IPCC based largely (though not solely) on GCMs. It was largely for reasons such as these, deriving from our closequarters examination of long-term climate modelling, that Simon Shackley and I (Wynne and Shackley, 1994) suggested that this scientific knowledge should be received less as predictive truth-machine and more as realitybased social and policy heuristic. By this we meant that the prevailing scientific knowledge should be understood epistemically as an organizing basis for a broader coalition of motivations, meanings and social, ethical and political concerns than just the instrumental one of ‘making the climate safe, and manageable’, which is the natural scientific framing. A2: Imperial Mindsets Inevitable Imperialist mindsets are not inevitable Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 189 [Marcus]

The science of outer space is now being deployed to humanize the cosmos in ways that not only reproduce the social order, but extend this order indefinitely into the cosmos. But an explanatory critique hopefully also shows that there is nothing inevitable about this process. Social and political alliances can be, and are being, forged against this particular form of humanization. New types of common sense can be constructed. Contemporary forms of subjectivity which are alienated from the cosmos and dreaming about being part of it are not inevitable. They are the product of recent times and can certainly undergo change in a more socially progressive direction. A2: Climate Change Real Even top scientists don’t know the answers to questions about climate risks. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus] One could see Houghton’s assertions as just such a commitment. However, what is interesting in this is how the formulation of the ‘relevant’ scientific knowledge about human-induced climate risks is then shaped in important (and indeed contested) ways by a leading scientist’s own, non-scientific assumptions about ‘proper’ policy needs and capacities, in co-productionist fashion (Jasanoff, 2004). Even the palaeoclimatology record of abrupt climate changes, natural or not, could be excluded on this basis and, broadly speaking, only ‘digestible’ and (thought-to-be) ‘manageable’ future climate changes are recognized as scientifically accredited.

Warming is a threat constructed by corporate owners for monetary gain. Brian Wynne, Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at the University of Lancaster, 10 Theory, Culture, and Society, “Strange Weather, Again : Climate Science as Political Art, 2010, Volume 27 P. 289-306 [Marcus]

When we look at the vast range of different human activities on the planet which intersect with climate, many of which cannot be – and some of which do not need to be – represented in climate simulation models, Heidegger’s question seems entirely to the point. For many people, apocalypse has indeed already arrived, and conditions which have been imposed on them by past and present – often environmentally damaging – global economic and political arrangements force them as a matter of sheer survival to do things which may well exacerbate climate and other environmental processes, some of these also global. Meanwhile the powerful rich-world policy focus, reinforced by commercial, industrial and media priorities, is restricted to greenhouse gas emissions and their control, while the culturaleconomic habituated practices and global economic relations which ‘enforce’ those doubly destructive global conditions are backgrounded or even erased. Link – Imperialism

Pro-space advocates project ideologies of Western dominance into space. The elitist narcissistic perspective of the affirmative negates ethical relations with others. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 615-618

Some preliminary indications of an extreme form of this kind of self come from an ethnographic study of citizens actively promoting and advocating the extension of society into space (Ormrod, 2006). There is a ‘pro-space’ social movement, largely operating out of the USA, numbering approximately 100–150,000 members. These activists (many from the quasi-technical new middle class identified at the heart of the culture of narcissism [Sennett, 1974]) are paid- up members of one or more pro-space organizations, who meet to discuss the science and technology necessary to explore, develop and colonize the universe, as well as lobbying politicians in favour of both public and private programs aimed at accomplishing this. We now draw upon our research into the movement, not as conclusive proof of a general condition of narcissism, but merely as illustrations of how some individuals relate to the universe.1 There are strong indications that these pro-space activists are amongst those most affected by late modern narcissism. Early on in life, these activists come to project infantile unconscious phantasies (those relating to omnipotence and fusion with the infant’s ‘universe’) into conscious fantasies2 about exploring and developing space, which increasingly seem a possibility and which now achieve legitimacy largely through the ideology of the libertarian right. Those who have grown up in the ‘post-Sputnik’ era and were exposed at an early date to science fiction are particularly likely to engage in fantasies or daydreams about travelling in space, owning it, occupying it, consuming it and bringing it under personal control. Advocates talk about fantasies of bouncing up and down on the moon or playing golf on it, of mining asteroids or setting up their own colonies. These fantasies serve to protect the unconscious phantasy that they are still in the stage of infantile narcissism. Of course not all of those people growing up in late modern societies come to fantasize about space at such an early age like this, and are less single minded in their attempts to control and consume the universe, but we argue that this is nonetheless the way in which some dominant sectors of Western society relate to the universe. It is not only pro-space activists, but many well-to-do businesspeople and celebrities who are lining up to take advantage of new commercial opportunities to explore space as tourists. The promise of power over the whole universe is therefore the latest stage in the escalation of the narcissistic personality. A new kind of ‘universal man’ is in the making. Space travel and possible occupation of other planets further inflates people’s sense of omnipotence. Fromm (1976) discusses how in Western societies people experience the world (or indeed the universe) through the ‘having’ mode, whereby individuals cannot simply appreciate the things around them, but must own and consume them. For the narcissistic pro-space activist, this sentiment means that they feel a desperate need to bring the distant objects of outer space under their control: Some people will look up at the full moon and they’ll think about the beauty of it and the romance and history and whatever. I’ll think of some of those too but the primary thing on my mind is gee I wonder what it looks like up there in that particular area, gee I’d love to see that myself. I don’t want to look at it up there, I want to walk on it. (25-year-old engineering graduate interviewed at ProSpace March Storm 2004) Omnipotent daydreaming of this kind is also closely linked to the idea of regaining a sense of wholeness and integration once experienced with the mother (or ‘monad’) in the stage of primary narcissism, counterposed to a society that is fragmenting and alienating. Experiencing weightlessness and seeing the Earth from space are other common fantasies. Both represent power, the ability to ‘break the bonds of gravity’, consuming the image of the Earth (Ingold, 1993; Szersynski and Urry, 2006) or ‘possessing’ it through gazing at it (Berger, 1972). They also represent a return to unity. Weightlessness represents the freedom from restraint experienced in pre-oedipal childhood, and perhaps even a return to the womb (Bainbridge, 1976: 255). Seeing the Earth from space is an experience in which the observer witnesses a world without borders. This experience has been dubbed ‘the overview effect’ based on the reported life-changing experiences of astronauts (see White, 1987). Humans’ sense of power in the universe means our experience of the cosmos and our selves is fundamentally changing: It really presents a different perspective on your life when you can think that you can actually throw yourself into another activity and transform it, and when we have a day when we look out in the sky and we see lights on the moon, something like that or you think that I know a friend who’s on the other side of the Sun right now. You know, it just changes the nature of looking at the sky too. (46-year-old space scientist interviewed at ProSpace March Storm 2004) In the future, this form of subjectivity may well characterize more and more of Western society. A widespread cosmic narcissism of this kind might appear to have an almost spiritual nature, but the cosmic spirituality we are witnessing here is not about becoming immortal in the purity of the heavens. Rather, it is spirituality taking the form of self-worship; further aggrandizing the atomized, self-seeking, 21st-century individual (see Heelas, 1996). Indeed, the pro-space activists we interviewed are usually opposed to those who would keep outer space uncontaminated, a couple suggesting we need to confront the pre-Copernican idea of a corrupt Earth and ideal ‘Heaven’. For these cosmic narcissists, the universe is very much experienced as an object; something to be conquered, controlled and consumed as a reflection of the powers of the self. This vision is no different to the Baconian assumptions about the relationship between man and nature on Earth. This kind of thinking has its roots in Anaxagoras’ theory of a material and infinite universe, and was extended by theorists from Copernicus, through Kepler and Galileo to Newton. The idea that the universe orients around the self was quashed by Copernicus as he showed the Earth was not at the centre of the universe and that therefore neither were we (Freud, 1973: 326). However, science has offered us the promise that we can still understand and control it. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, trumpets Kepler’s role in developing the omniscient fantasy of science (it was Kepler who first calculated the elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun): Kepler did not describe a model of the universe that was merely appealing – he was investigating a universe whose causal relationships could be understood in terms of a nature knowable to man. In so doing, Kepler catapulted the status of humanity in the universe. Though no longer residing at the centre of the cosmos, humanity, Kepler showed, could comprehend it. Therefore […] not only was the universe within man’s intellectual reach, it was, in principle, within physical reach as well. (Zubrin with Wagner, 1996: 24) Thus Zubrin begins to lay out his plan to colonize Mars. The Universe as Object for the Exercise of Power While pro-space activists and others are daydreaming about fantastical and yet seemingly benign things to do in outer space, socially and militarily dominant institutions are actively rationalizing, humanizing and commodifying outer space for real, material, ends. The cosmos is being used as a way of extending economic empires on

*Links Earth and monitoring those individuals who are excluded from this mission. On a day-to-day level, communications satellites are being used to promote predominantly ‘Western’ cultures and ways of life. They also enable the vast capital flows so crucial to the global capitalist economy. Since the 1950s, outer space has been envisaged as ‘the new high ground’ for the worldwide exercise of military power. The ‘weaponization of space’ has been proceeding rapidly as part of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ (Langley, 2004). The American military, heavily lobbied by corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, is now making new ‘Star Wars’ systems. These have been under development for over 30 years but are now being adapted to root out and destroy ‘terrorists’, if necessary with the aid of ‘smart’ nuclear weapons. American government spending on the Missile Defence Program jumped by 22 percent in 2004, reaching the huge sum of $8.3 billion (Langley, 2004). The unreal and almost certainly unobtainable objective is to create a new kind of ‘pure war’ in which terrorists are surgically pinpointed and killed while local civilians remain uninjured (Virilio, 1998; Virilio and Lotringer, 1998). Meanwhile, and paralleling the weaponization of space, surveillance satellites have also been much enhanced. Although originally developed for military purposes, they are now increasingly deployed to monitor nonmilitary populations, creating a global, orbital panopticon. Workers in British warehouses are even being tagged and monitored by satellite to ensure maximum productivity (Hencke, 2005). For those elites in positions of power over the universe, as for pro-space activists, the universe is experienced as an object to be placed in the service of human wants and desires. However, for those with less privileged access to the heavens, the universe is far from being such an object – their relationship with it is more fearful and alienated than ever before.

The aff reinforces space as a “subject” that needs to be dominated Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 615-618 [Marcus]

There are two mechanisms through which the majority of the world’s population are kept in a state of reverence towards the cosmos. Both go towards constructing it as a subject, a powerful agent in its own right, and one dominating Earthly affairs. This is a scenario with a long history stretching back to early Greece and into Parsons’ ‘cosmological societies’ (Parsons, 1966; see also Assmann, 2002), and witnessed in E.B. Tylor’s animistic tribal religions. The first is a sense of fear related to the kinds of military and surveillance applications mentioned above. The second is a feeling of inadequacy in the face of contemporary cosmological theory. There is a direct parallel between Bentham’s panopticon and this new orbital or ‘planetary’ panopticon (Whitaker, 2000). Both involve a watchstation up on high that watches deviant populations, and in neither case do the monitored have any knowledge of whether or not they are being watched. Foucault (1977) argued that this results in the watched regulating their own behaviour and conforming to the required social order. There are signs that the orbital panopticon is having a similar effect on people’s subjectivity and relationship with the universe. The ‘eye in the sky’ reinforces the idea that the heavens are distinct from Earthly affairs as far as monitored populations are concerned; a remystification of, and alienation from, the universe, which reduces people to passive conformists. Those able to utilize satellite technology have symbolically replaced God in the Heavens: the American military, for example, gaining a ‘God’s eye view’ over the planet (Weiner, 2004). Public knowledge that wars from space can be conducted instantaneously, without the possibility of forewarning or resistance, furthers this fear that parallels pre-modern anxiety in the face of angry and punishing gods in the sky. US plans to construct ‘rods from God’, tungsten rods suspended from a satellite that can be dropped on targets on Earth with the impact of a nuclear explosion, play on this kind of sentiment.

The aff creates an imperial system meant to dominate space. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 615-618 [Marcus]

This article has explored some of the past relationships between humanity’s internal nature and the universe. We have also suggested some of the more troubling ways in which these relationships are developing in contemporary society. One development is the trend toward a cosmic narcissism in the ways in which elites and the affluent middle classes relate to the universe as an object for maintaining imperial dominance and sustaining personal fantasies about omnipotence respectively. However, narcissistic relationships with external nature are intrinsically unsatisfying. Objectifying nature and the cosmos does not actually empower the self, but rather enslaves it. Even the wealthy and the technocratic new middle class who relate to the universe in this way become subjected to the objects of their own narcissistic desire.

Outer space development reinforces the imperial US mindset. Peter DICKENS Lecturer Sociology @ Cambridge AND James ORMROD, Lecturer in sociology at University of Brighton, 07 “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe” Sociology 41 (4) p. 77-78 [Marcus]

Taken together, our two theoretical starting points lead us to argue first that the humanization of outer space is a product of economic and social crisis and second that such humanization is a means of reasserting hegemonic authority. Capitalism expands into outer space as a result of its inherent contradictions, capital being drawn from the primary circuit and invested in more speculative projects that extend the system in time and space through the secondary and tertiary circuits. Property rights are central to this process as capitalism attempts a series of outer spatial fixes. That this should happen is generally considered common sense. Outer spatial fixes are part of a hegemonic solution to the world’s problems. Rather than try to figure alternative social relationships, the extension of the current socio-economic system into space is supported uncritically. Space technology itself plays a central role in disseminating a hegemonic Western culture in which a possessive individualism is promoted; something that prevents those alternative social relationships from forming. There is, however, always hope for resistance, and for the moment it is to organic intellectuals within the Global Network and similar organizations that we must look for critical new visions of our relationship with the universe.

Representations must precede policy discussion Neta Crawford ,PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, 2002 p. 19-21

Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are a rguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); a nd the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before specific arguments t hat could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occ ur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over th e nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in r eligion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. The y are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are abo ut how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible i nterpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptan ce for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling represen tations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to san ctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are str uggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration , analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentatio n of the real.’ Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are e mphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Re presentation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific o rganization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be co nsidered legitimate, framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presuppo ses the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationsh ips, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representa tions, “it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whe ther frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of represe ntation- how frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over represe ntation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument. Aff Reps Fail – Lack of Trust

Overuse of climate fear representations will lead to a lack of trust – the public will question the system O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html] Every day, most individuals are faced with a barrage of multimedia messages about all types of issues and are often sophisticated in their interpretation of those; receivers do not blindly trust every piece of information they receive. Individuals are increasingly aware of the power of the media and often skeptical or questioning of communications approaches (Hastings et al., 2004). In an age of marketing and spin, issues of trust have come to the fore in the arena of climate change communication, and thus the repeated use of fear approaches may be damaging for the source organization. Trust in a communication source is a prerequisite for effective risk communication (Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Organizations and individuals have to work hard to maintain public trust: Poortinga and Pidgeon (2003) found U.K. individuals more likely to trust environmental organizations and scientists working for environmental groups or universities to tell the truth about climate change, but participants were somewhat ambivalent about trusting local authorities, the national government, or the European Union. However, even NGOs (which have relied heavily on fear appeals in the past for communicating climate change) should not assume they have carte blanche for launching fear appeals (Ballinger, cited in BBC News Online, 2000). An ill-considered fear approach may damage (or further damage) the reputation of the communicating organization and the ability of that organization to attempt further engagement approaches. This is key when considering the need for sustained and consistent messages to communicate climate risks (Futerra, 2005). Cultural conservatism hinders ethical human interactions. Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657 [Marcus]

Cultural conservatism makes contemporary Pragmatism inadequate for attempting the kinds of cultural transformation that are necessary to adequately achieve a more ethical and genuinely sustainable interaction between human societies and the ecosystem. The heyday of recent Environmental Pragmatism seems to have been in 1996 yet it is important to examine it because like many other American ideologies, it dominates much environmental theoretical debate at present. In 2001 Mintz advocates contemporary Pragmatism as a guide for the law because, pragmatic thought has much to add to contemporary discourse regarding environmental laws and policies. Pragmatism’s stress on concrete facts, flexibility, experimentation, and practical, workable solutions to realworld problems, combined with its clear preference for democratic consensus-building and social justice, appears to provide a sensible intellectual framework for innovation and reform in environmental decision-making at all levels. (Mintz, 2001)

Fearful framing of climate change creates powerlessness and inaction. O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html] The continued use of fear messages can lead to one of two psychological functions. The first is to control the external danger, the second to control the internal fear (Moser & Dilling, 2004). If the external danger—in this case, the impacts of climate change—cannot be controlled (or is not perceived to be controllable), then individuals will attempt to control the internal fear. These internal fear controls, such as issue denial and apathy, can represent barriers to meaningful engagement. Lorenzoni et al. (2007) divide the barriers to engagement with climate change, into two types, individuallevel and social-level barriers. Of particular consequence for this discussion of fear appeals are the barriers acting individually to inhibit engagement with climate change. These include uncertainty and skepticism, an externalization of responsibility and blame or stating other issues as more immediate and pressing, and fatalism or a “drop in the ocean” feeling. All are maladaptations; that is, they lead to an individual controlling his or her internal fear by no longer interacting with the climate change issue, but the action does not decrease the individual’s exposure to climate risk. Repeated exposure to fearful representations of climate change may indeed even provoke a counterintuitive reaction, for example, causing the message to become laughable. Ereaut and Segnit (2006, pp. 14-15) recognized this in their report investigating public climate discourses in the United Kingdom. They named one of the apparent public discourses as “settlerdom.” The settlerdom discourse rejects and mocks an alarmist discourse. Those invoking the settlerdom discourse do so by invoking a feeling of common sense in their audience, not through expert discourse or debate. The authors find the discourse is constructed in terms of the “sane majority” against the “doom mongers” or the “global warming brigade.” Also mentioned by Ereaut and Segnit is a small but potentially important discourse defined as “British comic nihilism,” or “bugger it and open another bottle.” The discourse was characterized by a whimsical and unserious nature and a happy refusal to engage in the debate. Both of these discourses may represent unintended consequences of repeated exposure to communications approaches depending on threat and fear. Aff Reps Fail – Lack of Action Although fear reps may work in other social relationships, it fails to accomplish public action in the environment O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html]

There is much literature examining the impact of fear appeals, especially from the health- and marketing-related disciplines. However, there is little that concentrates on fear appeals in relation to environmental issues. This is an important distinction. Macro-environmental issues such as climate change are “wicked issues”—defined by Lorenzoni, Jones, and Turnpenny (2006) as “virtually intractable matters characterized by uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (p. 65). Unlike marketing or health-based approaches that connect on a personal, tangible level, climate change represents a greater communications challenge as it is temporally and spatially remote from the individual. Evidence on the effectiveness of fear appeals in the literature appears inconclusive, with relationships observed from a simple linear association between fear and effectiveness to more involved models and theories such as the curvilinear model, parallel processing model, extended parallel processing model, expectancy value model, and protection motivation theory (for a full review, see Hastings, Stead, & Webb, 2004; Ruiter et al., 2001; Witte, 1992). The quantity and somewhat contradictory nature of these theoretical models demonstrate the disparity in research findings investigating the effectiveness of fear appeals. Hastings et al. (2004) question the value of these models based on laboratory experiments where much of the data are obtained using psychology or marketing students as participants when related to a real world, sophisticated, and cluttered communications environment. Only a few studies have evaluated fear-based communications in real-world interventions. These few studies have shown that fear-arousing approaches usually have both weaker effects and unintended reactions when used in a realworld setting (Hastings et al., 2004). A consistent message that does arise from the fear appeals literature appears to be that both an individual’s perceived sense of action effectiveness and the individual’s perceived sense of self-efficacy are imperative for a fear appeal to be successful. This theme is discussed further in the results and discussion sections of this article. Aff Reps Fail – Not Sustainable Environmental fear cannot be sustained in the long term O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html]

The laboratory studies reviewed by Hastings et al. (2004) often tell nothing of the long-tern effectiveness of fear campaigns or about exposure to repeated fearful messages. There is also little literature examining longitudinal attitudes toward climate change and decarbonization-oriented behavior change. For example, Lowe et al. (2006) report that fear-inducing appeals are unlikely to have long-lasting impacts. Lowe et al. carried out a pre/post-test survey before and after watching the clinmte change disaster movie The DlI}'Afâ‚|' Tomomzw (Emmerich, 2(X)4), with survey themes followed up a month later with focus groups. They found that although the majority of participants (67%) in the post-test agreed that "everybody has to do something" about climate change, this sense of urgency had substantially diminished by the time the focus groups took place. The "wicked" nature of climate change (Lorenzoni et al., 2006) makes it, for many people, an impersonal and distant issue. This factor makes climate-related fear appeals very difficult to sustain in the long term. For example, research indicates that individuals are likely to feel that dangerous climate change will not affect them for some considerable years, if at all (Lowe et al., 2006; O'Neill, 2008). This presents certain communication difficulties where engagement is concrned because of the perception that climate change is an issue for the far future. Research shows that individuals have difficulty visualizing future periods; Tom, Hemrick, and Conrad (2006), for example, found that individuals had difficulty imagining beyond I5 to 20 years into the future. Drottz-Sjiiberg (2006) also found that individuals find it difficult to imagine the future, with an imagination limit generally of around 50 years. Similarly, Lorenzoni et al. (2007) found individuals considered scenarios describing the 2050s to be so far into the future as to be almost completely hypothetical. Many individuals also exhibit unrealistic optimism (Weinstein, 1980) in their ability to avoid climate risks compared to others, with Leiserowitz (2007), Lowe et al. (2006), and O’Neill (2008) finding that individuals generally considered climate change “less serious” and “less dangerous” to themselves than to other people. An additional difficulty posed by climate change is that it is not possible, in a deterministic sense, to attribute particular events to anthropogenic climatic change. Attributing increasing anthropogenic GHG emissions to particular weather events is unusual and limited to risk statements of statistical likelihood (e.g., see the case of the 2003 European summer heat wave event in Stott, Stone, & Allen, 2004). Therefore, the constant use of fear appeals may act to decrease issue salience and increase individual feelings of invulnerability, if the narratives of disaster and destruction do not ring true or are not “proven” within an imaginable period. Humans will inevitably become desensitized to environmental fear representations O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html]

A further consequence of long-term reliance on fear appeals, as stated by Hastings et al. (2004), is that it is possible that a law of diminishing returns may exist. If this exists, fear approaches need to be made more intense as time goes by because of repeated exposure to threatening information in order to produce the same impact on individuals. Linville and Fischer’s (1991) “finite pool of worry” effect is also worthy of note here. This theory states that increased concern for one risk may decrease concern for other risks, as if individuals only have a certain capacity for worry. So it could be posited that communicating particularly fearful messages about certain climatic phenomena (e.g., dramatically rising sea levels because of ice sheet melt) might desensitize individuals to be concerned about other potentially more salient concerns (e.g., the consideration of local impacts such as city heat waves), impacts that they could act on constructively.

**Aff No Link – SPS Dickens and Ormrod would support SPS. Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

Not yet, anyway. Dickens and Ormrod are not opposed in principle to all space exploration and development. Their concluding section suggests a lukewarm endorsement of space humanisation (the use of satellites for human purposes) provided that it “could emphasise collective responsibilities on Earth and try to ensure that any gains made through space exploration were spread throughout to improve the lot of the dispossessed on Earth” (p.190). They then toy, though inconclusively, with the idea of “spreading a socialist or communist society throughout the whole of nearby outer space”. Alt Fails – Cap better Capitalism is better than any alternative – prevents war outbreaks. Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

To that end, the repeated use of terms like “crisis” and “class hegemony” set up an implication that all this capitalist imperialism must be completely swept away and replaced with a socialist utopia. This is finally made explicit, towards the end of the book, when reporting with approval the views of authors who believe that “a great mass of people subordinated to global capital and global power” constitute “a powerful counter-force resisting and eventually overcoming capitalist imperialism” (p.181-182). This is a bold step to take, because the historically aware reader (or even a sociologist in the dictionary sense of the term) will immediately object, firstly, that capitalism has proved itself by far the most efficient economic system yet seen, having liberated the populations of the developed world from hunger, disease and ignorance, and secondly, that violent revolutions have in the past installed totalitarian dictatorships. Mention of Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg as examples to follow (p.182) hardly instils confidence. These obvious objections are not addressed in the book. Chapter 3 discusses military involvement in space. It concludes: “War is no longer an occasional disturbance to an otherwise peaceful society. Rather, it has been made a permanent feature of the social order.” (p.100) This is an astonishing conclusion. Wars have continued throughout history. One of the most remarkable features about global society since 1945 is that direct military conflicts between great powers have stopped. This is due, not to any outbreak of sanity, but to several material factors acting in concert: the increasing destructiveness of modern weapons, particularly nuclear weapons, the increasing vulnerability of society to disruption, increasing global trade links, the rise of the mass media and public opinion, and increasing risk-aversion, which combine to reduce the attractiveness of war as a means of achieving policy goals. Obviously wars have continued, but since 1945 they have been marginalised in the poorer regions of the world. These regions are progressively shrinking as previously poor countries industrialise and integrate into the global economy. This remarkable situation is not mentioned. Apparently, the link between capitalist development and increasing public security is not in line with the polemical purpose of this book, and therefore cannot be discussed. Like much present-day climate science, the facts are being spun to suit the desired policy outcome.

Capitalist actions have positive end results Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

But our authors are silent about the fact that the goods and technologies made widely available by capitalist development have vastly improved people’s lives in the developed world. We have been liberated from hunger, pestilence and the more arduous forms of manual labour, and have access to antibiotics, education, electrical appliances, domestic plumbing and travel opportunities which were unimaginable or the preserve of a tiny elite only a few generations ago. Perhaps Dickens and Ormrod are not as conversant with the “reality principle” as they claim to be?

*AT: Alternative Alt Fails – No Utopia Policy decisions are better than their utopian alternatives. Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

Similarly, the charge that space advocates are indulging in “escapism” is rich indeed, coming from authors who insinuate on every page that all the desperately difficult problems of world development, wealth distribution and security will magically disappear after the installation of “alternative forms of consciousness” and “popular control”. In reality, dreams of escaping into a socially just society which does not suffer from these problems are far more fantastic than the plans of would-be space colonists, which deal with the world as it is, not as an unattainable utopia. The word “fix” is another favourite in Cosmic Society. A “fix” is a botch-up job: a mere “sticking-plaster”, a temporary, unstable solution to some social or economic problem (p.49-78, 113). The impression created is that such a solution is of no value because it merely creates new problems which then have to be solved in their turn – an example given is that the use of satellites has given rise to dangerous space junk (p.66-67, 153-154). Here again, the use of a misleading word is being offered as a substitute for argument, because the argument by itself would be too weak for the authors’ polemical purpose, and would attract tiresome counter-arguments. Obviously, one would not necessarily expect technological solutions to social or economic problems to be permanent, if they were introduced during a period of rapid technological change such as the one we are living in now. A long-established spacefaring civilisation would clearly routinely clear up its space junk or avoid creating any in the first place, but in order for us to progress to that stage we first have to see the problem and experience sufficient motivation to work out a solution appropriate to our current institutional and technological level. Later on we may find that our solution, that “temporary fix”, breaks down, and will feel the need to move on to the next higher level of solution. But because our authors have no interest in the likely end-point of this iteration, they therefore have no patience with the painstaking, step by step, evolutionary means which are the only ones through which it can be approached, and so those means must be denigrated as a “fix”. Alt Fails – Can’t Shift

Dickens and Ormrod ignore that other states will compete over resources. Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

Dickens and Ormrod have such a strong focus on selecting only those arguments which fit the Marxist-Leninist worldview that they have completely failed to notice the power struggle over the future of manned spaceflight which is so prominent at present. While big aerospace companies lobby for ambitious government exploration programmes which provide jobs at public expense but generate no profits, it is maverick entrepreneurs, some extremely rich but most not wealthy at all, who are pushing for the development of marketable services such as space tourism, and eventually space settlement.

It’s impossible to abandon large-scale environmental impact discourse – only way to bring in global constituency.

Fredrick BUTTEL Rural Sociology @ Wisconsin ’97 in Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring eds. David Goodman and Michael Watts p. 359-360

There are many critics of environmental movements (and many socialscientists) who exaggerate the flexibility these movements have to developideologies and strategies as they see fit)) More concretely, we need to recog-nise that it is something other than mere short- sightedness that causesdominant environmental ideology to stress global environmental issues andto de-emphasise issues such as toxics and agriculture and food. We need torecognise that mainstream environmentalism faces some very formidablemobilisation constraints. The continual resort to global ideologies is due, atleast in part, to the exigencies of how to appeal to large numbers ofmembers, supporters, the media, and public officials, with modest resources.Global formulations based on science that forecast calamity and catastrophe,and that justify international agreements to override politics and business asusual, are an attractive formula in many respects for enhancing mobilisation.This overall formula will likely not be superseded entirely. But for the long-term good of the movement, as well as for the sake of agro-foodsustainability, the movement needs to give more emphasis to concerns thatare well within the direct experiences and realities of significant numbers ofpeople. While not neglecting the important global dimension of environmentalissues, modern environmentalism needs to find some new formulas whichhave some foundation in the immediate problems and concerns of themajority of citizens. Agro-food issues alone cannot provide this reorienta-tion, but food and land issues could be of some considerable importance. Forexample, toxics (an issue increasingly relegated to local, grassroots groupsbecause it is not fashionably 'global') could be a focal point of mobilisationfor which agriculture, food, and land could have important linkages(through the connection with pesticides, preservatives, groundwater contamination, etc.). Most importantly, toxics or related issues are ones that help tojustify the enhancement of state environmental regulatory capacity which isnecessary (though, of course, not sufficient) for addressing agro-food!susrain-ability concerns, Extending food concerns in ways that are relevant to theinterests of the growing tanks of the poor and hungry will also be pivotal. Kritik of scientific framing ensures environmental catastrophe—we need scientific measures to determine most important environmental problems. Agribusiness, big farms, and others will exploit their alternative.

Ted BENTON Sociology @ Essex ‘5 in After Postmodernism eds. Jose Lopez and Garry Potter p. 137-138

Second, the post-Kuhnian relativist aproaches to the sociology of science, in challenging the proclaimed finality and cultural authority of big science, saw themselves as on the side of 'the underdog', pressing for democratic accountability on the part of the scientific establishment - even for a thoroughgoing democratisation of knowledge itself. Sociologists of science have tended to see 'technoscience' as indissolubly tied to political and industrial power and domin ation. To call into question its epistemological authority has been to undermine a key source of legitimation for established power. However, the politics of the critique of science become more complex and ambivalent in the face of the new ecological issues. While many Greens see the interests associated with technoscience as largely to blame for many ecological hazards, they also rely on scientific detection, measurement and theoretical explanations in making out the Green case. The construction of incinerators for waste disposal adjacent to working-class estates, the noise and fumes emitted by heavy road-traffic, the loss of treasured landscapes and so on, are forms of ecological degradation which are readily perceptible, and may enter directly into the discourses of popular movements. However, many other, often more sinister and catastrophic, forms of ecological transformation may only be detected by scientific instrumentation. Nuclear and other forms of radiation, low concentrations of toxins in food and drinking water, antibiotic - resistant pathogens, shifts in the chemical composi tion of the upper atmosphere and so on fall into this category. In other cases, the scale of transformation is what is ecologically significant and, here again, scientific modelling and measurement displace the evidence provided by the senses of necessarily localised human agents. Global climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion are among the transformations which fall into this category. Finally, rational discourse about policy options depends on (but is certainly not restricted to) best - available scientific thinking about the causal mechanisms involved(the 'greenhouse' effect, CO2 exchanges at the surface of the oceans, pholovvnthesis, mechanisms of cloud-formation and many others in the case of dinsate 'hanged. To expose the normatively and culturally 'constructed' character of those scientific research programmes which have so far indcnt-ifled, measured and explained the hazardous dynamics of ecological change is to run a serious political risk. The big industrial complexes, such as the biotech, pharmaceutical, agribusiness , petrochemical, construction and road transport sectors, together with their state sponsors, have a lifeline thrown to them. That the knowledge - base which exposes the ecological 'externalities' of their activities is culturally biased and epistemologically questionable is music to their ears. Why put the brakes on wealth creation and progress on the basis of such flimsy and questionable evidence (see R. Rowell, 1996, esp. chap. 5)? These misuses of the work of constructionist sociology of environmental science are often seen as problematic from the standpoint of its practitioners (see, for example, r} a special issue of Social Studies of Science, 1996). Of course, it would be quite posble to accept these implications of he approach, in the face of unwanied political consequences: perhaps the weakening or even abandoning of environmental regulation and technteal safety standards could be accepted as an appropriate response to the sociologied dchunking of en ironmental science. lot esnnglv, however, few constructionists would be happy with such an outconic. the question is, can they coherently or consistently unhappy about it? Winne i9% and Burninghaio md. Coopei (1999) oiler sophisticated defences of their own variants of construe onism from this sort of 'realist' criticism. They claim, variously, that the 'taking of sides' in environmental conflicts is not necessarily the most productive role for social scientists to take, and that, notwithstanding rite realist critique. it often possible to combine constructionism with cotmitiimmred cn'-ironmen iahsns. These contributions deserve much fuller responses than I have space for here hot, as I shall argue below. dicnt are other reasons for scepticism about the more radical versions of constructionism. Alt Fails – Takes Too Long Even if we should be critical of market mechanisms—we must use them to generate a transition to renewables. only the plan can achieve short term success—purely negative kritik isn’t an option and value shifts take too long.

Michael ZIMMERMAN Philosophy @ Tulane ‘2K “A Strategic Direction for 21st Century Environmentalists: Free Market Environmentalism” Strategies 13 (1) p. 92-94 [acronymns clarified]

Today, after the deserved collapse of the Soviet empire, the free market system is so influential that even established left-wing authors find themselves exploring "market socialism."" In a remarkable turnabout, the noted leftist economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis contend that egalitarian goals can best be achieved not by the traditional approach of redistributing wealth, but instead by "asset-based policies of redistribution," which "seek to implement a sustainable assignment of private property rights that make economic actors both effective decision-makers and the owners of the results of their actions."" Likewise, more and more environmentalists are taking FME [free market environmentalism] seriously, not as a panacea, but as a helpful remedy for dealing with a host of important and complex environmental issues. A decade ago, in Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, left-wing political scientist Robert C. Paehlke supported elements of free market ("neoconservative") approaches to environmentalism: We [progressive environmentalists] should not be afraid to look for elements within neoconservatism that might be both compatible with environmental progress and not incompatible with distributive progress. Increased military spending and a too-cautious approach to environmental regulation should be rejected whatever the political risks. But what of a gradual return to fiscal responsibility accompanied by an enthusiasm about creative entrepreneurial initiatives? The latter applies well to recycling, renewable energy, and energy conservation Thus environmentalists need not automatically be hostile to such sociotechnological developments, and enthusiasm about the future is also part of the neoconservative appeal." Paehlke is correct that "enthusiasm about the future" is one reason that people are attracted to proponents of free market Environmentalists would be wise to embrace measured optimism, at least, even while continuing to point out potential obstacles and dangers lying ahead. A crucial ingredient in neoclassical optimism is that the demise of communism and rise of market economies will bring greater prosperity to people around the world, and that such prosperity brings with it demand for a better environmental amenities." Environmental conditions are generally best in the world's wealthiest regions, including western Europe, the United States, and Canada. Environmental conditions tend to decline as wealth declines, partly because poor people inevitably concern themselves more with the immediate need for making a living, rather than with the desire for clean air, water, and a healthy natural environment. Moreover, many studies have shown that as a nation's per capita income rises, population growth slows. Greater economic and educational opportunities, then, will not only create greater demand for a healthier environment, but will also slow human population growth. Hence, every effort must be made to increase prosperity by making use of free market economic practices, while simultaneously using scientific knowledge and political action to shape those practices in ways that promote the most environmentally sustainable outcomes. Radical environmentalists who insist that eco-catastrophe can be averted only by a complete transformation of industrial civilization, or by overcoming humanity-nature dualism, or by rediscovering the feminine and/or sacred dimension of nature, or by transforming consciousness, offer a counsel of despair. Such dramatic changes--laudable though they may be, at least in some cases--cannot be achieved in half a century, although efforts to promote such changes can and should continue for the long run. For the short term, however, environmentalists who are progressive and who want to make a real difference must both criticize and utilize existing institutions and practices for the sake of achieving environmental amelioration. The situation is too serious, and the opportunities too great, to justify what Adorno called the "great refusal" to participate in capitalism. Environmentalists recognize that they must everywhere strengthen democratic institutions in order to monitor, evaluate, and regulate the activities of corporations. Simultaneously, however, environmentalists must learn to use the tools of market-based economics to produce environmentally and socially preferable outcomes. A2: Floating Pic No floating pic – alt doesn’t solve the aff Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

Dickens and Ormrod’s fundamental thesis might be stated in a nutshell as: first solve all social problems on Earth, only then, after justice and equality have been achieved for all, turn to the exploration and development of outer space. But they have no idea of when or even whether their social objectives can be achieved. While even if they are achieved, our authors have no guarantee that the resulting society, without the impetus to growth generated by capitalism, will still be capable of expansion into space. Their equation of change with “crisis” strongly suggests that it will not.

*AT: Representations Prior A2: Reps 1 st Representations and framework aren’t a prior issue—arguments for better policy should draw from different frameworks when appropriate.

Andrew LIGHT Environmental Philosophy @ NYU ‘5 “What is Pragmatic Philosophy” http://faculty.washington.edu/alight/papers/Light.What%20Pragmatic.pdf. P. 349-351

I have no easy answer to this question of how practical or “do-able” reform proposals made by philosophers should be. As suggested above, it is a question that has obvious important implications for the application of philosophical principles to environmental policy. My intuition though is that the pragmatist ought to have a long-term end in view while at the same time she must have at the ready viable alternatives which assume current political or economic systems and structures whenever possible. This is not to say that the pragmatic philosopher gives up on the tasks of defending alternatives to current structures, and the pursuit of those alternatives in democratic debates on the reallocation of resources. It only means that our position may require, for consistency sake to our pragmatic intentions at least, that we not rely exclusively on such changes in articulating our preferred ends for better public policies. In this context, there are at least two senses in which one could understand the meaning of “pragmatic” philosophy as discussed so far. (1) Philosophy that has practical intent, anchored to practical problems, and (2) Philosophy which aids in the development of policy solutions that can actually achieve support and consensus. While Young’s approach certainly encompasses (1) the question is whether she also does (2). My own pragmatist approach assumes that there is a connection between (1) and (2) (indeed, that (1) implies (2)). Assuming a successful argument that (1) and (2) are related in this way (for some this may take some argument, for others it will be obvious) then a question remains concerning how to go about achieving (2). Let me make just one suggestion for how the pragmatist could go about reconciling her desire to change systems with the need to make achievable policy recommendations. As is suggested by my approach, my view is that if a pragmatic philosophy in the end is in the service of an argument to create better polices, then in our democratic society it must be prepared to argue its case before the public, and perhaps sometimes only before policy makers. As Said puts it, the public intellectual not only wants to express her beliefs but also wants to persuade others—meaning the public at large—of her views (1994, p. 12). This raises the critical issue of how such appeals to the public are to be made. It raises the issue of how important persuasion is to the creation of pragmatic arguments. All philosophy is in some sense about persuasion, though to differentiate ourselves from rhetoricians (if we are interested in making such distinctions, which I still am) we must restrict ourselves to persuasion through some form of argument given more or less agreed upon (and revisable) standards for what counts as a good argument. But the pragmatic philosopher is not simply concerned with persuading other philosophers. She is also interested in persuading the public either directly (in hopes that they will in turn influence policy makers) or indirectly, by appealling to policy makers who in turn help to shape public opinion. The work of a public philosophy is not solely for intramural philosophical discussion; it is aimed at larger forums. But as I suggested before, such a task requires some attention to the question of what motivates either the public, policy makers, or both to act. Our bar is set higher than traditional philosophical standards of validity and abstractly conceived soundness. For if we are to direct our philosophy at policies in a context other than a hypothetical philosophical framework, we must also make arguments which will motivate our audiences to act. Since we are dealing in ethical and political matters, the question for pragmatic philosophers like Young and myself is how much we must attend to the issue of moral motivation in forming our pragmatic arguments. If we agree that the issue of moral motivation is always crucial for a pragmatic philosophy then at least two issues arise. First, as I suggested before, we must be prepared to embrace a theoretical or conceptual pluralism which allows us to pick and choose from a range of conceptual frameworks in making our arguments without committing to the theoretical monism which may be assumed in some versions of these frameworks. The reason is that we need to be able to make arguments that will appeal to the conceptual frameworks of our audiences while recognizing that these frameworks can change from audience to audience. So, if we think a utilitarian argument will be useful for talking to economists in decision making positions, then we should be allowed to engage such a framework without completely committing ourselves to utilitarianism.

The way the media represents climate in the status quo is crucial for change. Julie Doyle , 6-07, Science as Culture “Picturing the Clima(c)tic: Greenpeace and the Representational Politics of Climate Change Communication” [http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_4800/doyle_2007.pdf]

The framing of climate change science is crucial to bringing attention to, and legitimating, the issue. The legitimacy of environmental issues and perceived risks can be linked to ‘questions about the ease with which some issues link into powerful, historically established, symbolic imagery’ (Hansen, 1991, p. 451). In a similar vein, Alison Anderson points out that certain issues gain public legitimacy through their capacity to signify symbolically: ‘(t)hese issues tend to have particular “carrying capacities”; they become icons or symbols for a wide range of concerns that people can easily identify with’ (Anderson, 1997, pp. 5–6). I would maintain that, in the case of climate change predictions, the lack of visible evidence of this problem made it difficult for the issue to be linked to an established set of symbolic imagery. This lack of visual evidence, related to the temporal aspect of climate change as a risk that develops over time, also contributed to the lack of international politics addressing the issue, as well as low public perception. Our Reps Good – environment The public is shaped by climate representations - they are key to reducing emissions O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 09, Researches Social dimensions of Climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change research. “Fear won’t do it: Promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations” [http://scx.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/01/07/1075547008329201.full.pdf+html] The U.K. public is increasingly recognizing climate change as a reality. For example, a survey by DEFRA (2007a) found 99% of people surveyed recognized the term climate change. DEFRA claims that within the United Kingdom, being “green” is now seen as a social norm rather than an alternative way of life. Thus far, strategies by the government for reducing individuals’ emissions have steered away from regulation and instead focused on encouraging voluntary uptake of decarbonization behaviors and practices. A myriad of U.K. agents beside the government also urge individuals to cut their carbon dioxide emissions and to change their behavior in relation to climate change (e.g., DEFRA, 2007b; Marks and Spencer PLC, 2007; Rising Tide, 2007). Yet recognition of the language of climate and even recognizing climate change as a risk issue arguably represent a fairly superficial engagement. Risk research indicates that the public rank climate change as lower priority than other risk issues such as genetically modified foods or nuclear power (e.g., Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Without prompting, over a third of the U.K. public state crime, health, economic concerns, and education as issues the government should deal with, with just 1% stating the same about climate change or global warming (DEFRA, 2007a). Other risk issues such as these are more immediate and pressing on a daily basis, with climate change being a much less tangible issue of concern. Lorenzoni et al. (2007) illustrate this and a host of other barriers that are preventing people from engaging with climate change in ways that go beyond the tokenistic. The most significant channel of information that the general public receives about climate change is the mass media, which arguably has a great influence on people’s perceptions of the issue (Carvalho & Burgess, 2005; Trumbo & Shanahan, 2000). Contemporary forms of mass communication are saturated with images and stories that have the potential to influence people’s perceptions. These help to communicate and simplify information, making messages memorable, condensing complex information, communicating concepts instantly, and providing a basis for personal thoughts and social interactions that contribute to people’s memories, awareness, and opinions about particular issues (e.g., Farr, 1993; Graber, 1990). Examining different approaches to stimulating public engagement can help to inform how future climate change communications can be designed to encourage voluntary domestic decarbonization (in travel, leisure, and household activities) and the policy acceptance needed if society is to substantially reduce its GHG emissions.

Dickens & Ormrod Indict

Dickens and Ormrod’s space view is inherently flawed Stephen Ashworth, fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, 10 Astronist, “1. A Review of Dickens and Ormrod, Cosmic Society”, 12/18/10, http://www.astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html [Marcus]

Dickens and Ormrod (and their numerous sociological predecessors listed on p.73) are saying in effect: you disagree with us, therefore you must be suffering from a “personality disorder”! This charge inevitably links them with the abuses of the Soviet system (see for example Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent, Basic Books, 1977). Consider, firstly, the lop-sidedness of the argument. Space advocates are suffering from infantile fantasies, a disorder characterised by Freud as “adult narcissism”? Well and good: then what about people who suffer infantile fantasies of developing “alternative forms of consciousness” (p.77)? What about people who talk earnestly about the “crises of capitalism”, with approving references to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and to authors who talk glibly of “overthrowing the social order” (p.182), more than a decade after the final collapse of the Soviet bloc? Who are so intolerant of dissent and so desperate to be right that their opponents have to be denigrated as psychiatric nutcases? How exactly did Freud characterise their psychological syndrome? “Adult Marxissism”? The implication is silently insinuated that by producing such armchair psychoanalysis our sociologists – themselves claiming to be oracles of pure adult reason untainted by infantile fantasies – have wisely trumped anything a space activist could possibly say on the matter. After all, the sociologists clearly know what will make other people happy – what will “empower” and what “enslaves” the self (p.76) – better than those people know themselves! But these totalitarian implications cannot be stated, for to do so would at once expose them as evident nonsense. In reality, any space activist wishing to be equally offensive could easily conjure up ways in which the revolutionary desire to overthrow the existing social order and institute a utopian state of social justice can be traced back to an angry sense of injustice nurtured from infancy. But such a Freudian fable would be just as equally irrelevant.

*Other Climate Discourse Good Using catastrophic climate discourse key to spur change in agriculture. Fredrick BUTTEL Rural Sociology @ Wisconsin ’93 in Food for the Future ed. Patricia Allen p. 28

Environmental groups had been aware for several years about the growingspeculation within some quarters of the atmospheric science community thatthe world was in the early stage of a potentially profound global warmingtrend-one widely discussed concomitant of which would be rising temperatures and instability of rainfall in the temperate agricultural breadbaskets.The drought of the summer of 1988 prompted environmental groups to "go public" about global warming and greenhouse gases apparently despite some misgivings (such as being aware of the fact that the need for strict conservation would be difficult to sell in the consumerist 1980s and that reduction of greenhouse gases might virtually compel greater reliance on nuclear power). Nonetheless, there ensued a global warming bandwagon effect, which up to this time has been a major boon to environmental mobilization in general, and to agricultural sustainability efforts in particular. A global warming- and global environmental-change-centered environmentalist program has several advantages from the standpoint of environmental activism. The global warming and global environmental change message can be very influential with the public and with policymakers, since it can be buttressed with "dread claims," e.g., about the massive biospheric disruption, coastal inundation, destruction of the agricultural productivity of the temperate agricultural breadbaskets, etc., that will occur if we fail to act now to reduce pollution of the atmosphere. Global warming and the associated concerns (e.g., rising skin cancer rates due to depletion of stratospheric ozone, biospheric disruption due to loss of tropical biodiversity) can serve as a comprehensive, overarching justification for a very lengthy agenda of environmental goals. The need to reduce industrial pollution, achieve greater energy conservation, conserve tropical rainforests, utilize more environmentally sound agricultural production practices, and so on can all be justified through one overarching imperative-to stem global warmingrather than having to justify each on its own particular merits. This "globalpackaging" is thus attractive, since it obviates the need for environmentaliststo struggle to achieve multiple goals in many places simultaneously. Persuasive claims about global warming and global change can also become a strongrationale to override politics-as-usual at the international and national (andoften the subnational) levels. The extraordinary threat of global warmingand global biospheric disruption can he said to require extraordinary measures. This can increase the likelihood of convincing many countries andgroups that they must set aside their immediate, narrow political and economic interests if the needed measures-such as international conventionsand protocols on CEC emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, forest policy,and biodiversity conservation-are to be achieved. Climate Change Real It’s important to distinguish between relative credibility and expertise of sources in climate debates. Even if the category of “expert” is contingent—peer review and relatively balanced presentation are reasonable lines to draw.

Myanna LAHSEN Former Post-Doctoral Fellow with US Nat’l Center for Atmospheric Research and Kennedy School of Gov’t (Harvard), Rsearch Scientist Center for Science and Technology Policy Research @ Colorado (Boulder) ‘5 Technocracy, Democracy, and U.S. Climate Politics: The Need for Demarcations Science, Technology, & Human Values Vol. 30 No. 1, Winter 2005 p. 160-161

Theories of reflexive modernization are assets in the important project to reduce technocracy and elitism by rendering decision making more democratic and robust. This study of U.S. climate politics highlights obstacles to the kind of democratic transformation of decision making posited by Ulrich Beck and others, however; it reveals complexities and inequities of power that need to be treated as starting point challenges in the U.S. context. These obstacles suggest the need for a more level political playing field in terms of access to power and influence. They also suggest the good sense in privileging knowledge on the basis of whether it is based on peer-reviewed science , whether it is balanced , and whether it is promoted by self-interested political and financial elites. However, the above criteria are not easily applied to knowledge claims advanced by means of public relations campaigns designed to deceive rather than engage and fully educate the public. The threat such campaigns pose to democracy and equality is profound, not the least because they feed off of and reinforce cultural dispositions in U.S. society to venerate science without fully understanding both its strengths and its limits. In our media age, symbols of science, whether white lab coats or non-peer-reviewed articles formatted to appear as peer-reviewed ones, are easily mobilized to “conjure science” and disseminate one-sided and even dishonest understandings of scientific reality. Even without such in(ter)ventions, scientists, lay persons, and governmental officials alike pick and choose among the heterogeneity of scientific evidence and voices on the climate issue in ways that suit their belief structures. They often fail to discriminate between better and worse sources of scientific information on the basis of the (not infallible) strengths of peer review, upholding instead their preferred interpretation as “the truth.” To be effective, reflexive modernization institutions need to find ways to discriminate between better and worse sources of scientific claims related to environmental reality and to be especially critical of “authoritative” black box opinions disseminated by vested financial and political interests and by the politicians who serve these elite interests. Sensitivity to the limits of science and to the elusiveness of an objective standpoint is imperative in contemporary science- and technology-dependent societies. Such sensitivity reduces the play of manipulative objectivist claims in U.S. climate politics and in science-based controversies as a whole.Western scientific knowledge has important limitations (Long Martello 2001; Scott 1998; Visvanathan 1997), and a struggle should continue toward inclusion of other types of knowledge. Purported scientific claims, as well as claims to expertise, need to be critically examined, not passively accepted; the contingent, negotiated character of both need to be recognized, leaving room for critical discussion. Such discussion will necessarily have to involve deliberation on better and worse sources of knowledge, despite the nontranscendent, faulty, and contingent nature of such demarcations. As shown by countless social studies of science, science is intimately and inextricably interlinked with politics, and no transcendent definitions exist by which to distinguish true science from “pseudoscience.” Even peerreviewed science produced by means of the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, and falsification is liable to error. But it is nevertheless a particularly rigorous basis for the production of knowledge, and it can and should enjoy greater consideration relative to claims that not only are produced by less rigorous methods but also are paid by, and designed to benefit, financial and political elites over the general good. As responsible A2: Root Cause Capitalism isn’t the root cause of environmental destruction. empirical studies prove ecological modernising capitalism can create structural change and net declines in resource use.

Arthur MOL Environmental Sociology @ Wageningen ‘2K “The Environmental Movement in an Era of Ecological Modernisation” Geoforum 31 p. EBSCO

In the 1980s increasing numbers of environmental sociologists, and other social scientists who had environmental deterioration and reform as their central object of study, started to observe that some significant changes were taking place in both the environmental discourse and the social practices and institutions that actually dealt with environmental problems. Out of the sometimes vigorous debates concerning the interpretation of these transformations, their structural or incidental character, their geographical reach and their normative valuation, the theory of ecological modernisation emerged. For example, some empirical studies showed that from the mid to late 1980s onwards, in countries such as Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the USA, Sweden and Denmark, a discontinuity could be identified in the tendency of enhanced economic growth to be paralleled by increased environmental disruption – a process referred to as the decoupling or delinking of material flows from economic flows. In a number of cases (countries and/or specific industrial sectors and/or specific environmental issues) it was actually claimed that environmental reform resulted in an absolute decline of emissions and use of natural resources, regardless of growth in financial or material terms (cf. recently for the Netherlands RIVM, 1998). However, although these – sometimes controversial – empirical studies lie behind the idea of ecological modernisation, they do not form the core. Central stage in ecological modernisation is given to the associated social practices and institutional transformations, which are often believed to be at the foundations of these physical changes. In the debate on the changing character of the social practices and institutions since the 1980s, adherents to the theory of ecological modernisation positioned themselves by claiming that these transformations in institutions and social practices could not be explained away as mere window-dressing or rhetoric, but should indeed be seen as structural transformations in industrial society’s institutional order, as far as these concerned the preservation of its sustenance base. Perm Perm Solves. Critical environmental alternatives should complement problem-solution policy. We need a way to translate theoretical principles into realistic options. Without the bridge of the plan, their alternative remains hopelessly disconnected from the people it most needs to reach. Paul WAPNER Director of the Global Environmental Politics Program in the School of International Service at American University ‘8 “The Importance of Critical Environmental Studies in the New Environmentalism” Global Environmental Politics 8.1 p. MUSE 6-13

We are all familiar with the litany of environmental woes. Scientists tell us, for example, that we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction since life [End Page 9] formed on the planet close to a billion years ago. If things don't change, we will drive one-third to one-half of all species to extinction over the next 50 years.4 Despite this, there are no policy proposals being advanced at the national or international levels that come even close to addressing the magnitude of biodiversity loss.5 Likewise, we know that the build-up of greenhouse gases is radically changing the climate, with catastrophic dangers beginning to express themselves and greater ones waiting in the wings. The international community has embarked on significant efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions but no policies are being debated that come even close to promising climate stabilization—including commitments to reduce the amount of carbon emissions per unit of GDP, as advanced by the US government, and to reduce GHG emissions globally by 5 percent below 1990 levels, as specified by the Kyoto Protocol. Scientists tell us that, to really make a difference, we need reductions on the order of 70–80 percent below 1990 levels.6 Such disconnects between high-level policy discussions and the state of the environment are legion. Whether one looks at data on ocean fisheries, fresh water scarcity or any other major environmental dilemma, the news is certainly bad as our most aggressive policies fall short of the minimum required. What is our role as scholars in the face of such a predicament? Many of us can and should focus on problem-solving theory. We need to figure out, for example, the mechanisms of cap and trade, the tightening of rules against trafficking in endangered species and the ratcheting up of regulations surrounding issues such as water distribution. We should, in other words, keep our noses to the grindstone and work out incremental routes forward. This is important not simply because we desperately need policy-level insight and want our work to be taken seriously but also because it speaks to those who are tone-deaf to more radical orientations. Most of the public in the developed world apparently doesn't like to reflect on the deep structures of environmental affairs and certainly doesn't like thought that recommends dramatically changing our lifestyles. Nonetheless, given the straits that we are in, a different appreciation for relevance and radical thought is due—especially one that takes seriously the normative bedrock of our discipline. Critical theory self-consciously eschews value-neutrality and, in doing so, is able to ask critical questions about the direction of current policies and orientations. If there ever were a need for critical environmental theory, it is now—when a thaw in political stubbornness is seemingly upon us and the stakes of avoiding dramatic action are so grave. The challenge is to fashion a more strategic and meaningful type of critical theory. We need to find ways of speaking that re-shift the boundary between reformist and radical ideas or, put differently, render radical insights in a language that makes clear what they really are, namely, the most realistic orientations these days. [End Page 10] Realism in International Relations has always enjoyed a step-up from other schools of thought insofar as it proclaims itself immune from starry-eyed utopianism. By claiming to be realistic rather than idealistic, it has enjoyed a permanent seat at the table (indeed, it usually sits at the head). By analogy, problem- solving theory in Environmental Studies has likewise won legitimacy and appears particularly attractive as a new environmental day is, arguably, beginning to dawn. It has claimed itself to be the most reasonable and policy-relevant. But, we must ask ourselves, how realistic is problem-solving theory when the numbers of people currently suffering from environmental degradation—either as mortal victims or environmental refugees—are rising and the gathering evidence that global-scale environmental conditions are being tested as never before is becoming increasingly obvious. We must ask ourselves how realistic problem-solving theory is when most of our actions to date pursue only thin elements of environmental protection with little attention to the wider, deeper and longer-term dimensions. In this context, it becomes clear that our notions of realism must shift. And, the obligation to commence such a shift sits squarely on the shoulders of Environmental Studies scholars. That is, communicating the realistic relevance of environmental critical theory is our disciplinary responsibility. For too long, environmental critical theory has prided itself on its arcane language. As theoreticians, we have scaled the heights of abstraction as we have been enamored with the intricacies of sophisticated theory-building and philosophical reflection. In so doing, we have often adopted a discourse of high theory and somehow felt obligated to speak in tongues, as it were. Part of this is simply the difficulty of addressing complex issues in ordinary language. But another part has to do with feeling the scholarly obligation to pay our dues to various thinkers, philosophical orientations and so forth. Indeed, some of it comes down to the impulse to sound unqualifiedly scholarly—as if saying something important demands an intellectual artifice that only the best and brightest can understand. Such practice does little to shift the boundary between problem-solving and critical theory, as it renders critical theory incommunicative to all but the narrowest of audiences. In some ways, the key insights of environmentalism are now in place. We recognize the basic dynamic of trying to live ecologically responsible lives. We know, for example, that Homo sapiens cannot populate the earth indefinitely; we understand that our insatiable appetite for resources cannot be given full reign; we know that the earth has a limit to how much waste it can absorb and neutralize. We also understand that our economic, social and political systems are ill-fitted to respect this knowledge and thus, as social thinkers, we must research and prescribe ways of altering the contemporary world order. While we, as environmental scholars, take these truths to be essentially self-evident, it is clear that many do not. As default critical theorists, we thus need to make our job one of meaningful communicators. We need to find metaphors, [End Page 11] analogies, poetic expressions and a host of other discursive techniques for communicating the very real and present dangers of environmental degradation. We need to do this especially in these challenging and shadowy times. Resuscitating and refining critical Environmental Studies is not simply a matter of cleaning up our language. It is also about rendering a meaningful relationship between transformational, structural analysis and reformist, policy prescription. Yes, a realistic environmental agenda must understand itself as one step removed from the day-to-day incrementalism of problem-solving theory. It must retain its ability to step back from contemporary events and analyze the structures of power at work. It must, in other words, preserve its critical edge. Nonetheless, it also must take some responsibility for fashioning a bridge to contemporary policy initiatives. It must analyze how to embed practical, contemporary policy proposals (associated with, for example, a cap-and-trade system) into transformative, political scenarios. Contemporary policies, while inadequate themselves to engage the magnitude of environmental challenges, can nevertheless be guided in a range of various directions. Critical Environmental Studies can play a "critical" role by interpreting such policies in ways that render them consonant with longer-range transformative practices or at least explain how such policies can be reformulated to address the root causes of environmental harm. This entails radicalizing incrementalism— specifying the relationship between superstructural policy reforms and structural political transformation.

Perm solves – separation of concepts and practice create new waves of conservatism. Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657 [Marcus]

This last tendency to separate practise from theory pervades contemporary Pragmatism. Separating practise from concepts is extremely detrimental and serves to maintain a very conservative position amongst Pragmatic environmentalists. For example, in the prologue of their book Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz (1996) make extraordinary claims against theorising about the environment – that ‘The ideas within environmental ethics are, apparently, inert – like Hume’s (1958) Treatise, they fall deadborn form the press’. They ‘argue that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environ mental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives’ (Light & Katz, 1996: 7). The aim of contemporary Environmental Pragmatists is to stifle some elements of environmental debate, especially poststructuralist positions, in favour of a consensus of ideas which are presumed to guide policy from above.

***Colonization The affirmative’s vision of space exploration and colonization is bound with the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Christian millennium McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 286-289, August 2004 // Lack] So both Tsiolkovsky and O'Neill conceived of "times of tribulation" which necessitated the desire for weightless rapture. While Tsiolkovsky saw the coming destruction of the Earth through long-term scientific processes such as the cooling of the sun, or through the loss of the Earth's atmosphere, O'Neill conceived of much more imminent threats to the future of life on Earth as part of his pre-rapture tribulation. O'Neill wanted humanity off the planet – now. The rapture of O’Neill’s space colonizers has at its root one primary necessity: the escape from an overburdened planet. The picture of the Earth which O’Neill painted was one in the throes of chaos, a planet deep into a Tribulation reminiscent of Darby’s millennial scheme. In The High Frontier, O’Neill used one particular 1970s doomsday book as evidence of the unsustainability of continuing life on only Earth. Richard Heilbroner’s book An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974) was one of the most learned and pessimistic treatises to emerge from the era of ecological dismay. In his High Frontier chapter “The Human Prospect on Earth,” O’Neill supported Heilbroner’s major assertions that human population would continue to increase, the engine of industrialization would not stop humming and not stop increasing its rate of resource devouring, no new set of ideas would arise which would ameliorate this exponential increase in industrialization, autocratic leaders would proliferate in response to the anxiety of an increasingly claustrophobic and environmentally threatened populace and nuclear terrorism would be seen by poor nations as the only means by which to force the redistribution of wealth from the First to the Third World. Heilbroner’s book ended on a pessimistic note. He saw no hope for humanity under these conditions and saw no solution. O’Neill saw himself as supplying a necessary corrective to the dead-endism of Heilbroner’s analysis. His space colonies would make an end run around Heilbroner’s “Tribulation,” in effecting a last-minute Rapture of just enough souls to make such a conclusion unnecessary. Without space colonies, O’Neill saw little hope. In O’Neill’s opinion, Earth was a doomed, condemned planet for mankind. Earth was a trap. For O’Neill, two choices faced contemporary mankind: a global totalitarian regime formed for the express purpose of redistributing wealth and ironing out the inequities of an increasingly overpopulated and underfed world -- or massive space colonization. The physicist closed off all other choices because, in his opinion as in Heilbroner’s, the world was out of new ideas, human nature was immutable, people would continue to be greedy and selfish, and time was running out. The outline of O’Neill’s scenario bears a striking similarity to the post-WWII conception of the endtimes advanced by millennialists such as Hal Lindsey. Like Lindsey, O’Neill’s scheme had an inevitable Tribulation and a hopeful Rapture. The Tribulation is inevitable because given the trajectory of world events there can be no other outcome but chaos and stifling control. Lindsey, too, in The Late Great Planet Earth, asked his readers to keep their eyes open for the “signs of the times." “Look for the present sociological problems such as crime, riots, lack of employment, poverty, illiteracy, mental illness, illegitimacy, etc., to increase as the population explosion begins to multiply geometrically in the late ‘70s," he wrote. "Look for the beginning of the widest spread famines in the history of the world.” O’Neill predicted similar crises to instigate the ascension of the elect. According to Lindsey’s interpretation of Darbyite dispensationalism such crises will cause the world’s people to look for a Messiah. “Look for a growing desire around the world for a man who can govern the entire world,” he wrote. “Look for some limited use of modern nuclear weapons somewhere in the world that will so terrify people of the horrors of war that when the Antichrist comes they will immediately respond to his ingenious proposal for bringing world peace and security from war.” Both Lindsey and O’Neill saw the imminent appearance of a totalitarian and messianic figure who will play upon the fears of the world’s people in an effort to unify them. By casting space colonies as the final technological answer to the implicit apocalypticism of environmental disaster literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the explicit apocalypticism of population disaster books such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, O'Neill united two forms of freedom in his colonial rhetoric. Not only would exodus to space colonies counter the effects of the environmental apocalypse he admitted would occur without his scheme, he also touted them, as countless NASA officials had done before him, as the extension of the American terrestrial frontier off of the planet altogether. This rhetorical union allowed O'Neill to reveal his space colonization plan as both hopeful and patriotic, and it was this union which accounted for the brief passion for his idea within a significant portion of the 1970s American public. It also accounts for the willingness of NASA and the public to quickly jump on board the unbuilt rockets to the space colonies without finding out whether long-term human survival in an extraterrestrial environment was even remotely feasible. This thinking ends the human spirit and our value to life. Vote Negative to reject the rash action of the Plan which seeks to end the human condition as we know it. Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf, p. 3-4 // Lack] At the very beginning of the Space Age, Hannah Arendt had already remarked (in the "Prologue" to The Human Condition) on the extraordinary ease with which belief in our species' universal nature and cosmic destiny was coming to be accepted as standard fare. "Such feelings"--as she wrote, Arendt had in mind the funeral obelisk of the early Russian space pioneer Tsiolkovsky, on which appears the epitaph "Mankind will not remain bound to the Earth forever"--"have been commonplace for some time." (The Human Condition was published in 1958.) These feelings are part of a historical and philosophical context that she explains definitively in a passage I must quote in full. [These feelings] show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and adjust to scientific discoveries and technical development, but that, on the contrary, they have outsped them by decades. Here, as in other respects, science has realized and affirmed what men anticipated in dreams that were neither wild nor idle. What is new is only that one of this country's most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly nonrespectable literature of science-fiction. . . .3 The banality of the statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the Earth as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison of men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning- away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the father of men in heaven, end

**Neg *1nc with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the mother of all living creatures under the sky? (Human Condition 1-2) Whatever our ambitions, " The Earth," Arendt hastens to remind us, remains "the very quintessence of the human condition," and "earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they move and breathe without effort and without artifice" (Human Condition 2). Now humankind seems increasingly committed to its abandonment, intrigued by the challenge of perfecting a world ruled solely by human artifice. The desire to explore and eventually to colonize space represents, as Arendt insists we remember, the most farreaching means yet imagined for "cutting the last tie through which man belongs among the children of nature." Yet "there is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange," Arendt adds, "just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on Earth" (Human Condition 2, 3). As a rational alternative to such a rash and momentous course of action, Arendt suggested more than thirty years ago that we stop for a moment in order "to think what we are doing" (Human Condition 5). With some notable exceptions, however, few have heeded her recommendation. ("Considering the quarter-century duration of the Space Age, its primacy in national and international affairs, and the way it has affected our lives," David Ehrenfeld has noted, writing in 1986, "surprisingly little intelligent thought has been devoted to it" ["Lesson" 367].) When we have stopped at all--as we did, for example, after the Challenger disaster--it has only been to think in a calculative, not a meditative, way:4 for purposes of technological reassessment or political reappraisal, not in pursuit of wisdom, not to seek a philosophical or psychohistorical understanding of our extraterrestrial urges prior to their enactment. A series of interrelated essays or reflections on various facets of the "science fiction" culture (Sofia 45) of the Space Age, this book seeks to track the path of what Arendt has called "the twofold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (Human Condition 6)--a flight that in our time, and especially in America, would seem to have attained escape velocity. A2: Perm Permutation is impossible – the Christian vision of apocalypse which justifies the Affirmative’s vision of space is mutually exclusive with environmental attempts to save Earth. McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 222-224, August 2004 // Lack] Lindsey's book represented nothing new in its promise of imminent global destruction. Using material recycled from his lecture notes at Dallas Theological Seminary, Lindsey merely modernized Biblical-inspired fatalism for a post-Apollo, countercultural generation, titling the chapters of his many books with groovy monikers like "The Weirdo Beast," and "The Ultimate Trip." Lindsey was careful to use precise and up-to-date military and social terminology in naming the weapons and scourges which would incite the apocalypse and make real the Rapture. Drug addiction, ballistic missiles, parapsychology, astrology, black magic, "Oriental" religions, pollution, hydrogen bombs, and Cobra helicopters all make appearances amidst Biblical passages purported to presage their arrival, and of course, their quick and fiery immolation. His maps detailing the movements of the armies of "Gog and Magog," or Russia and China, resembled so many Vietnam War-era counter-insurgency planning charts generated by Pentagon brass. But even these innovations do not fully explain the popularity of his prophetic treatise. Lindsey’s book was not just wildly popular; it single-handedly revolutionized the field of prophecy literature. The only color artwork associated with the entire fatalistic book may have had a lot to do with the book's popularity. The cover of The Late Great Planet Earth, for most of the editions published in the 1970s, featured a blue Earth, trailed by a burning tail of fire, arcing through space, presumably on its way to a final impact. Other editions featured an Earth, awash in a sea of flames. Besides being the biggest selling book of the 1970s, it was also the most widely printed book to feature the newly photographed Earth on the cover, certainly surpassing in sales any environmental or astronautical titles with a similar motif. It is no exaggeration to say that the most popular books about the Earth in the era following the first photographs of Earth were those macabre titles which fatalistically and predicted the imminent destruction of the Earth. The attraction of Lindsey’s book was that it related in often childishly simplistic language the “signs” in world events which foretold of a fulfillment of premillennial prophecy in the last years of the twentieth century. In contrast to the desire in environmentalist literature to prevent the destruction of the Earth and its resources, the message in Lindsey’s book was clear and unambiguous: the Earth was destined to be destroyed or “purified” by nuclear war; there is nothing good Christians could (or should) do about this inevitable prophecy; and those blessed enough would be transported off of the Earth prior to the great “tribulation” in a form of extraterrestrial rapture. Whereas Earth Day was concerned with cultivating a global ethic of Earth nurturance and respect, Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was concerned only with correctly identifying the circumstances, and perhaps the time, of the planet’s destruction and humanity’s final departure. Such evangelical acquiescence in the face of Earth’s destruction all but proved Lynn White’s observation that traditional Christianity, in its baldest and most literal forms, was not only anti-environmental or anti-Earth, but perhaps possessed of a dark and intransigent global death wish. Lindsey mentioned the space program only once in The Late Great Planet Earth, but his mention was, predictably, in regard to the inevitable Rapture of the believers. In his chapter “The Ultimate Trip,” Lindsey compared this “ultimate trip” to the Apollo space program. “Science fiction had prepared man for the incredible feats of the astronauts,” Lindsey wrote, in attempting to appeal to a generation raised on comic books and trash fiction. “but when the reality of the moon landing really hit, it was awesome.” Yet for all the wonder of man’s stepping on the moon, claimed Lindsey, nothing would compare to what God had in store for humanity. “Astounding as man’s trip to the moon is, there is another trip which many men, women, and children will take some day which will leave the rest of the world gasping… Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend. Earth and all its thrills, excitement, and pleasures will be nothing in contrast to this great event.”297 Forget about the space program's pathetic rapture, Lindsey told his readers, the real thing was bound to be much, much cooler. Both Lindsey’s book and the environmental literature being released at the same time possessed similar streaks of scaremongering apocalypticism. Perhaps it was something in the image of the entire planet from the depths of space which shook the American psyche to its very foundations, as if one were looking in a mirror for the first time, realizing that not only one’s life, but the life of everyone on Earth, could be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. In a culture as steeped in Christian millennialism as the United States, the sight of the Earth from outer space could perhaps not help but be met with the reaction or expectation that it would and could imminently explode in a violent cataclysm, like Superman’s Krypton.

*Links*A2s Link – Generic Regardless of the nature of the affirmative – all missions to space are rooted in the idea of the new American Frontier McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 289-290, August 2004 // Lack] So many examples exist of the use of American frontier rhetoric to justify the space program that it is difficult to find a supportive Congressman, Senator or President, NASA official, or American space enthusiast who did not make the concept of space as the new American frontier one of the central, if not the central, justification for the funding of the construction of space centers, massive rockets, space stations, moon flights and moon bases, Mars and other planetary missions, space-based anti-missile weaponry, and space colonization. The identification of the new American frontier as space became standard material for NASA supporters, officials, and the American media throughout the Space Age and beyond. While Eisenhower was no great champion of the space dream and no fan of connecting it to a new American frontier vision389, Kennedy, whose program for the country he himself dubbed the "New Frontier," often referred to the "seas" of space, and the astronauts as "pathfinders" and "pioneers." In a 1962 speech at Rice University, Kennedy noted that the city was benefiting from space funding and said that "[w]hat was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space." President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, took the rhetoric one step further by writing in his memoirs that he identified with the astronauts whom he called "those brave pioneers who have blazed new trails across the untraveled wilderness of space" and who were "the folk heroes of our time." "The new adventures in space that lie ahead," he wrote, "will bring with them excitement and accomplishment as great as anything we have witnessed in the epic period just past, when we proved ourselves once more to be the sons of pioneers who tamed a broad continent and built the mightiest nation in the history of the world."391 However, the use of such American frontier rhetoric in relation to space was a bit of a problem for U.S. Presidents during the Space Age given the internationalist propaganda aims of the program. An endeavor "for all mankind," needed to come first before any national grandstanding. Presidents from Kennedy to Nixon, for the most part, intentionally downplayed or contraverted frontier rhetoric in regard to space. In his 1969 inaugural address, Nixon said, echoing repeated references to space made by his predecessors, that "[a]s we explore the reaches of space, let us go to the new worlds together – not as new worlds to be conquered, but as a new adventure to be shared." However, the fact that Space Age Presidents sought to often downplay the frontier rhetoric shows, paradoxically, how pervasive and strong such rhetoric actually was. Astronauts in the 1960s were continually called pioneers and space was continually referred to as the frontier in the American press, if only circumspectly and cautiously by Presidents. Link – Rhetoric The justification of the affirmative is one that sanctions abandonment of the Earth and the end to human freedom McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 295-296, August 2004 // Lack] The Earth of O’Neill’s space colonization future will be an excessively intrusive and centralized bureaucracy of stifling personal control. Not only did he envision "anklets" as being mandatory in nearly every country on Earth, he also saw the proliferation and centralization of massive computer networks as a grave threat to human freedom. "[I]t would be possible," he wrote, "for a central computer to keep detailed tabs on every human being in any country and update the information every minute or so" and "in the nation where the interests of the state are dominant… the battle will be lost before it's fought." In Russia "anklets were mandatory… and with modern computers the state had no trouble keeping track of everybody," he writes. It is no surprise that most intelligent Russians “chose the Russian colonies in space, where the living conditions were a good deal more pleasant.”398 In 2081, he predicted all manner of Earthly futuristic transportation devices, personal conveniences, and leisure activities, but his entire future is predicated upon the supposition that space colonization one hundred years hence will be widespread. For instance, O’Neill’s prediction about the near-disappearance of organized crime in 2081 rests on the supposition that “wealth and population will be concentrated in space” and since it will be difficult for organized crime syndicates to get a foothold in small, decentralized space colonies of a few thousand people, crime bosses will turn more towards legitimate operations. Such space colonization, in the O’Neillian view, is a necessary prerequisite for the continuance of human felicity on Earth. “For a civilization now tightly constrained within Earth’s biosphere and infected with nuclear proliferation,” O’Neill wrote, “the most important new possibilities opened by space colonies may be a reduction in the scale of institutions and a dispersion of humanity far outside the bombladen pressure cooker that now seals it in.”399 Without such space colonization, O’Neill’s vision of the Earth’s future would be much darker than that he fantasizes about in his futuristic extrapolations. O’Neill does not devote a great deal of space in his books to the darker future, rather leaving it up to the imagination. His depiction of an Earth postspace colonization is scary enough. To accept O’Neill’s vision and take away the colonies would be to logically envision a literal hell on Earth. In fact, the foil for O’Neill’s futuristic vision is exactly that dystopian postapocalyptic Earth imagined by prophecy writers such as Hal Lindsey. O’Neill’s colonies, -- the metallic analogue of the Rapture -- promise to ameliorate the effects of the plague of terrestrial crises. In this sense, O’Neill offers a similar choice for humanity as that offered by Lindsey and other Christian fundamentalists: clean up your act in preparation for the ascension or suffer the consequences of life on Earth. Link – Colonization Space colonization is rooted in the Christian vision of the Apocalyptic Rapture McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 105-107, August 2004 // Lack] As the Space Age matured and the United States began to match and eventually surpass Soviet achievements in the heavens, other evangelicals began to express a point of view regarding spaceflight which was highly ambivalent. Their response was perhaps the simplest and most matter-of-fact given to the entire space endeavor. At a fundamental level, the whole astronautical affair meant very little to a mindset predicated upon a consistent anticipation of a prophesied and imminent apocalypse. Technological advancements were seen by such clergymen as spiritual lessons sent from God. In this sense, American evangelicals recognized the inherent spiritual drive of technology present since its inception – and blithely accepted its apocalyptic import. The millennial promise of the Space Age and the Nuclear Age was not what these technological eras could provide man in the way of abundance, but what these eras could provide humanity in the way of a rapturous, violent, and apocalyptic extraterrestrial deliverance. According to pre-Tribulation theology, popularized by John Nelson Darby, the elect were going to be whisked off of the Earth just prior to the end and only the wicked and the unbelievers would perish in the violent times to follow – so why bother worrying about the technological utopias promised on Earth when the Bible promised what would no doubt be a far grander utopia in Heaven? The ominous 'signs of the times' were just that – signs pointing to Biblical scripture – and thus their importance was educational, and thus immaterial. While the rocketeers sought to craft the metallic means of extraterrestrial transcendence off of a doomed Earth, American evangelicals scoffed at such a silly and pointless exercise when God was going to effect such a transfer, in a much more glorious way. Humanity was a minute and unimportant actor in this inevitable cosmic drama.148 By this reckoning, figures such as influential evangelical radio personality and author M.R. De Haan had always seen the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a sign of the end-times. Armageddon was inevitable, no matter what steps were taken to create a more peaceful society. “No shelter… can protect us from the bombs being perfected today,” he wrote, in a book published the same year the John Glenn made his first orbital flight. “ The only way out is up. ”149 De Haan was not referring to the astronautical rapture dreamed of by von Braun, but the spiritual Rapture of Jesus. Evangelical Chicago pastor A.W. Tozer, who saw in the ‘signs of the times,’ the unmistakeable blueprint of the coming end of days, summed up the theological dilemma then confronting American Christians best when he wrote, a year after the launch of Sputnik, “The new concept of space has stunned us... our faith is staggering in an effort to equate the highly complex world of space and nuclear energy with the relatively simple world of the Bible and Christian devotion.”150 Tozer's answer was simple, and it was found in the Book of Revelation. “Looking through the telescope of the New Testament prophecy what do we see?” he asked. The shaking of the heavens and the earth, the panicky flight of helpless populations fleeing in terror before something that is taking place among the heavenly bodies, the ascending of pillars of smoke into what would now be called the stratosphere or the ionosphere, the thunderous passing away of the earth and all the related heavens to make room for a new heaven and a new earth that will be a fit home for a redeemed human race, the appearance from remote space of beings wholly unlike anything with which earth dwellers are familiar.151 Space exploration for Tozer was a sign of the End-Times, and paradoxically, a hopeful sign. Their affirmative is rooted in the Utopian vision of world peace – this is part of the Space Frontier myth we critique McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 243-244, August 2004 // Lack] The proliferation of extraterrestrial recreational possibilities would be accompanied by a proliferation of political and sociological possibilities. O’Neill estimated that individual colonies could become large communes and self-governing entities. “A community of 200,000 people,” he believed, “eager to preserve its own culture and language, can even choose to remain largely isolated.” The countries of the Earth could retain their national and cultural identity even in space. Groups smaller than national entities could also expand: “Free, diverse social experimentation could thrive in such a protected, self-sufficient environment.”324 William Bradford’s Pilgrims would supposedly love the possibilities for this New Eden, a very high “citye on a hill." Despite the possible retention of national identity in space, O’Neill believed that the ultimate utopian dream could perhaps be fulfilled: the end of warfare. O’Neill coquettishly feigned reluctance in suggesting such a goal – “I hesitate somewhat to claim for space colonization the ability to solve one other problem, one of the most agonizing of all: the pain and destruction caused by territorial wars.” But he went on to suggest such a possibility anyway, thus claiming his colonies were the technological fix for human belligerence the weary post- Vietnam War generation had been waiting for. In O’Neill’s view, a perspective influenced by Robert Ardrey’s 1966 animal behavior bestseller, The Territorial Imperative, the thirty years since the end of World War II had taught humanity that warfare was “strongly, although not wholly, motivated by territorial conflicts: battles over limited, nonextendable pieces of land.” Without land scarcity, according to O’Neill, war would be unnecessary. Nuclear weapons and power plants would be left behind on Earth since “the colonies can obtain all the energy they could ever need from clean solar power.”325 No spent fuel rods would float about in the void, fodder for terrorists or despots. Space would be clean and sustainable while the Earth, at the bottom of a dried-up gravity well, would be the unfortunate dumping ground for man’s worst technological failures. Along with the end of human warfare and the boundless colonization of the universe, O’Neill foresaw the solution of five intransigent global problems "without recourse to repression." Bringing every human being up to a living standard now enjoyed only by the most fortunate; protecting the biosphere from damage caused by transportation and industrial pollution; finding high-quality living space for a world population that is doubling every 35 years; finding clean, practical energy sources; preventing overload of Earth’s heat balance. The affirmative’s rejection of the Earth as the home for humankind has its roots in Christian ideas of the Hollow Earth McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 368-369, August 2004 // Lack] In rejecting the Earth as a sustainable home for mankind, O’Neill was also rejecting open air living on the surface of a planet. In rejecting the uncontrollability of Earth’s natural systems and man’s inventive capacity, O’Neill was replacing the uncertainty of life on Earth with the supposed certainty of manmade and controlled life inside an artificial Earth. To understand the psychology of O’Neill’s “interiorization” of the Earth, one must again travel back to Newton's era to see how the cosmos was imagined during his time. Few people during Newton's era believed that the Earth was flat. However, an increasing number of theories proposed by quite learned individuals theorized that the spherical Earth was actually hollow and that perhaps entire other races of beings lived on the inside of the Earth. Over the next three centuries, hollow Earth theories would crop up again and again, and while they would never become acceptable in scientific circles, examining the ideological roots of their imagination sheds light on the psychological will to space colonization. The hollow Earth provided conceptual refuge for those too afraid to encounter the infinity of the revealed Copernican cosmos. Medieval geology was rather simple, and in fact, assumed the existence of a hollow Earth. Indeed, the Earth was rarely conceived as a sphere by the layfolk, and the ancient Judaic conception of a sandwich universe – Sheol (later Hell) below; Earth in between; and the firmament above – formed the basic outline of most people's imagination. The Earth was hollow, but the Earth was flat, amidst waters, so there was no end to Hell beneath. While this view was the popular one, scholars adopted an Aristotleian vision which held that the universe consisted of a series of concentric spheres or levels. Hell was inside the sphere of Earth, Earth was inside the sphere of the revolving planets and sun, the stars were inside a further sphere, and so on. For scholastic theologians, the Earth was always a solid mass within which was imagined an interior Hell. From Aristotleian physics, theologians determined that the interior of the Earth was composed of imperfection, material worse than dust. Since objects fell, and tended down, the interior of the Earth was heavy, dead – of the grave. By contrast, as fire tended upward, towards the shining stars and planets, that which was furthest away from the Earth was luminous and bright. Since beyond the stars was the empyrean realm of God, deity, perfection, and holiness were associated with bright white light. It is this dark Earth as contrasted with the lights of the sky which provided Thomas Aquinas with his logical post-apocalyptic transformation of the Earth into a transparent, glass sphere. According to Aquinas, the Earth's surface will be as glass, and within the Earth, the dungeon of hell would remain, still dark and murky, filled with tortured souls. The risen inhabitants of the empyrean realm will be able to see the damned, as if in a snow globe, their punishment a stark contrast to the heavenly life of static bliss enjoyed by the blessed. Dante's vision was also of a hollow Earth, in which sat the nine circles of Hell, each one deeper, darker, and more horrific than the last. Link – Exploration Historically, space exploration has been a Christian religious endeavor McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 117-118, August 2004 // Lack] For the rest of the space race, the issue of God in relation to space travel cropped up again and again, not only in the protestations of theologians, but in the overtly religious language employed by American politicians, NASA officials, astronauts, and scientists alike. This response to the Soviet challenge of an atheist cosmos had a dual effect. On one hand, it served to cast the space endeavor in explicitly Judeo-Christian terms, within a framework that the ideology of exo-millennialism found natural and appealing, given their common roots. It created a natural alliance between a more technologically accepting brand of American Christian fundamentalism and the space endeavor, evidenced by the prevalence of Biblical literalism within NASA and the space community itself. At the same time, exo-millennialists saw a theological manner of allying their perspective with the American Christian mainstream, and thus hoped to create a common ideation of space exploration based in Biblical justifications. On the other hand, this alliance was positioned on extremely shaky ground. The center of American society in the 1960s was not holding; the common center of American life was quaking as a result of an intense pressure caused by the collision of deep and subterranean fault lines in the national body politic – fault lines of race, gender, antimilitarism and religion. The futuristic space program, with its transcendent dreamers, rapidly became associated with a bygone era with little relevance in a rapidly changing contemporary climate. To talk of God and space technology, in the 1960s and 1970s, was increasingly tantamount to associating God with intercontinental ballistic missles, napalm, Huey helicopters, M-16s, industrial and chemical pollution, nuclear weapons, chainsaws, asphalt, and all the other manifestations of what some called the Establishment, and others called the "system" or the "Machine." At the same time, the rhetoric of the American frontier, which the space program had deeply allied itself with, endured a similar decay of persuasion. The frontier, in the 1960s identified with the cold, dead void of the moon and empty space, began to seem like a not very exciting or welcoming place to be. The natural alliance between a philosophy of Earth transcendence through technology and the Biblical God, so common among the rocketeers, became a marriage of convenience, but as the 1960s wore on, this union began to become, for many Americans, a marriage from hell. The frontier, in a similar fashion, became not the place of dreams and conquest, but hell itself as well. Space exploration is linked with the Christian search for God – thus connected to Christian exomillennialism McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 213-215, August 2004 // Lack] Interest in the discovery of extraterrestrial life was certainly not the complete result of Fletcher's religious background. The prospect of such a search is deeply inspiring and intellectually fascinating. Many NASA officials advocated such a search, and the Mormon plurality of worlds doctrine was certainly not the prime mover in the broader interest in the subject at the agency and beyond. Yet Fletcher's personal interest in the project was allied to his worldview, and the Mormon worldview, after all, arose in a mid-nineteenth century religious climate of increasing excitement over the possibility of life on other worlds. And the Mormon worldview was itself the product of a deeper Christian hierarchy of celestial value embedded within the very language of the canonical text of Christianity. Not only did Mormon cosmology posit the existence of "millions" of earths, it retained the concept of an utterly debased Earth even given the plethora of worlds. Such a retention can be seen in The Pearl of Great Price, where God purportedly told Moses, "Wherefore, I can stretch forth mine hands and hold all creation which I have made, and mine eye can pierce them also, and among all the workmanship of mine hands there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren." According to Erich Robert Paul, this passage in the Book of Moses became an additional basis in Mormon thought (alongside previous Biblical language to this effect) for the Earth to be considered "the most wicked of all worlds."285 In traditional Christian thought, predicated upon a Biblical and medieval conception of heaven and Earth, the wicked nature of the planet necessitates an imitation of Christ's departure upon the part of the elect during the Last Days; in Mormon thought, such terrestrial wickedness necessitates a similar departure, perhaps at a similar apocalyptic juncture, but now such ascension is to any number of celestial bodies in a newly material and inhabitable cosmos. As a result, the search for extraterrestrial life, in a reading cognizant of the Christian hierarchy of values which gave rise to the birth of modern astronomy and the assumption of celestial divinity in the first instance, becomes, as Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Bruce Murray commented in 1979, "like looking for God."286 One imagines that for Fletcher, and for others, such a quest is not just like looking for God; in the context of Mormon cosmology, as well as in the context of an older Christian cosmology which also posited the seat of divinity as necessarily far away from the terrestrial sphere, such a search can become, and is, looking for God. The search for extraterrestrial life, itself an exo-millennial manifestation of the search for God and divinity, was not the only dream of space which Fletcher attempted to stoke during his time as Administrator. Like Administrators before him, Fletcher was involved in the whole panoply of extraterrestrial endeavors, and tacitly exomillennial endeavors, that comprised the spacebound dream. He oversaw the funding and construction of the first space shuttle, designed as part of a long range von Braunian vision of shuttle-dockable space stations and permanent manned bases on the Moon and Mars. In addition to overseeing the funding of Cyclops and SETI, Fletcher helped initiate an expensive, but largely fruitless, quest for extraterrestrial life on Mars, through the funding of the Viking Program. And as we shall see in a later series of chapters, Fletcher presided over the agency when it funded the study of the boldest manifestation of the exomillennial dream ever sponsored by a state technocracy: the space colonization vision of physicist Gerard K. O'Neill. The Affirmative’s space venture is rooted in the rhetoric of apocalypse McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 157-158, August 2004 // Lack] Clarke’s earliest writings revealed a sense of disgust with the Earth, likening the planet to a cosmic cesspool. “Looking out across immensity to the great suns and circling planets, to worlds of infinite mystery and promise” he asked in a 1920s British Interplanetary Society leaflet, “can you believe that Man is to spend all his days cooped and crawling on the surface of this tiny Earth – this moist pebble with its clinging film of air?” With the advent of the atomic bomb, Clarke saw the expansion of humanity into space as an inevitable imperative, necessary to escape a nuclear-threatened Earth. In 1951, Clarke connected the exploration of space with escape from the curse of the Manhattan Project. "We stand now at the turning point between two eras," Clarke wrote. Behind us is a past to which we can never return, even if we wish. Dividing us now from all the ages that have ever been is that moment when the heat of many suns burst from the night sky above the New Mexico desert – the same desert over which, a few years later, was to echo the thunder of the first rockets climbing toward space. The power that was released on that day can take us to the stars, or it can send us to join the great reptiles and nature's other unsuccessful experiments. But Clarke did not restrict his hope of space exploration to merely curing nuclear neuroses. Instead, he looked to it to completely transform the planet, making the twentieth century merely a "prelude to some great drama." Landing on Mars and Venus, Clarke believed, would, from a future historian's point of view, end the "childhood of our race" and begin "history as we know it." For Clarke there were two choices for the future: either our descendants will be "dispossessed savages clinging to the fertile oases in a radioactive wilderness" or they will be exploring the stars.225 Clarke's novels often reveled in the abandonment, and in some cases, destruction of the planet. One of his early novels, Childhood's End, concluded with the quiet extinction of modern-day humanity through the 'benevolent' intercession of an extraterrestrial race of overlords, and the migration of a 'risen' humanity off of an exploding Earth. Specifically Space Exploration’s use of weightlessness is linked to the Christian rapture myth McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 261, August 2004 // Lack] What separated O’Neill’s space colonization proposal from others hatched during the era of the moon missions was its rejection of what Isaac Asimov coined as “planetary chauvinism."350 According to O’Neill, humans possessed a natural prejudice against imagining extraterrestrial human colonization on anything other than a planetary body such as the moon or Mars. O’Neill calculated that the “gravity well” of Earth and other planetary bodies and the effort and energy expended to “escape” from these gravity wells would be unnecessary in “free space” where earth-gravity would exert little influence. By claiming that humanity and NASA were imaginatively hobbled by a form of planetary chauvinism, O’Neill deflected attention from the fact that most of the utopian reverie surrounding space exploration and colonization on the part of rocketeers and spaceflight enthusiasts centered on the experience of weightlessness . For O’Neill, planetary chauvinism had blinded Space Age thinkers from the true extraterrestrial calling of mankind which was the nearly boundless expanses of free space. As in the Christian rapture myth, O’Neill disdained the ground and the gravity which bound humanity to it. The gravity well of Earth was a “hole” from which mankind must escape. “Does it make sense to climb with great effort out of one such hole,” asked O’Neill, “drift across a region rich in energy and materials, and then laboriously climb back down again into another hole…?”351 For O’Neill, the attraction of space colonization was both socially and economically meaningless without freedom from gravity. Link – SPS SPS links to the K – it is part of the colonization rhetoric McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 5-6, August 2004 // Lack] O’Neill believed the first colony could be constructed with fifteen years, and could quickly pay for itself through profits generated by lunar and asteroid mining, the generation and transmission of solar power in microwave form to receptors on Earth, and 4 Hal Lindsey. Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. 6 space tourism. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provided the physicist with exploratory funding for his proposal, and politicians such as California governor Jerry Brown, Arizona Congressman Morris Udall, and Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich at various times became fervent supporters of the O’Neillian vision. SPS is specifically part of the historical justification for Space Colonialism McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 249-250, August 2004 // Lack] During a visit to the Goddard Space Center in Washington to meet with NASA officials O'Neill received a small lesson in financial practicality. Von Puttkamer suggested to O'Neill that he have the colonies pay for themselves by linking their construction to the development of a solar power satellite system such as that suggested by Dr. Peter Glaser in 1968. The Solar Power Satellite system was to consist of a series of geosynchronous satellites fitted with massive solar energy collectors. The satellites would gather the energy of the sun and beam it to earth via an antenna. In order to catch this energy, beamed to Earth in the form of microwaves, vast swaths of the Earth’s surface would be cleared to erect systems of energy collectors. These collectors would, in turn, funnel the energy to homes and businesses the world over. Link – Space Mining Their vision of solving mineral shortages from Asteroids is the same vision of Space as the sphere of salvation inherent in all attempts to colonize Space McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 223-234, August 2004 // Lack] From the very beginning, O’Neill sought to simulate the experience of living on Earth. Previous proposals for space-based living had assumed that, just as workers learned to toil in factories and in mines, future extraterrestrial humans would adapt to the circumstances of their off-Earth environment. The early twentieth century scientist and futurist J.D. Bernal imagined that humans would one day hollow out asteroids and construct interior planets on the inside. In addressing critics who claimed that such an existence would be too much unlike that of Earth for human survival and propagation, Bernal dismissed them by responding: “This criticism is valid on the initial assumption that men have not in any way changed…we must anticipate the later chapters and assume men's interests and occupations to have altered.” As evidence, Bernal pointed to the contemporary lives of the devoted scientist who had already turned to a life of Gnostic separation from the rest of his species: "Already the scientist is more immersed in his work and concentrates more on relations with his colleagues than in the immediate life of his neighborhood,” he wrote. Imagining a Baconian New Atlantis in space for Bernal was not difficult, and even blissfully escapist. The experience of being separate from the organic Earth did not trouble Bernal either, who wrote from the perspective of a committed modernist. He anticipated an easy transition from the contemporary worship of the machine and of the manmade, to the experience of life inside a hollowed-out, barren, extraterrestrial stone. “Present æsthetic tendencies verge towards the abstract,” he observed, “and do not demand so much inspiration from untouched nature.” Those who did not wish to live off of the Earth, in such an ‘abstract’ aesthetic and cultural reality, could remain behind on an abandoned planet. “[F]or those whose primary interest is in primitive nature there will always remain the earth which, free from the economic necessity of producing vast quantities of agricultural products, could be allowed to revert to a very much more natural state.”

Space mining links to the K – it is part of the colonization rhetoric McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 5-6, August 2004 // Lack] O’Neill believed the first colony could be constructed with fifteen years, and could quickly pay for itself through profits generated by lunar and asteroid mining, the generation and transmission of solar power in microwave form to receptors on Earth, and 4 Hal Lindsey. Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. 6 space tourism. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provided the physicist with exploratory funding for his proposal, and politicians such as California governor Jerry Brown, Arizona Congressman Morris Udall, and Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich at various times became fervent supporters of the O’Neillian vision. Link – Hegemony Hegemonic contests in space have their root in rhetoric of Christian millennialism McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 121-123, August 2004 // Lack] Khrushchev’s taunting of God only further compelled the American space program to adopt Judeo-Christian rhetoric. The Soviet claim that there was no God to be seen during spaceflight was, of course, teasing on an international scale. Yet at the same time, the claim could not go unanswered. Two basic responses to the Soviet ridicule became common. The theological response was similar to that given by Reverend Sockman two years earlier: “God was Spirit,” and thus not detectable in space, so Soviet assertions were characterized as either the product of idiots, fools, or diehard materialists. In 1962, almost in the shadow of the recently constructed Space Needle in Seattle, and under the auspices of a theological conference dedicated to the exploration of "Space Age Christianity," the Reverend William G. Pollard, Executive Director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, also thought he had found an appropriate answer to the Soviet challenge to Biblical spatiality. “In order to really reach heaven,” claimed Pollard. “Mr. Khrushchev and his scientists would have to learn how to shoot rockets perpendicular to the whole space-time continuum, right out of our domain of existence. But there is no way in which science can learn or teach us how to do that.”174 Pollard was one of the most prominent defenders of the technologization of American Christianity during the Space Age. In abstracting God to this “other” domain of existence, theologians like Pollard admitted that they did not necessarily subscribe to the Biblical language and metaphor which continually situated Yahweh as a sky-God. In the new Space Age, the ideas of up and down came to mean little, so events like Jesus’s “ascent” into heaven and the common practice of looking to the sky to beseech God’s favor became, even in the eyes of mainstream American theologians, antiquated. In a battle between the poetic language of the Bible and the scientific language of space, many theologians deferred to NASA. John Glenn’s flight in February 1962 provided the first opportunity for America to flex its theological muscle outside the Earth’s atmosphere. On his return to Earth, Glenn appeared before the Senate Aeronautics and Space Sciences Committee, where the questions asked of him seemed more designed to score propaganda points in the United States’s “God in space” battle with the Soviets, than to elicit any scientific or practical human spaceflight knowledge. Oklahoma Senator Robert S. Kerr, the committee chairman, opened the session by praising Glenn “on his spirit of reverence and his faith in God… [B]y his example and his performance, Colonel Glenn has made a tremendous contribution to the spiritual uplift of so many people in this nation and around the world.” Glenn himself denied praying in space – he was “too busy,” he admitted – but the astronaut claimed for himself an ever-present faith, contrasting his beliefs with a “fire-engine type religion,” in which God was called on in an emergency and then “put… back in the woodwork.” God was much bigger than space, Glenn told the committee, and “I think He will be wherever we go.” Contests of Space Dominance are linked with Christian millennialism – reading of Genesis proves McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 128-129, August 2004 // Lack] Prior to the Apollo 8 flight, the Public Affairs division at NASA had briefed the astronauts on their live television appearances. “There will be more people watching these shows than have ever listened to a single human being in all of history. Say something appropriate,” they were told. On Christmas Eve, the astronauts were given a chance to give their personal reflections on the meaning of their flight to millions upon millions of people on Earth. The astronauts ended their broadcast by reading the first nine verses of Genesis, as the sun rose for the tenth time over the lunar landscape. "In the beginning," Apollo 8 crew member Bill Anders began, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. Jim Lovell continued: And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. Frank Borman took over, continuing to read from the ancient passage, which described a cosmography which was, by 1968, almost completely alien to modern man: 'And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.' And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good earth. Three days later, Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific. The Genesis reading was the culmination of the superpower theological battle which had been fought throughout the decade. By invoking Biblical cosmogony, the astronauts and the United States were symbolically ferrying the creation story of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam into a newly desacralized heaven. To an outer space divested of angels and an immediate God, the astronauts actively brought Biblical faith. Whereas the Soviet space program would have undoubtedly characterized the moon mission as a triumph of liberated man, the astronauts used the occasion to invoke the supremacy and omnipotence of God. Link – Machines Their affirmative represents the narrative of machinery in space – space colonization’s narrative has always been filled with it McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 274-276, August 2004 // Lack] O'Neill would replace the utopian exo-millennialism of gravity-less human perfection with a more defensible industrial vision of the supposed benefits of low gravity. The notion that machines, with their many working parts, are somehow "destined" for space, or will work better in space than on Earth, has a long history. All the rocketeers believed this and stated this as an essential reason for the conquest of space. There is a definite logic to this notion. Machinery and industry are the products of engineering and engineering is a discipline concerned with applying the abstract laws of physics to construct objects. Newtonian physics explains many phenomena on Earth but the effect of the Earth's atmosphere on the movement of objects and the effect of gravity makes all Earth-based engineering somewhat inexact. The realm beyond the Earth, however, imagined since ancient Greece as an abstract, perfect, and even holy realm, supposedly contains few of these complications. Heaven and its successor, outer space, are the ultimate abstractions. Newtonian physics may work decently on Earth, but in space, such physics works much better. Newton was, after all, primarily an astronomer, and his laws have been assumed by physicists and engineers since his era to work much better off of the Earth than on. As a result of this belief, machines, the product of such physics, have been assumed by many space enthusiasts throughout the modern era to work better in space than on Earth. Again, Tsiolkovsky became one of the earliest and most fervent popularizers of this idea, using it to justify the exodus of technological humanity off of the planet and into a more perfect, gravityless, and atmosphere-less environment. In nearly every one of his stories and treatises, he marvels at the lightness of a place without Earth-gravity, and how easy and effortless even the most burdensome tasks become. "You can lift heavy loads, leap so high and feel so light not because you are stronger… but because gravity is less…" one of his sagely mock physicist friends tells him on an imaginary journey into space. Similarly, machines with moving parts in an extraterrestrial environment, Tsiolkovsky believed, would approach perfection. In many of his writings, the Russian schoolteacher envisioned the perfection by extraterrestrials of the most dominant machine technology on Earth at the time – the railroad. In space, he imagined that these extraterrestrial trains would be powered by solar energy, freely available in an region without atmosphere. On a populated asteroid, he finds "many-storied perpetual-motion circuit trains driven by solar motors" which can "attain a speed 10 times as fast as that of the fast terrestrial locomotives…" He finds that he can cause these trains to attain great speeds with his own power: "[I]t is enough to create slight friction between the truck and the side of the moving train" and "within a few minutes I am speeding along with it at the rate of 128 km/hr." By building up speed, and by pushing other trains in front, and by climbing from one train to another, Tsiolkovsky finds he can travel between a series of asteroids arranged in a ring at lightning speeds. Elsewhere, he explained how for machines that required gravity, rotation of the "factory building" could be achieved, but he also touted the benefits of zero gravity for workers who would find it "easy to handle" large industrial parts. "[I]n an environment without gravity," he stated, "a hammer can be as useful as on the Earth… It is easier to impart velocity to objects in a gravity-free environment that it is on the Earth." As the machines of the twentieth century became more complex, believers in the exo-millennial vision became even more enamored with the possibilities for industry in the space environment. In imagining the proliferation of metallic globes throughout space constructed by highly advanced technological man, J.D. Bernal imagined that zerogravity would be a boon. "Owing to the absence of gravitation," he stated, the construction of a metallic sphere, "would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude." Such structures could be easily cobbled together from the "substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn, or other planetary detritus." According to Bernal, zero gravity would be a relatively simple environment to adjust to. "This three-dimensional, gravitationless way of living is very difficult for us to imagine," he admitted, "but there is no reason to suppose that we would not ultimately adjust ourselves to it."

*Impacts Impact – Environment The Affirmative’s attempt to colonize and explore space is imbued with the idea that we must abandon the Earth – justifying exploitation of the environment McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 149-150, August 2004 // Lack] As Sputnik flew, and satellites proliferated, and then as the Kennedy moon challenge seemed to implant the imprimatur of inevitability of imminent space colonization into the American mind, the Earth ceased to be thought of any longer as the “ground” or “soil.” The Earth became an entity or a system of which humanity was recognized as the controlling interest. Through the actions of humanity, the Earth could live or the Earth could die. The Earth could be left behind . For those that found in the perceived destruction of the human environment a sign of a mounting apocalypse, the stakes of the 1960s rose immeasurably. This shift awakened many to the uncomfortable realization that if they were not going to fight for the survival of the planet then they were essentially becoming complicit in a collective form of planetary suicide. The situation suddenly seemed that dire. The poignant musings of poet-naturalists were replaced by the sharp- edged and apocalyptic warnings of scientists and political essayists. In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson dedicated her expose of the chemical industry, Silent Spring, to humanitarian and naturalist Albert Schweitzer. She placed on the otherwise blank dedication page Schweitzer's ominous and apocalyptic prediction: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” His words, spoken at the dawn of the Nuclear Age, took on greater resonance during the triumphs of the Space Age. If man would succeed in destroying the earth, then the spaceflight triumphs of 1962 certainly placed him in the commanding and distant location from which to deliver the crushing blow. On the next page, Carson posted a quotation of E.B. White’s: I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially. When Carson required inspirational or dire language throughout Silent Spring, she used the image of the Earth. “As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature,” she opened her chapter “Needless Havoc,” “he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.” She paraphrased Robert Frost at the start of another chapter: “We stand now where two roads diverge… The other fork of the road – the one ‘less traveled by’ – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” And in conclusion she characterized modern applied science and its fantasized “control of nature” as a “phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy… It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.216 Carson used the terms “earth,” “life,” and “nature,” in much the same quasi-mystical way as Schweitzer and Bailey and to similar inspirational effect. Silent Spring resonated with readers of the early 60s because its imagery of a planet threatened by an unchecked and unregulated science and technology became all the more immediate in the Space Age. For Carson, the Earth was the innocent civilian in a technological war of uncontrolled insanity. Going to space severs the connections of responsibility to the environment on Earth – justifies abandonment and exploitation McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 141-142, August 2004 // Lack] While the Earth in the modern age might no longer be imagined as possessed by a personified evil, Bailey recognized that the notion of an evil Earth had survived and was thriving and that the notion that the Earth was a sort of fearsome Hell was widespread and deeply entrenched. “The old fear of nature,” he wrote, “that peopled the earth and sky with imps and demons, and that gave a future state to Satan, yet possesses the minds of men…” This ancient view of the Earth was born, according to Bailey, of escapism and desperation – reactions to nature indicative of an as yet underdeveloped and immature humanity. Humanity had not yet awakened to the realization which possessed Bailey, that the Earth was a good and holy place. “Not being yet prepared to understand the condition of nature,” Bailey wrote, “man considered the earth to be inhospitable, and he looked to the supernatural for relief; and relief was heaven. Our pictures of heaven are of the opposites of daily experience – of release, or peace, of joy uninterrupted. The hunting grounds are happy and the satisfaction has no end.”208 But questioning traditional Christian cosmography and differential judgment did not necessarily mean that heaven need be rejected. Instead, claimed Bailey, a new vision of heaven could emerge from a reconnection of mankind to the Earth. “Heaven is to be a real consequence of life on earth,” he wrote, “and we do not lessen the hope of heaven by increasing our affection for the earth, but rather do we strengthen it.”209 A fantasied deliverance into a distant heaven was escapist and myopic, thought Bailey. Heaven was here, already, on Earth. The Earth was Eden . To counter this tendency towards disembodiment, Bailey sensed the rise of some great new thought, some rediscovery of a pure and heavenly joy of living life on a “good” earth – perhaps a reinterpretation of Christianity, and an abandonment of the value-laden cosmography which possessed men’s minds. For Bailey, the anticipation of deliverance into the sky – the anticipation of transcendence – was the key psychological barrier which had to be overcome if the Earth was to be enjoyed and used correctly for future generations. Instead of the transcendent God of heaven, Bailey hoped for a broader recognition of an immanent God of Earth: “Waiting for this rescue," he wrote "we have overlooked the essential goodness and quickness of the earth and the immanence of God." Bailey hoped that a recognition of the immanent Earth could be the dawn of a new consciousness: "We begin to foresee," he wrote, "the vast religion of a better social order.”210 For Bailey, reconnection to the planet would come through a new spiritual orientation, one not extraterrestrial, but terrestrial. Impact – Abandonment Their affirmative is literally the “abandonment of Earth” McMillen, Aerospace History Fellow @ NASA, PhD of Philosophy from University of Texas, ‘4 [Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization”, pg. 236, August 2004 // Lack] O’Neill anticipated the abandonment of Earth for what he believed to be the utopian benefits of space- based life but the lessons learned from the public’s growing disdain for Apollo caused him to doubt that the aesthetics of “primitive nature” could ever be left totally behind. It was for this reason that O’Neill did not envision his colonies as being completely concealed from the light of the sun and the view of the infinite, but as being composed of a complex series of pivotable mirrors and shutters, all working together to assure that the colonists did not become too homesick for Earth. O’Neill recognized the planetary separation anxiety which several of the astronauts had experienced and did not see how space colonization could be made palatable to an already space-weary public without a believable simulacrum of terrestrial life. Space colonies were not a new concept. What separated O'Neill's colonies from previous incarnations was their rejection of the anti-natural modernism of Bernal, Clarke and von Braun. O’Neill set out to create an explicitly postmodern vision of life in space. Although mankind would live inside enormous machines, in a region with no air, such life, O’Neill accepted, would be impossible if the inhabitants lived completely in the reality of the abstraction to which they had emigrated. The Newtonian perfection of outer space was, prior to the space race, the ultimate backdrop for the abstract modernist utopia. A region completely open to man, without the difficulties of planetary life, and ready to be populated with the ultimate fruits of the Machine Age – space up until the 1950s was a modernist fantasy. O'Neill attempted to transcend the anti-natural modernism of the Machine Age to create a simulacrum of the Earth within the Machine. Impact – Extinction Abandoning Earth allows extinction to go unchecked Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf, Chapter 5 // Lack] The prospect of extinction does not sit well with a creature of infinite presumptions, and so we fantasize, too, about our escape; we contemplate abandoning the Earth before the Woman as Great as the World erases us. And such a planned emigration becomes, in a circular argument, a major premise in the extraterrestrial imperative. "We could already be off the planet," Carnegie-Mellon robotics expert Hans Moravec laments, "and I think it's inexcusable that we're not. If we stay here, we are going to get wiped out sooner or later. And what's more, we'll deserve it" (Fjermedal 250). A recent coffee-table volume of space advocacy (Hartmann, Miller, and Lee, Out of the Cradle) insists as a basic premise in the book's whole argument that not to expand into outer space is to risk the "three dangers" of (1) nuclear war, (2) Malthusian disaster, and (3) ecological disaster (37-42). And such thinking, a prime example of what Christopher Lasch has called "apocalyptic survivalism," is now monotonously routine. Impact – Awareness The Aff’s desire to abandon Earth is bound in apocalyptic rhetoric – numbing our sensations to crisis Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf, Chapter 5 // Lack] In Robert Silverberg's short story "The Wind, the Rain," an expedition of humans returns to Earth after having fled thousands of years before from a dying planet on which they did not care to be marooned, As the story progresses, we learn that the beings we had at first taken to be aliens are actually descendants of present-day Earthlings (one in the party, for example, is of Japanese ancestry). Having returned to their ancestral home, they exhibit, predictably enough, occasional space cadet characteristics. The story's narrator, for example, finds even Earth's destruction something he can groove on--a real "mind-blower," not a tragedy. Even devastation can be an art form, can it not? Perhaps it is one of the greatest of all art-forms, since an art of destruction consumes its medium, it devours its own epistemological foundations, and in this sublimely nullifying doubling back upon its origins it far exceeds in moral complexity those forms which are merely productive. . . . We envy those who collaborated to create these extraordinary conditions. We know ourselves to be small-souled folk of a minor latter-day epoch; we lack the dynamic grandeur of energy that enabled our ancestors to create those extraordinary conditions. (288) Impact Turns Case K Turns the Case – aspirations to space travel causes abandonment of responsibilities on Earth – justifying wars, genocide and destruction of the environment Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf // Lack] It may well be true, as Kierkegaard, the great analyst of the dialectic of finite and infinite in the human spirit, documented in the middle of the last century, that at the heart of the modern "project" lies dread--the dread Pascal experienced in the face of the terrifying silence of infinite space--and that such dread now fuels humankind's energy. Riding the crest of such energy, we have surmounted our "fear of the outside" and, in a newly conceived leap of faith, actually broken through the "surface tension" of the planet . Now with infinite presumption, fearlessly willing to burn their bridges behind them, even to administer, as a parting gesture, a "scorched earth" policy to the Earth itself, some now dream of entirely abandoning a planet that, in a planned obsolescence, they are anxious to put behind them.10 We are witnessing, according to a radical critic of technology, the The Mentality of the Space Age end of humility and the birth of a new, humanistic-with-a-vengeance cosmology. "It is not humility that inspires the new cosmological jargon," Jeremy Rifkin writes, "but bravado." In the Space Age, "We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else's home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. It is our creation now " (Algeny 244). Impact Turns Warming Turns Warming – The escapee mindset justifies inaction over global warming – allows nations to let the Earth destroy itself Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf, Chapter 5 // Lack] In "Nuclear Exorcism: Beyond Cursing the Day We Were Born," Alice Walker expresses shame for her species with unequaled vituperation and passion. In the context of a consideration of a terrible "curse-prayer" collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s, a plea to "the Man God" to bring to the speaker's enemies absolute havoc--blindness, barrenness, disease, poverty, crop failure, starvation, exposure to the elements, failure of their language, pestilence, death, and more--Walker, certain that the curse's speaker is a woman and inclined to imagine her to be a colored woman, thinks "with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman--starved, enslaved, humiliated, and carelessly trampled to death over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman--along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers, and children--seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. Bringing it about, that is, not for her specific enemies, but for the human species." And Walker finds herself sorely tempted to shout the curse with her predecessor, to pray it in unison: When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think--in perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the Earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. (341) She contemplates as well the possibility that "it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it and continue their lust to dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet but the rest of the universe." And she offers, as a proposition that "requires serious thought from every one of us," the dire prospect that "fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to The Mentality of the Space Age save others from what Earth has already become." Walker, it is true, does go on to qualify her bitterness and to partially annul her curse because of the realization that "accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe" would bring doom to "the godly and the ungodly alike," and so the "thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of--from the grave--achieved revenge" cannot long be entertained. That she contemplates it at all must stand, however, as a distinct landmark in the developing imagination of extinction and the abandoned Earth. *Link**Aff Debate No Link No Link – they mischaracterize the Affirmative – people go to space for many reasons Pass, PhD of Sociology & Board Member of the Astrosociology Research Institute, ‘10 [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Working Paper Series, “Refining the Definition of Astrosociology Utilizing Three Perspectives”, October 2010, pg. 7, accessed with SSRN // Lack] When looking at the cause-effect relationship in terms of what causes humanity to favor migrating into space and leaving Earth, the focus becomes phenomena on Earth that compels humanity to favor the unknown over the known, a set of social forces produce the imperative to settle the space environment.24 The causal arrow is from Earth to space, indicating a pattern of emigration from Earth. For the current epoch, the focus remains Earth-centric because no humans remain forever in space. The lure of additional “land” may cause some groups to leave Earth. Such things cause a portion of humanity to explore space, work and play there, and eventually stay there indefinitely. The intent to live in space outweighs the familiarity and safety of living on Earth. People elect to abandon Earth’s surface for a variety of reasons. Examples include overpopulation, energy and resource scarcity, global warming, the fear of destruction from super volcanoes and asteroids, and religious persecution and conflict. Another illustration involves astronomers who may wish to relocate themselves on the far side of the Moon or an even further object in order to construct and operate a telescope without interference from Earth’s atmosphere. In this example, scientific discovery lures astronomers away from Earth. No Link – Double Bind Either the AFF broadens the connection between humanity or does not link to the specific exploitation the NEG asserts Pass, PhD of Sociology & Board Member of the Astrosociology Research Institute, ‘10 [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Working Paper Series, “Refining the Definition of Astrosociology Utilizing Three Perspectives”, October 2010, pg. 8, accessed with SSRN // Lack] Some of the ways in which space affects humanity on Earth – and, by definition, on societies, institutions, social groups, and individuals – causes human beings to become content with remaining on Earth. Abstractly, humanity pulls space toward Earth. The causal arrow is from space to Earth. Most humans reside on Earth but utilize space resources to enhance their lives. Travel into space occurs to fulfill the objective of bringing benefits back to Earth. Some people may recognize the benefits of space but prefer to improve conditions on their home planet rather than leaving for off-world destinations. These types of forces both contribute most to the development of terrestrial spacefaring societies. The exploitation of space resources from asteroids for use on Earth serves as a good example. The areas of solving or mitigating social problems with space assets, spinoffs and technology transfers, and knowledge resulting from the space sciences such as astronomy and space missions easily come to mind. Of course, there will always be those on Earth who benefit from space resources and other forms of astrosocial phenomena without taking part in the process. They do not seek benefits from astrosocial phenomena. They merely stand by, ignore, or fail to recognize efforts made without taking part or supporting the effort. If they benefit, it is only because their passivity did not hinder the creation of beneficial results through their opposition. This category of humanity represents the largest segment in the beginning phases of humanity’s migration into space. The relationship between humanity and space will not result in consistent outcomes. At the micro level, individuals will possess unique perspectives. For example, one person may view social problems as unsolvable and opt for a new start in a space environment. Here, the lure of space resources draws humanity into space to the extent that individuals agree on a specific mission and organize themselves to realize their ideas on the macro level. Alternatively, another person may assess the same social problems and look to terrestrial science for solutions. In this case, there is no expectation that space assets could solve, or even mitigate, Earthly problems. Thus, various social groups and societies on Earth are likely to take distinctive perspectives on these sorts of matters. Obviously, then, this relationship between space and human society, like exploration in general, is a complex and evolving one that will become even more compelling as we move further into the twenty-first century. Therefore, the relationship between space and humanity remains interwoven, one intrinsically connected to the other. As humanity continues to pursue space exploration, space exploitation, space science, and settlement, this relationship will strengthen as more humans venture into space on temporary and permanent bases, along with social institutions and groups on Earth creating ties to extraterrestrial ecologies. True migration into space will provide an even greater connection to space, one in which the connection to Earth becomes weakened to some extent. Thus, one cannot simply dismiss the significance of space for humanity even while terrestrial social problems demand a great deal of attention. The existence of terrestrial social problems and that of evolutionary pressures toward migration into space are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they actually possess a great many ties to one another that are worthy of examination. Definitional principles and the astrosociological imagination will guide the way.

*Other A2: Value To Life We solve Value to Life – space travel explores our true meaning Lavery, Professor of English @ Tennessee State University & Adjunct Professor @ Seattle University, ‘92 [“Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age”, http://davidlavery.net/LFS/Late_for_the_Sky.pdf, Conclusion // Lack] Is it not possible to imagine humanity surviving its brush with death as a less tyrannical, less colossal, less destructive creature? Might not such an encounter inspire a re-vocation in which our supremacy is revoked but transformed without the need of escapism? The proverbial wisdom of Chinese Taoism teaches that when an ordinary man attains self-knowledge, he becomes a sage, but when a sage acquires enlightenment, he becomes an ordinary man. Can there be an evolutionary equivalent to this circular progression, but in the mind and heart of a species? Is it possible that human beings, after having developed in the course of our emergence from the natural world a powerful, masterful, almost unnatural, out-of-this-world intelligence, might surmount it not through the further acceleration of intelligence, not through our pursuit of distant suns, but from a wise submission--a humiliation, as I like to call it--to the natural and the earthly? In other twentieth century imaginations of disaster, the end of humankind guides us toward this desolation, toward a life in death in which we can endure, ironically succeeding in our audition, only as an adapted being, accommodated at last to creatureliness, our vulnerability and finiteness, to our place on Earth. In these versions, the abandoned Earth signifies adaptation, the end of longing, our acceptance of its ways with us. Climate Science True

Climate science is true – all objections are all selective reading of data and biased critiques Demeritt, Department of Geography at King’s College London, ‘06 [Energy and Society, Volume 35, Number 3 (August 2006), “Science studies, climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique”, 453-479 // Lack] First published in Nature and then subsequently modified and extended in several further publications (Mann et al . 1998, 1999), this dramatic figure assembles the best available estimate of hemispheric scale temperature fluctuations over the last thousand years. It provides one (but by no means the only) basis for the claim, in the summary for policy-makers of the third IPCC assessment report, to have found ‘new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities’ (2000: 100). As such the ‘hockey stick’ has assumed an almost iconic status in recent debates in the United States about global warming. Very different from simply reading a thermometer, estimating the average annual temperature of the hemisphere as a whole over a millennium is quite literally an act of reconstruction. Behind the hockey-stick graph stands the congealed labour of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of scientists involved in assembling, manipulating, and transforming various recalcitrant materials annually laid down in tree ring and ice cores, laminated lake and ocean sediments, and ocean corals (to name just the finest resolution sources of proxy palaeoclimatic data). Through careful measurements and complicated statistical techniques scientists relate various quantitative properties of those materials to each other and to various other temperature and precipitation records so as to reconstruct individual records of average annual temperatures . Combining these heterogeneous proxy records for various places and regions into a spatially homogenized annual time series for the hemisphere as a whole then involves further calibrations against instrument and other records (themselves, of course, also the result of previous rounds of statistical purification) to ensure that the final palaeo-climatic reconstruction represents average annual temperatures over the hemisphere as awhole. Each step in this process of assembling a reliable witness to historic climate changes in the northern hemisphere over the last millennium involves potentially contestable judgements and practices (Bradley 1999). While science studies scholars have become adept at disentangling this mangle of practice and identifying the contingent constructions involved, so too have climate sceptics. The hockey stick and its lead author, Michael Mann, have become the object of intense and often highly personal attack. Two of the most prominent climate sceptics, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (2003), drew selectively on some of the same proxy palaeo-climatic data in the hockey stick to counter the conclusion that recent warming is unprecedented. Their counterclaims were fiercely denied by Mann and colleagues, who took the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal in Eos, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union (Mann et al . 2003), as well as by many of those whose data were used by Soon and Baliunas (2003).1 Despite such criticisms, these new ‘findings’ were quickly touted in press releases by the American Petroleum Institute , which helped finance the study, and in a barrage of op-ed pieces put out by the smoothly oiled anti-climate change PR machine (Gelbspan 2004). Rhetoric Inevitable Science in policy is inevitably bound up in politics – warming debate proves Demeritt, Department of Geography at King’s College London, ‘06 [Energy and Society, Volume 35, Number 3 (August 2006), “Science studies, climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique”, 453-479 // Lack] Debate over the hockey stick nicely illustrates what sociologist of science Harry Collins has termed ‘the experimenter’s regress’ (1985: 2). Because ‘experimentation is a matter of skillful practice’ it is very difficult to perform a critical test of theory in the way that simplistic ideas of sound science insist, since ‘it can never be clear whether a second experiment has been done sufficiently well to count as a check on the results of a first’. Whereas conservative advocates of sound science insist upon definitive empirical proof, science studies scholars have found that, in controversial science, more data and experiments tend to raise new questions as much as resolve old ones. As Collins and Pinch provocatively put it, ‘experiments tell you nothing unless they are competently done, but in controversial science no one can agree on a criterion of competence. Thus in controversies . . . . scientists disagree not only about results, but also about the quality of each other’s work’ (1993: 3). In his testimony Mann responded that, unlike ‘experienced paleoclimate researchers’, Soon et al . (2003) failed to make important distinctions between proxy records for moisture and those for temperature. Furthermore, by refusing to aggregate to the hemispheric scale or to compare against a temporally normalized benchmark, they confuse short-term regional fluctuations (which David Demeritt: Science studies, climate change 463 can be explained by the wave-like character of the jet-stream, making some regions cool while others are warmer) with truly hemispheric, long-term changes, which ‘tend to be much smaller in magnitude than those for particular regions, due to the tendency for a cancellation of warm and cold conditions in different regions. . . . What makes the late 20th century unique is the simultaneous warmth evident during this period in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures’ (Mann 2003). Conservative ideologues have systematically ignored these technical qualifications and the other independent lines of evidence for concerns about global warming. In the summer of 2003, the White House demanded that Mann’s hockey-stick figure be removed from the EPA’s (2003) report on the state of the environment report and be replaced by a reference to Soon et al . (2003), which one EPA official characterized as ‘a limited analysis that supports the administration’s favored message’ (quoted in UCS 2004: 6). Referring specifically to the controversy over the Mann et al . graph, Senator Inhofe recently repeated his claim that ‘global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people’ (2004: S11292). Seizing the sound science high ground, he declared, ‘global warming ideology has no place in policy debates regarding scientific issues. Credible, reproducible studies should be our gold standard _ our minimum standard. By that standard, carbon restrictions fail the test’ (ibid.: S11297). This empiricist framing of sound science disregards the future risks posed by the continuing rapid and anthropogenically driven increases in GHG concentrations and the evidence from black body physics, simulation modelling, palaeo-climatic analogues, and other sources about the climatic changes likely to result from them. Instead, it seeks to focus debate on the technically difficult question of whether or not at present GHG concentrations, an anthropogenic ‘fingerprint’ of global warming, can be empirically detected within the noisy, heterogeneous, and incomplete climate record. ***Surveillance **Neg Link – Monitoring Satellite monitoring of Earth reproduces gendered understanding of the environment and reinforces the masculine schism between the rich and the poor Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) Taking these assumptions in order, consider the purported neutrality of science and scientists. Since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's work in the 1960s, a great deal of research in the history of science and the sociology of knowledge has undercut this assumption, demonstrating that science, like all social institutions, is suffused with power dynamics and irrationalities.19 Feminist theorists have highlighted the dimension of gender, elucidating how scientific practice has evolved under the formative influence of a particular ideal of masculinity based upon objectification and control. Feminists relate the fixation on scientific objectivity, which depends upon a rigid dichotomy between subject and object, to other parallel hierarchical dichotomies of modernity: human/animal, mind/body, masculine/feminine, reason/emotion, and elite/mass. Feminists also find in these hierarchical dichotomies of modernity the link between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature, pointing to the Baconian legacy that summons the scientist "to bind Nature to your service and make her your slave."20 Women, who have been traditionally defined as objects of control, have good reason to question the subject/object dichotomy. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of the pioneers of feminist philosophy of science, argues that the static objectivity of science that renders Nature into alien Other is rooted in the distinctive subjectivity of masculine psychological development with its preoccupation with autonomy.21 Keller's conception of dynamic objectivity offers an alternative stance, one that draws upon the ebb and flow (rather than a rigid dichotomy) between subject and object. While dynamic objectivity, which "actively draws on the commonality between mind and nature as a resource for understanding," is rooted in a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, it is similar to Sylvester's postmodern feminist notion of "empathic cooperation."22 I return to these ideas toward the end of this article in order to draw out the possibilities of Earth remote sensing informed by feminist insights. With respect to issues of objectivity, one striking aspect of remote sensing of the environment is indeed its very remoteness. In a sense, satellite-generated photographs of the earth represent the ultimate subject/object dichotomy. Space technology offers the tantalizing prospect of being able to leave the earth in order to get a better view-the ultimate Archimedean vantage point. Rather than being embedded participants in the reality depicted, Earth system scientists become disengaged observers of that reality.23 Thus, according to the celebratory discourse, remote sensing is "building a valid picture of the earth" for the first time.24 Presumably this picture is "valid" because it is drawn from huge quantities of objective, remotely acquired information. It is a picture that privileges knowledge derived from abstract science over knowledge derived from lived experience. The main elements of a spaceborne remote sensing system are "spacecraft, instruments, modeling/systems engineering, and data processing,"25 elements that give primacy to an expert structure comprised primarily of white men in affluent societies. To the question, "Who shall be designated as reliable environmental narrators?" Earth system science answers, "Scientists with professional credentials in physics, chemistry, and computer sciences-particularly those whose work is most distant from the everyday lived experience of poor people and most women." Whenever quantifiability monopolizes the mantle of legitimacy, qualititative values are given short shrift, so that even if satellite data are supplemented with "ground truth," the privileging of abstract decontextualized data is likely to de- value other approaches to knowledge.26 In particular, as a male-dominated activity, it may reinforce the division of labor that Joni Seager suggests permeates environmental politics: Women care about the environment and men think about it. 27A strong feminist position need not valorize caring as the only viable activity, but can rather insist that environmental preservation requires both men and women to become caring and thinking. The science and technology of satellite monitoring of the global environment also fail the neutrality test from another perspective, when developing countries are taken into account. Not only is the "remoteness" of remotely sensed data emblematic of a masculinist bias, it also exemplifies the schism between the rich and the poor. The multicolor renditions of satellite images, which can only be deciphered by experts with access to specialized equipment, illustrate the cultural and socioeconomic gap between the scientists who produce them and the lived experience of most of the world's people. The fact that satellite data must be converted to visual images, a task that requires highly sophisticated imaging technologies, also illustrates the difference in how experience of the world is gained by scientists in contrast to most people. Given the historical record, it is not at all certain that those images and data will serve the interests of those whose material survival is continually in jeopardy. Consider the controversy over measurements of greenhouse emissions, information that would appear to be derivable through objective means. During negotiations for an international climate change convention leading up to the Earth Summit in 1992, the World Resources Institute (WRI), a U.S.-based environmental nongovernmental organization, published its country-by-country estimates of greenhouse gas emissions. Without any attempt to frame its data in terms of emissions per capita, WRI concluded that India, China, and Brazil are among the top five countries responsible for global warming.28 In a rare instance of a challenge to Western science emanating from a developing country, two scientists from the Center for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi argued that both the WRI figures and conclusions were wrong. Starting with the premise that "there is no reason to believe that any human being in any part of the world is more or less important than another," they ask: "Can we really equate the carbon dioxide contributions of gas-guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America (or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World) with the methan emissions of water buffalo and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand?"29 The WRI-CSE controversy was not merely scientific; it reflected deep dissension over moral and political responsibility. As subsequent commen- tators noted, the WRI study implicitly "recycled an old scare tactic: What if the poor rise to the average level of per capita greenhouse gas emissions as the rich?"30 Without explicitly focusing on this issue, the CSE report attempted to shift the blame for global warming from population to consumption. While developing countries rarely contest the neutrality of Western science, we can expect such controversies to become more common if research agendas and environmental data continue to be dominated by industrialized countries.

*Links Link – Climate Research The rational policy model is based on flawed understanding of science- global climate change research reinforces patriarchal modernity and ignores human and cultural needs Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) Turning to the second assumption, let us consider whether science really does tend to generate rational policy. The belief that it does is a fundamental tenet of "the rationality project," a term Deborah Stone uses to describe the attempt to reduce politics and policy to rational analytic frameworks. This quintessentially masculinist orientation to social life, which interprets all social action through the lens of rational self-interest, "misses the point of politics" since "paradox is an essential feature of political life."31 The dichotomy between reason and emotion implicit in the rational policy model is one of the dichotomies characteristic of patriarchal modernity.32 The stated purpose of the global change research, with its heavy reliance on EOS data, is to generate the scientific knowledge that will enable policymakers to make rational decisions; science is assumed to lead to rational action. Scientists and policymakers alike envision a linear process that proceeds from recognizing potential problems in the earth's ecosystem, to understanding the implications, to evaluating potential remedies, to implementing remedies and monitoring them.33 Yet so much of the research program is devoted to pure science, with human activities included seemingly as an afterthought, that the next generation's policymakers will likely be more confused than today's. Research on policy options received only thirty-five million dollars of a total 1995 USGCRP budget of 1.8 billion dollars, which represented a doubling of the 1994 figure.34 Predictably, to the extent that social scientists have been involved in the research, their analyses tend to be economistic rather than based upon human needs or cultural analyses. The dearth of attention paid to human factors reflects a notion of neutrality embedded in modernity's hierarchy of the sciences, a hierarchy that elevates the sciences most remote from everyday experience, especially physics, to the apex of knowledge systems. The earth-system-science view of global change highlights atmospheric physics, geophysics, and chemistry, thus rendering human beings virtually invisible. But if the IPCC scientists are correct in surmising that global environmental change is imminent, then the agents of that change are almost exclusively human beings. From the perspective of the social sciences, global environmental change is a process where people are both the cause of change and the object of change-some much more so than others. It is a result of certain social choices and commitments, whether conscious or not, and will only be ameliorated by alternative choices and commitments.35 But from the perspective of remote sensing, human agency vanishes and global change is reduced to physical processes. Since the "valid picture" transmitted from space omits the main element of the picture, it is a dubious impetus for "rational policy." If history serves as a guide, the mammoth scientific undertaking embodied in the USGCRP is unlikely to become a principal catalyst for policy change- even when the results are in after two decades. The nearest approximation to a historical precedent is the ten-year, half-billion dollar interagency program intended to guide U.S. policy on acid rain, the National Acid Precipitation Assess- ment Program (NAPAP). Although NAPAP was applauded for its scientific achievements, in the end it was virtually irrelevant to the acid rain controls adopted in the 1990 Clean Air Act. Very little of the NAPAP research was policy-relevant, the reports were not timely, and they were "largely unintelligible to Congress."36 Given current trends in global change research, the USGCRP seems poised to follow in NAPAP's footsteps, although at perhaps sixty times the cost. Contrary to the rational policy model, environmental policy is not steered by science. In 1991, EPA administrator William K. Reilly commissioned an independent study to examine how his agency employed scientific data in its decision- making process. The report concluded that, to a great extent, EPA decisions are based upon extrascientific factors.37 Although environmental policy making is a more contentious process in the U.S. than it is in many other places, there is no strong evidence that science serves as the primary guide to policy elsewhere.38 Science does not provide the objective facts from which policy decisions are ra- tionally deduced. Rather, scientific information tends to be framed and interpreted according to preexisting discourses. As I have argued elsewhere, this was the case even for the global ozone negotiations, where a comprehensive international assessment representing a scientific consensus was available to all parties.39 Often as not, the same scientific information can be used to bolster an array of policy positions. If "irrationalities" tend to supplant scientific knowledge in the policy process for other environmental issues, how much stronger will this tendency be for an issue like greenhouse warming, which goes to the heart of industrial civilization's dreams and aspirations? Link – Data Collection The data collected from remote sensing will be useless as it is subject to international assessments and negotiations that empirically prevent any precautionary action. Any scientific data produced is based in the gendered view of nature and produces false risk assessment techniques: conservation tactics can solve climate change Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) [USGCRP = United States Global Change Research Program] So even if the USGCRP and international projects resolve the uncertainties, historical experience suggests that they are unlikely to be formative influences in policy decisions. But what of the third assumption, that scientific information tends to generate increasing certainty? No doubt, remote sensing will generate unprecedented quantities of data. EOS will produce one terabyte of new incoming data each day (a terabyte is 109 bytes); EOSDIS will be the largest data-handling system ever built, with a total capacity of fourteen petabytes (a petabyte is 1015 bytes). But if this is information that masks agency or renders it invisible, it will be empty information. Programs like the USGCRP will generate information, but will they produce understanding? Once fourteen petabytes of data are gathered, assessments will be required in order to make sense of it all. Because environmental change is global in scope, these assessments will have to be international. International science is always negotiated science and therefore unlikely to generate consensus. Consider the consensus on the imminence of greenhouse warming that was reached by the IPCC in 1990 and 1992. A small handful of dissenting scientists out of a total of several hundred questioned the accuracy of the report's conclusions, thereby providing ammunition for those policymakers who opposed precautionary action. Even in the ozone negotiations, where the science was comparatively refined, the international assessment that served as the basis for the negotiations was interpreted as supporting a huge range of policy positions.4? Yet the assumption that science generates certainty is wrong not just because of the political purposes that scientific information serves, but because it is based upon a popular but mistaken understanding of the nature of science. The conventional view, which abounds in the literature on global change and satellite monitoring, is that science enthusiastically embraces and pursues uncertainties. But this is not how science operates. Rather, as Brian Wynne argues, science proceeds by selectively ignoring significant uncertainties.4' As philosophers and historians of science since Kuhn have recognized, this state of affairs is normal, not pathological. Science could not function if it pursued all uncertainties persis- tently; thus, it "gives prominence to a restricted agenda of defined uncertainties, leaving invisible a range of other uncertainties, especially about new situations."42 As Wynne argues, this fact-that ignorance is endemic to science-is only a problem when it is disregarded, causing the scope and power of scientific knowledge to become exaggerated and the social commitments built upon that knowledge to grow dangerously inflated. The danger arises because as our technological systems grow larger, more elaborate, and more tightly interlocked, we can tolerate less uncertainty; difficulties in one part of the system can precipitate disaster in another. These issues raise a fundamental question that needs to be asked of the USGCRP and related scientific endeavors: If ignorance is endemic to scientific knowledge, what burden of proof can science be expected to sustain? Programs like the USGCRP seek, in effect, to bring climate change and other global environmental problems under the rubric of the risk assessment model by supplying the information from which risks will be calculated and policy determined.43 That model incorporates the probabilistic dimension of environmental risks into the rational policy model.44 It entails a particular reading of nature as a mechanical system with deterministic (albeit interactive) processes, which ecofeminists have pointed out is specifically the view of nature associated with patriarchical modernity. Yet of all "systems," the earth's climate system is among the least amenable to risk assessment. As the chaos theorists have demonstrated, it epitomizes the dynamics of a stochastic, as opposed to deterministic, system.45 Paradoxi- cally, incorporating more detailed information into models of stochastic systems may generate more uncertainties in the conclusions.46 Thus, the earth system science that sustains the remote sensing project seems especially unlikely to generate scientific certainty. Perhaps the quest for scientific certainty, which will be extremely elusive in the case of climate change, may not be as helpful in generating policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as efforts to reorder economic and technological priorities.47 Quite possibly, thirty billion dollars spent on researching alternatives to fossil fuel consumption could provide more environmental benefits than a program that seeks scientific certainty. Some preliminary studies along these lines suggest that conservation measures alone would result in economic savings while significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.48 Impact – Value to Life Satellite imaging allows the West to perceptually manage the Earth leading to the management and social control of people Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) Feminist analysis suggests that the practical inspiration behind the global view is the managerial impulse, which brings us to the sixth assumption implicit in the remote sensing project. In the discourse surrounding global environmental monitoring programs like the USGCRP and the WCRP, terms like "managing the planet" and "global management" abound.57 The "blue marble" image fosters the notion that the earth is manageable. Talk of management is so ubiquitous, and the connotation of orderly administration so seemingly innocuous, that gaining a critical perspective on it requires a great effort. Yet the matter is not particularly complex: To manage means to control, to handle, to direct, to be in charge. The remote sensing project functions simultaneously as symptom, expression, and reinforcement of modernity's dream of knowledge as power. The drive to gain "objective" knowledge about the earth by maximizing the actual and felt distance between subject and object, I have argued above, is fundamental to androcentric modernity. The planetary gaze, relying on cameras col- lecting data at various wavelengths to inform us about the earth through color- coded computer simulations, is fundamentally a visual project. As ecofeminist writer Yaakov Jerome Garb shows, drawing upon feminist philosophy and the work of classicist Eric Havelock, vision has been deemed the cardinal sense in Western thinking."58 Of all of our senses, vision requires the least engagement; the advantage lies in separation rather than closeness. The photograph, and most especially that of the earth from space, "places the final seal on the disengage- ment from participation that vision allows, on the standing back so that subject views object across a void. It transforms the external world into a spectacle, a commodity, a manipulable package ... [through] the predatory nature of the camera." The miniaturization of the earth made possible by satellite photography appeals to the managerial impulse ; the "blue-and-white Christmas ornament" can be "managed" far more easily that a world of 5.5 billion people and thousands of cultures. The distinctive combination of will-to-power and the sense of the earth's fragility that typifies the remote sensing project is expressed in the words of astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin: "The earth was eventually so small I could blot it out of the universe by holding up my thumb."60 From space, the ultimate domination of the earth, or at least the illusion of it, becomes possible. While it is the earth that is objectified by the planetary gaze, ultimately "managing planet earth" will mean controlling human behavior, not the earth itself. Ecosystems will respond in various ways to changes in human behavior, but they will only be vicariously "managed." It is people, even as they are rendered invisible by the planetary gaze, who will be managed . The science and technology of remote sensing perpetuate the knowledge/power nexus with respect not only to human domination of nature, but also to social control. Thus, the six assumptions implicit in the project of global environmental monitoring by satellite turn out to be plagued with internal inconsistencies, parochial biases, and moral difficulties. Neither the science nor the technology of Earth remote sensing is neutral. The vast quantities of data generated by satellites are unlikely to lead to either scientific certainty or rational policy. Indeed, EOS technology, at least as presently constituted, seems to reinforce the drive to industrialization and the interrogatory approach to nature that lie at the heart of modernity. The global view that it purports to provide may become a totalizing perspective that omits human agency and substitutes the vantage point of a technical elite for the collective experiences of the diversity of human beings. EOS technology, like other photographic technologies, is a voyeuristic endeavor that maximizes the distance between subject and object-in this case, between the observing human and Earth's dynamic processes. Finally, the language of planetary management that pervades discussions of EOS suggests that the disciplinary power inherent in the managerial impulse is at the heart of the remote sensing project.

*Impacts Impact – Environment Global perspective is totalizing and fails to address problems with climate change by attempting a heroic solution that ignores the actual environmental needs. Male dominated and globalizing views of Earth set themselves apart from and above nature, allowing continuing violence towards nature. Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) Global corporatization is one of the dangers of the "global view" afforded by remote sensing, which brings us to the fifth assumption. At first glance, the assumption that a global perspective is necessary appears indisputable. After all, if problems like climate change, deforestation, desertification, and ozone depletion are global in scope, then we must take a global view in order to solve them. And if these environmental problems are simply the "negative externalities" of a global economy, then a global view seems inescapable. To some extent, all of this is true, but it overlooks the dangers implicit in globalism-particularly the conceptual and pragmatic links between hegemony and globalism. In an unequal world, globalism-including global science-is all too likely to mean white, affluent men universalizing their own experiences. Global problems are amenable to large data banks, to Big Science, to grand managerial schemes. As we saw earlier, the view from space renders human beings invisible, both as agents and as victims of environmental destruction. It also erases difference, lending itself to a totalizing vision. The "global view" cannot adequately depict environmental problems because the impacts of these problems vary with class, gender, age, and race. The very abstractness of the global view may thwart efforts to heal natural systems. Charles Rubin echoes this sentiment, suggesting that the global view removes environmental problems from the realm of immediacy where meaningful action is possible and most likely to be effective. Rubin goes so far as to reject the term "the environment" because, by essentially referring to "everything out there," it simultaneously serves to distance people from the local places where they live even as it erects an artificial totalizing structure.53 Rubin's claim about the concept of "environment" can be equally applied to "the global view": Both seem to include just about everything except the particularism of place. Ronnie Lipschutz extends this line of reasoning, suggesting that if place is a critical constitutive element of identity, then environmental degradation is not likely to be resolved by embracing the place- eradicating "Blue Planet" image. Rather, it is in the local realm, which is laden with cultural and personal meanings, where most women live their lives and where environmental healing is most likely to occur.54 According to Joni Seager, the "global view" is especially problematic for women: The experience of women on the front lines should help us change our notion of what environmental destruction looks like: it is not big, flashy, of global proportions, or if global, it manifests locally. Environmental degradation is pretty mundane-it occurs drop by drop, tree by tree. This fact is discomfit- ing to big scientific and environmental organizations whose prestige depends on solving "big" problems in heroic ways.55 Ecofeminsts who argue for the necessity of a "subsistence perspective" on issues of environment and development echo Seager's claim that women's lives are especially entwined with the local and the organic. Their general claims about the scientific method associated with "capitalist patriarchy" could be applied to the global gaze of Earth remote sensing: "But in order to be able to do violence to Mother Nature and other sister beings on Earth, homo scientificus had to set himself apartfrom, or rather above, nature."''56 While the explicit purpose of the earth remote sensing project is to rescue nature through monitoring and modeling it, ecofeminists would claim that the global gaze, by virtue of its position apart from and above nature, does violence to nature . NASA’s whole Earth perspective from space doesn’t allow us to accurately depict or solve environmental problems Gaard ’10 Greta is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and a Community Faculty in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN. (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism”, Vol. 17.4: 643-665, Autumn 2010) Ecofeminists have argued that NASA’s whole earth image of the planet from space creates not only a physical distance, but a psychic detachment as well (Garb 264 – 78). In this image, we earthlings become mere observers, not participants. This whole earth image depicts earth as an object of art, seen from such a distance that we do not see such simultaneously personal and political experiences as military occupation, death, sexual assault, deep sea oil drilling, aerial gunning of wolves, toxic waste, social injustice, human and interspecies oppression. In other words, this perspective does not provide a standpoint for understanding eco-justice problems, and thus cannot lead us to holistic eco-justice solutions, either: “the ‘global view’ cannot adequately depict environmental problems because the impacts of these problems vary with class, gender, age, and race” (Litﬁn 38). Perhaps the most dangerous implication of this “God’s eye view” from space is its valorization of space exploration, and the idea that extraterrestrialism is viable: the whole earth view is “a rearward view of the earth, a view seen as we leave” (Garb 272). It supports the myth that we can live apart from the earth, that we are not, in the most profound sense, earthlings. Seen from an ecofeminist perspective, the space program is “an oversized literalization of the masculine transcendent idea, an attempt to achieve selfhood freed not only from gravity but from all it represents: the pull of the Earth, of mater, dependence on the mother, the body” (Garb 272). The resonant detachment of both ecoglobalism and the whole earth image offers fruitful ground for feminist ecocritical explorations. Impact – Lack of Boundaries Satellites born in Era of war blurs the boundaries between earth and space, global and local, and the public and private Warf, Barney. Deptartment of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. October 2005 “GEOPOLITICS OF THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY”

Satellites reflect, and in turn feed back into, terrestrial politics in many ways. Born of Cold War rivalry, satellites played a key role in the militarisation of space. Although the military’s role in the satellite industry has declined, it continues to remain an important segment distinct from civilian applications. In civilian markets, satellites play a key role as communication devices in international transmissions of voice, video and data traffic, all of which reflect the growth of information societies around the world and their steady integration through the global market. Castells’ (1996) well-known ‘space of flows’ would be impossible without the skein of earth stations and orbital platforms that lie at the heart of this industry. The geography of large international earth stations reflects the schism between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, and, to a lesser extent, the legacy of the Cold War. Hence, while satellites float thousands of kilometres overhead, the determinants of access and use are firmly grounded in terrestrial politics. To minimise externalities and allocate prime orbital slots, global flows of information require international forms of regulation. The largest organisation for the provision of international satellite services is Intelsat, traditionally perceived as a mechanism for the assertion of US hegemony over the industry during the Cold War. Digital neoliberalism and the worldwide deregulation of the industry eroded Intelsat’s monopoly status and shifted control over the technology from national monopolies to private capital. Thus, the power of capital to allocate satellite resources has expanded while national security concerns, the industry’s traditional raison d’être, have been progressively eclipsed, but not removed entirely. In short, satellites, whether military or corporate, do not simply reflect the world’s geopolitics, they are simultaneously constitutive of it, blurring the boundaries between earth and space, the global and the local, the public and the private. Alt – New Thinking Only an alternative way of thinking can make remote sensing projects successful in the long term- we must embrace dynamic objectivity, approaching nature with empathy and respect as opposed to an object of planetary management. Only by breaking through the alienating discourse of the environment by the affirmative can we ever access the full capabilities of remote satellite sensing Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997)

Is the celebratory discourse surrounding the project, then, nothing more than a mask? On the positive side, even at a cost of thirty billion dollars it may be a better investment than spending the same number of dollars to send someone to Mars. Clearly there are some potential benefits in the mammoth project: Improve- ments are likely to be made on knowledge about crop conditions, soil moisture, forest cover, pollution levels, infestations, and climate change. Some of that knowledge will help to save lives and conserve resources. But any potential benefits of the remote sensing project are likely to be unrealized or undercut as long as the project's deeper assumptions and repurcussions are not critically assessed. If implicit in the project is the modernist equation of knowledge and power, and if it is this very equation that propels the devastation of Earth's habitability, then the gains from the planetary gaze are likely to be unevenly enjoyed and, in the long run, illusory. What are the possibilities for a feminist rehabilitation of Earth remote sensing? An ecofeminist reading of Earth satellites, as we have seen, offers a scathing indictment of the technology's patriarchal roots and thus little hope in this direction. The gulf between the local, organic world of women subsistence farmers and the planetary gaze is simply too great to be bridged. Moreover, the strong technophobic strain that runs through much of the ecofeminist literature would seem to preclude an ecofeminist rehabilitation of Earth remote sensing. This reading, however, is unsatisfying since it tends to leave the technology in the hands of a white male managerial elite, suggesting that the use of remote sensing technology by women or disenfranchised groups represents a form of false consciousness. Yet, while global satellite-based science has the earmarks of a mammoth technocratic enterprise, it is not immune to public opinion, nor are its fruits available only to the elite. Remote sensing is not just Big Science; environmental groups and indigenous peoples are increasingly turning to satellite data in order to press their claims on behalf of nature and cultural survival. Perhaps most intriguing is the use of satellite data by indigenous groups for mapping their customary land rights and documenting the role of the state and multinational corporations in ecological destruction."' Environmental advocacy groups and indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and the Pacific Northwest are attempting to integrate their traditional knowledge into modern scientific methdologies through the use of satellite-generated data and mapping software.62 These examples suggest that there is an alternative to viewing the earth as alien Other, as an object of knowledge and an object of control. Evelyn Fox Keller's work provides one example of the sort of reorientation that might be involved in such an alternative: Rather than positing a basic adversarial relationship between subject and object, "dynamic objectivity" draws upon the commonality between mind and nature as a resource for understanding. Keller likens dynamic objectivity to empathy, a way of knowing others that draws upon a commonality of feelings and experience in order to enhance one's understanding of another individual.63 But if the other is to retain his integrity as other, then empathy must not degenerate into projection; the knower must maintain an awareness of her own subjective assumptions and experiences and a conception of self that is distinct yet not disconnected. Informed by a sense of dynamic objectivity, Earth remote sensing could approach nature with a sense of empathy and respect, rather than as an object of planetary management. The global perspective afforded by satellites could honor local cultures and the needs of those whose voices are not heard in the current discourse of global environmental management. Perhaps such an orientation would make it possible for the earth to speak to us through the satellites, "to declare its subjecthood.""64 Might the view from space, along with fourteen petabytes of data and computer-simulated graphics, induce not only a state of awe-not so much of the earth itself but of human scientific and technological prowess-but also something resembling the sense of empathy that informs Keller's notion of dynamic objectivity?65 Once the celebratory discourse surrounding satellite-based monitoring of the earth is seen for the masking mechanism that it is, and once the alienating discourse of the environment as a system to be managed is abandoned, such a possibility might be realized. A more postmodern feminist rehabilitation of Earth-observing satellites is also possible. Keller's ideas, like those of ecofeminism, are rooted in a gender psychology of difference, although they clearly recognize the social construction of gender and are therefore less vulnerable to the charges of essentialism that have plagued ecofeminism.66 Kathleen Ferguson's notion of "mobile subjectivities" and Donna Haraway's notion of "cyborgs" catch some of the fascinating ambiguity of indigenous peoples and environmental groups using satellite data to press their claims.67 Here, there is no pure and unitary conception of woman to counter patriarchal modernity; nor is the line between humans and nature sharply drawn. Just as Christine Sylvester cites "the imaginative reworkings of seemingly fixed identities" in the "elephant-artist, "68 so might Earth-remote sensing promote such identities as "ecological technician" or "indigenous multispectral analyst." While a feminist rehabilitation of remote sensing is both intriguing and possible, we should not reject out of hand the interpretation of remote sensing as a manifestation of the will-to-power that lies at the root of humanity's crisis in its relationship with nature. This much, however, is clear. If knowledge-by-identity is to sever the knowledge/power nexus fostered by knowledge-by-distancing, then the "knowers," including the scientists, the interpreters, and the managers, will need to become conscious of the deep cultural assumptions that they bring to their knowledge. This would require a far greater interdisciplinary leap than the ones between physics, chemistry, and geology considered by Earth system science. To the extent that the social sciences are beset by the same notions of objectivity in knowledge/power nexus as the natural sciences, then what may be required is not so much an interdisciplinary leap but an extradisciplinary leap. An important corollary of this would be the dissolution

*Alts of the gendered division of labor, whereby men think about the environment and women care about it, for dynamic objectivity would enable thinking and caring to become integrated as complementary aspects of knowledge. Another thing is certain: If the knowers, interpreters, and actors could embrace the stance of dynamic objectivity, the hubris implicit in the knowledge/ power nexus could be replaced by an attitude of humility, for humility is what follows from a feeling of kinship with the object of study. This would have major implications, not only for knowledge about the earth, but for how we should live on the earth which, after all, is why programs like the USGCRP are being established. In fact, coming to this humility may generate more practical knowledge about how to proceed in our relationship with the earth than we will gain from the fourteen petabytes of data. Perhaps then the knot of knowledge/power could be disentanged and the crucial links be made between data, knowledge, and wisdom. Using the same technology that caused the environmental degradation fails : we must examine the assumptions in the remote sensing technologies. Their view of NASA as salesman and the environmental agenda as ruled by satellite monitoring reinforces the global hierarchy with the cultural west dominating the poor Litfin ’97 Karen T., Ph.D. from UCLA in political science with a thesis on global environmental politics, is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, “The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites”, Vol. 18.2: 26-47, 1997) This brings us to the fourth assumption underlying the remote sensing project: that a science and technology based upon the same assumptions that have been instrumental in causing global environmental problems will be instrumental in solving those problems. Uncovering this assumption highlights environmentalism's more general ambiguous relationship with science and technology. On the one hand, the Baconian legacy of knowledge as power and technology as domination seems to be responsible for the worst cases of environmental degradation. The "interrogatory" method of science,49 along with its technological feats, has either colonized or destroyed nature on a planetary scale. On the other hand, scientists often bring cases of environmental destruction to light and serve as defenders of nature. Moreover, if certain technologies are the problem, then alternative or "appropriate" technologies might provide the solutions. Rather than succumb- ing to the temptation to reject science and technology altogether as enemies of the earth, perhaps we should examine the assumptions embedded in remote sensing programs to see whether they tend to reflect the first or second view of science and technology. Such an examination, however, suggests that earth remote sensing, at least in the mainstream, is most likely to fit the interrogatory model of science as power. The ultimate goal of the undertaking is to predict, which, as Francis Ba- con recognized over four hundred years ago, is exactly how knowledge becomes power. Earth system science aims to uncover nature's secrets in order to enable policymakers to "manage the earth." The celebratory discourse surrounding the undertaking reflects just such an uncritical acceptance of this ambition. Thus, we are told, with no apparent sense of irony, that: New space-based monitoring technologies backed by powerful information systems will make possible quantum leaps in the ability to observe and understand Earth. ... It is obvious that the key to the secrets of the earth system lies in advanced organization, big science, big technology and, of course, big money.50 NASA, the principal recipient of this big money, waxes eloquent on the cover of its colorful Earth System Science literature, quoting Goethe: "Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."51 There is surely an element of salesmanship here, as NASA seeks to justify its budgetary requests in an era of fiscal conservatism, but in this case the salesmen seem to have swallowed their own snake oil. Rather than standing back from modernity's dream of power through knowledge, NASA embraces it wholeheart- edly in its grand vision of a comprehensive understanding of the earth as a system. How the power and magic will be manifested remains to be seen, but there is good reason to wonder whether the remote sensing project will be environmentally benign. Just as the assumptions about the nature of science implicit in satellite monitoring are rooted in Baconian thinking, the assumptions about technology are rooted in the modernization paradigm. Even when information is made available at no cost to developing countries, which is by no means always the case, remote sensing is still a technology that is likely to benefit industrialized countries the most. Research agendas are largely set in the West, the space and computer technology are owned by the North, and the results are published in English. When satellite data reveals mineral deposits in Third World countries, U.S. and Euro- pean multinational corporations quickly arrive on the scene to "develop" the resources.52 Even Third World participation in remote sensing at a rudimentary level requires computer skills and technology that most developing countries lack. Full participation requires access to space technology. A few developing countries, like India, Brazil, and Indonesia, have become space powers, although not necessarily in the best interests of the majority of their citizens since the elites generally seek to replicate the development path of the North. Like so many technological projects in the past, global environmental monitoring by satellite runs the risk of providing a new arena for the world's elite to dominate the poor. The remote sensing project seems to reinforce the drive to modernization that is itself the cause of global environmental change. ***Gender**Neg

Link – Development The affirmatives development into the final frontier reflects an extension of modernist ambition above earth. Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274, MA]

In the middle of the twentieth century, outer space was still a concept defined in a single direction; one looked up through the sky. not down from beyond it. The earth had but a single satellite, the moon, and the man on it was a figure of poetry. not technological triumph. Beyond the atmosphere lay a realm for astronomic observation and literary speculation, not exploration or commercial development. But when nineteenth-century Western imperial expansion began to unravel, ink drying on to last white areas of its terrestrial maps, a new and final frontier was defined, one above the emerging political boundaries of First, Second and Third Worlds (McDougall l985). Frequently described in language of colonial conquest (the inexorable "progress of mankind" now continuing beyond the confines of a single planet), this frontier reflects both a logical extension of modernist ambition and its limits. Outer space describes that which lies beyond place, stretching between things away from the familiar globe. To imagine this beyond as a frontier is to invite its exploration yet is also simultaneously to reposition the surface already known. The earth becomes a whole and suddenly intimate place, one that can fulfill the promise of Copernicus by traveling across another sky (Blumenberg l987). Moreover, thanks to the compelling present tense of photography, it can be seen from a distance and recognized as a globe, that potent symbol in reconceived relations to the environment (Ingold 1993). Yet this reorientation of Earth is not solely a matter of cosmic perception or contemplation; there are significant technical consequences as well for science, politics, and economics. A vast vacuum free of gravity requires no pump (Shapin and Schaffer I985), inviting scientific research while holding it to new standards, those of the laboratory beyond the atmosphere. To a properly equipped eye in orbit, the stars above and the land below grow sharper; earth, sky. and weather all can be monitored more intimately (Lambright I994; Mack 1990), Points on the globe need no longer be connected directly to each other but can instead acquire new significance through their relation to the zone above the atmosphere. ln a sense, what has been a geometry of two dimensions becomes a geometry of three, as connections are no longer restricted to the surface sphere of the planet. A platform in space offers not only an imperial vantage point across continents but also a potential beacon between them, circumventing geographical markers on the ground and altering their meaning. 111e foregoing sketch abbreviates many stories. European conceptions of time and space shifted dramatically between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as witnessed by artistic movements under various banners of "modernism," while the establishment of universal time zones, news services, telephones, radio and television networks, and aircraft radically altered the rate and topography of everyday life (Kern 1983; Read 1992). Yet to evoke the meaning of the Space Age, with all its powerful technological and representational possibilities, a certain degree of abstract distance is necessary, for while the airplane opened the sky and moved through it at dramatic elevations, and while the radio tower filled the air with waves (bypassing ground connections). neither made the limits of the earth entirely visible or transparent. Space technology closed the sky again, bounded it from above and sealed it whole. Only then could the sky become fully modern in an active technological sense, and only then could what lay beyond it become meaningful as space, a vast sea of darkness surrounding a blue and green point of unified, singular human place. To illustrate this general redefinition of human space through the realization of outer space, let us turn to the example of the development of satellite communications and the consequent redefinition of the equator.

*Links Link – Technology Technology blurs focus to the center point, ignoring previous processes Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274, MA]

Let us compare this little collage to the opening postcard with its glowing machine. Where the postcard features a technology of things, we now find some human shadows; the focus that rested on a stable center shifts outward along the range, and the center grows blurred. Rather than a single universalizing object, we now have an amalgam of particular lives, imperfectly anchored around a technical event. Technology in action unravels along many lines, blurring the object in question (Latour 1987). By descending to the level of particular detail-even cursory detail-it becomes apparent that the launch of a satellite involves far more than a row of buttons or a single screen, that the machine at the center of the postcard is only one point in a vast array of worldwide connections Kourou intersects with Japan, China, and Italy as well as the neighboring rain forest. The lines attached to every launch nm through many patient and impatient hands, to a cellular phone in a New York broker's convertible, to a glass of beer before a French legionnaire, to a Brazilian mother's washing machine. Not all the links in these lines are equal in status, pay, or technical efficiency. Yet separating them into clearly defined categories ordered by criteria of causality becomes less certain the more one considers place, for the control room is a placeless space of modem technology, the launch zone is a distinctive place redefined by modem technology, and the people who move between them-assembling, directing, cleaning, serving, consuming-cross arrays of cultural and technical spaces negotiated between rhythms of modern technology and the tropics. A rocket launch indeed represents the center of this motion, but it is a center that materializes and dissolves rather than holding steady, a center that can only take its literal and figurative meaning in motion. A rocket, after all, is a transport vehicle, as its engineers like to point out. Thus the clear vision of an empty control room floating in some placeless, modem space is at once strikingly accurate and perfectly misleading; its distortion lies not in an inverted choice of subject matter but in an inverted choice of focus. Back beyond the postcard, in the heat and bright sunlight, we again find a muddle of lives clearly-if not simply-attached to the earth. Link – Science Establishment of knowledge through science creates a “a view from nowhere” Rommeveit, Funtowitzcz and Strand, Kjetil, philosopher and a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, Silvio, scientific officer at the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), European Commission Joint Research Centre, Roger, Professor and Director at SVT; Visiting Prof., Institute of Environmental Science and Technology ,2010 [KjetilRrommeviet, Silvio Funtowitcz, Roger Strand, “Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice,” Google Books, MA]

Science and the problem of Context Throughout the latter years, many studies in science governance have converged on a focus on the mutual co~production of science and society (lziszinoff, 2004; Latour, l993)- One insight to emerge from such studies is that both the context of knowledge production and the context of knowledge application (Nowotny et al., 2001), including the wider political purposes for which knowledge is constructed, matters more to the ways in which we use science to make sense of the world than is commonly recognised, The implications of this seemingly simple observation should not be underestimated. When considering the uses of science and technology for purposes of broad- scaled political intervention and change, keeping the attention too narrowly focused on the scientific facts of the matter can blind us to the wider context within which we find ourselves. Similar points have been put forward, although perhaps with less descriptive accuracy, since the inception of the Enlightenment, for instance by Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, One central point of critique has been, and remains, how the establishment of standardised and impersonal ways of producing knowledge through science also entails the effective decoupling of knowledge from the context in which it was created (Toulmin, Z003). It was a decoupling of the means of knowledge from the ends of knowledge that seemed to follow from its universal character and from standardisation, as if offering ‘a view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1986). One outcome of the broad-scaled application of science and technology to nature and society that eventually followed was the radical increase in welfare and prosperity that took place during industrialisation and the coming of the knowledge society. The power of nuclear energy, fossil fuels, antibiotics and computers resides in their enhancement of human agency, i.e. in increased capacities to act in a number of situations. It also resides in the fact that science and technology may be distributed across and used in a number of different contexts, to ‘act at a distance’ (Latour, 1987). On the negative side, this transformation of knowledge and society also entailed an increasing amount of nonintended side effects to nature and society (Beck, 1992), the unforeseen accumulation of chemicals in ecosystems and the aggregation of CO, emissions being prime examples. It also entailed serious regulatory and legal problems: the global, aggregated effects of a number of local actions meant the effective decoupling of responsibility from those effects (von Scholnherg, 2007). Hence, with the decoupling of science and technology from their context of creation, there followed, almost as by logic, the problem of how to re- introduce knowledge into contexts different from the one in which it arose. The problem of the context is at least, therefore, double. On the one hand, we note the dependency of science on the context in which ir was created, significantly for its verification and accountability. On the other hand, there is the problem of what to make of science as soon as it is applied for the sake of action, i.e. reintroduced in some practical context. Closely related, there is the seeming impossibility of relating it back to one agent who can be held accountable for negative consequences. Neither of these elements, we argue, is sufficiently attended to in climate change knowledge governance today. We believe such problems of contextualisation to underlie at least some ofthe broader problems we witness: first, failing efforts to change society towards more sustainable ways of producing and living, second, the related problem of engaging people for the sake of common action towards such a goal.

Scientific investigation is governed by dominant gender norms. Claims to objectivity conceal oppression. Harding, Professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Eduation and Information Studies 1991 [Sandra, professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Whose science? Whose knowledge?, Google Books, pg. 79-80, MA]

“Feminism is about people and society: the natural sciences are about neither; hence, feminism can have nor elevance to the logic or content of the natural sciences.” One line of thinking behind this argument is that researches are far more likely to import their social values into studies of other humans than into the study of stars, rocks, rats, or trees. And it is absurd, the conventionalist will argue, to imagine that social values could remain undetected in studies of the abstract laws that govern the movements of the physical universe. Scientific method has been constructed exactly to permit the identification and elimination of social values in the natural sciences. Practicing scientists and engineers often think the discussions of objectivity and method by philosophers and other nonscientists are simply beside the point. If bridges stand and the television set works, then the sciences that produced them must be objective and value-free—that’s all there is to the matter. One could begin to respond by pointing out that evolutionary theory, a theory that is about all biological species and not just about humans, clearly “discovered” secular values in nature, as the creationists have argued. It also “discovered” bourgeois, Western, and androcentric values, as many critics have pointed out. Moreover, the physics and astronomy of Newton and Galileo, no less than those of Aristotle and Ptolemy, were permeated with social values. Many writers have identified the distinctively Western and bourgeois character of the modern scientific world view. Some critics have detected social values in contemporary studies of slime mold and even in the abstractions of relativity theory and formal semantics. Conventionalists respond by digging in their heels. They insist on a sharp divide between premodern and modern scieences, claiming that while medieval astronomy and physics were deeply permeated with the political and social values of the day, the new astronomy and physics were (and are) not; this is exactly what distinguishes modern science from its forerunners. As historian of science Thomas Kuhn said, back when he was such a conventionalist, the world view characteristic of medieval Europe was much like that of “primitive societies” and children, which “tends to be animistic. That is, children and many primitive peoples do not draw the same hard and fast distinction that we do between organic and inorganic nature, between living and lifeless things. The organic realm has a conceptual priority, and the behavior of clouds, fire, and stones tends to be explained in terms of the internal drives and desires that move men and, presumably, animals. The conventionalist fails to grasp that modern science has been constructed by and within power relations in society, not apart from them . The issue is not how one scientist or another used or abused social power in doing his science but rather where the sciences and their agendas, concepts, and consequences have been located within particular currents of politics. How have their ideas and practices advanced some groups at the expense of others? Can sciences that void such issues understand the causes of their present practices, of the changing character of the tendencies they seem to ‘discover in nature’ in different historical settings? Even though there are no complete, whole humans visible as overt objects of study in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, one cannot assume that no social values, no human hopes and aspirations, are present in human thought about nature. Consequently, feminism can have important points to make about how gender relations have shaped the origins, the problematics, the decisions about what to count as evidence, social meanings of nature and inquiry, and consequences of scientific activity. In short, we could begin to understand better how social projects can shape ,results of research in the natural sciences if we gave up the false belief that because of their nonhuman subject matter the natural sciences can produce impartial, disinterested, value-neutral accounts of a nature completely separate from human history.

Modern science is grounded in domineering relations between people and society, focusing on success without looking at the negatives. Restivo and Loughlin Sal Restivo- Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies & Information Technology Program Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , Julia Loughlin- Professor at Syracuse Univerity, 1987 [Sal Restivo and Julia Loughlin, “Science Communication” Pg 486-508, http://scx.sagepub.com/content/8/3/486.full.pdf+html, MA]

We identify our approach in the sociology of science as "critical" in order to distinguish it from approaches grounded in "common sense" or "folk" sociologies, from approaches that confuse social references with sociological analysis, and especially from those sociologies of science that are conceived as sources of support for the ideologies and myths of science, in particular the physical sciences. Thus, a critical sociology of science treats the social organization of science, scientific change, and patterns of communication and power in science as problems, not givens. It is not based on "awe” of science and scientists, or a worshipful, ritualistic orientation to objectivity, rationality, rigor, and the other "good" aspects of scientific inquiry. It also does not assume that the development of science as a human activity producing negative and positive consequences for people and their environments is necessarily progressive. And lineally, it does not accept "intersubjectivity" as a panacea for the fallibilities and pathologies of individual perception, cognition, motivation, and choice. Intersubjectivity is a social process and thus as vulnerable to fallibilities and pathologies as individuals. Social organization is, in science as elsewhere, a dynamic entity with the potential for temporary or permanent pathological transformations (including, for example, goal displacement and manifestations of the "iron law of oligarchy" in professionalization and bureaucratization ). One of the common signs of an uncritical sociology of science is the assumption of efficacy,""success," and "progress" in science. A critical sociology of science must evaluate efficacy, success, and progress in terms of how science is perceived by, to what extent it is created and controlled by, and how it affects the various social classes, institutions, communities, organizations, and individuals that make up "science and society." The fact is that while modern science is part of the general social process of epistemic investigation, discovery, and invention, it is grounded in aggressive, domineering, exploitative relationships between people and their social, physical, and material surroundings (Merchant, l980; Easlca, 1983). Focusing on the "successes" of science without considering the negative personal, social, and environmental consequences of those "successes" is analogous to focusing on the Gross National Product as a sign of economic success without considering the negative consequences (such as waste, pollution, and alienation) of national processes of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. And indeed, any focus on scientific validity that is restricted to a concern with problems of measurement and ignores general problems of truth and objectivity is consistent with this analogy. Optimizing validity can become a narrow organizational and administrative goal, and not the best way to ensure that we are getting high quality results in our research. Validity (internal and external) is a concept rooted in a quantitative, measurement oriented conception of science. In this sense, it can be an especially appealing criterion for legitimating research findings from the point of view of governmental or other administrative and social control agents and agencies. A focus on validity in this narrow sense separates the research community from its audiences, clients, and subjects and reinforces the notion of a social system of science that is immune to "external" social forces and values. But as we will argue in the second part, the concern for establishing, sustaining, and reinforcing a research community producing knowledge that is "useful" from a humanistic and ecological point of view is better served by focusing on the social relations of science, and on the problem of generating a sense of the social nature and value of valid knowledge among researchers and users alike. lt is important in this regard to understand that validity (or more generally, objectivity) is a social process, and that there are degrees of validity. The quality of the validity generated by any given community is a function of the degree to which the social interests of the community are general and diffuse rather than specific and focused(Restivo, l983a: 147-l54).

Social hierarchy in science shapes the credibility of results, ignoring normative models of inquiry. Restivo and Loughlin Sal Restivo- Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies & Information Technology Program Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , Julia Loughlin- Professor at Syracuse Univerity, 1987 [Sal Restivo and Julia Loughlin, “Science Communication” Pg 486-508, http://scx.sagepub.com/content/8/3/486.full.pdf+html, MA]

As informal modes of consensus formation become stabilized and institutionalized, they become transformed into "truth tests" that appear to be independent of social forces. These tests can then be used as official guarantors of the validity of research results (Holzner and Marx, 1979: 102). More specifically, professionalization and bureaucratization cause creative and innovative ideas and actions to be devalued (Holzner and Marx, |9791 l 12, I29; Restivo, l983a: |53-l54). Such ideas and actions are a threat to the internal stability of the scientific profession. They also threaten the established social order, and the position of science in that social order. This is why Campbells "social system of science” approach is so problematic. It is a theory about science that is not merely grounded in the findings of science but is also (and not incidentally) congruent with the conservative requirements of scientific ideology. A critical sociology of science cannot for any reason ignore the fact that epistemic communities develop "self-validating knowledge-use systems," and that the claims, predictions, recommendations, and theories of a prestigious epistemic community can be taken as warnings, become self- fulfilling prophesies, and facilitate social control (Holzner and Marx, I979: 272). Ignoring these social realities can only undermine efforts to apply social science knowledge in ways that are both effective and humane. Structural and functional differentiation and autonomy in a social activity does not isolate it from the wider sociocultural system it is part of. Even in extreme stages of differentiation and autonomy, a social activity cannot be treated as a "closed system."Two points often missed in common sense or folk sociologies are as follows: ( l) The social system of science has an internal social structure that affects the nature and types of knowledge produced; and (2) the degree to which science in fact approximates a closed social system-that is, the degree to which it is differentiated and autonomous- varies within and across cultures, as well as from one scientific discipline or specialty to another. In no case can any social activity-no matter how autonomous institutionally operate independently of "external" and "internal" social forces. For more than a decade, sociologists of science have been studying science as an ongoing social activity; in particular, they have studied in detail the social construction of scientific knowledge both in contemporary (including on-site) and historical settings (Barnes and Shapin, I979; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay, l983), This research has undermined many traditional views about the nature of science. The most important results of this research in terms of our present concerns are that ( I) there is nothing unique about the rationalities used in scientific practice relative to the rationalities of everyday social practice; (2) reliability, validity, truth, and objectivity in general are achieved in science (as a specific human organization) in the same ways that they are achieved in _general epistemic activity in any organization or society; and (3) rigor is not a sine qua non in science; it is part of the cycle of inquiry, and can coexist in the same field of research-and even in the same project with non rigorous methods and concepts. More important, it has been clearly established that standards of rigor and validity are historically and culturally situated. Moreover, the loosening of canons of rigor is often a condition for solving intractable problems, developing new approaches to get around obstacles, and generally for "getting things done." Standard: of rigor, rationality, validity, and related notions are generally established by or associated with orthodoxy and authority. And, we should not forget the stake scientists have as professionals-as workers- in demarcations strategies (Gieryn, l983). Admitting that scientists have ideological and professional interests and goals, but ignoring these factors in the interest of some sort of normative model of inquiry, only veils the complex social realities that link discovery and validation with issues of status, power, and prestige, make cognitive "correctness" context dependent, and link theories, methods, and social organization (Knorr-Cetina, l984; Mulkay, l984; Bunge, I967).

The media uses discursive strategies to exaggerate scientific authority Carvalho, Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal, 2007 [Anabela, “Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: re-reading news on climate change”, April 2007, “Public Understanding of Science” vol. 16 no. 2 223-243, MA] The earlier years of reporting on climate change tell a known story about media discourse on science: a novel knowledge claim is reconstituted in the press in a way that reinforces the social power of science. As exemplified by the excerpts below, an image of certainty was clearly built by The Times (emphasis has been added to parts that present the relation between temperature rises and the enhanced greenhouse effect as uncontested). An American meteorologist, Kerry Emanuel, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the rise in temperature due to the greenhouse effect in tropical latitudes will make hurricanes and cyclones much more destructive even than they are today. … So Dr Emanuel calculates that the maximum destructive force of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mexico will be increased by as much as 60 per cent. Other meteorologists believe it is possible to quarrel with Dr Emanuel’s detailed conclusions. But the existence of the greenhouse effect is generally accepted. It is thought already to have caused an average temperature rise of around 0.5C and to be due to raise average temperatures by a further 2C by AD 2050 with greater rises in some areas. The effects of this on cyclones could be less severe than those predicted by Emanuel, but they might be even worse. It is also possible, say other meteorologists, that a further effect of the warmup will be to increase the frequency as well as the severity of tropical cyclones and hurricanes. (John Newell, “How Greenhouse Effect Might Help Cyclones to Grow,” The Times, 20 April 1987) Already in 1986, Pearce Wright reported that … the latest results of studies by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado … show that if the level of human activity producing the change continues at the present level, the increase will add at least one degree Centigrade and perhaps as much as five degrees Centigrade before the year 2050. (“Gases Pushing up Ground-level Temperatures,” The Times, 21 January 1986) Linguistic choices such as the word “will” for talking about impacts forecasted by scientists, the use of terms such as “detailed and reliable records” (see following article), and the recurrent employment of the word “show” in relation to records or results contributed to depicting climate sciences as a consensual and reliable domain. [The Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia] was established some 12 years ago by Professor Hubert Lamb to create detailed and reliable records of the climate of the past, with the object of then developing practical advice for the future. The scientists have already shown that the agricultural growing season in Europe has shortened, and even better understanding about the longterm trends in the climate is expected to be of value for planning large-scale, energy projects. … Now, more detailed records assembled by Dr Tom Wigley, director of the research unit, show that the rise in carbon dioxide that started with the industrial revolution is greater than previous estimates. … One implication of this is that the warming of the atmosphere by the “greenhouse effect” during the last hundred years has been greater than that allowed for in previous calculations. (Pearce Wright, “Gloom Over Weather Patterns,” The Times, 13 August 1985) Scientists were the uncontested central actors and exclusive definers of climate change up to the end of 1988. Newspapers deployed a discursive strategy of authorization (van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999): authors of press articles sought to legitimate knowledge claims by resorting to the authority of individuals and institutions holding positions of recognized importance. The scientific journals Science and Nature were the sources of six out of 21 articles published between 1985 and 1987 in The Guardian and The Times. The names of researchers and their institutional affiliation were referred in 20 articles. At a higher level, we can speak of a strategy of rationalization: climate change was represented as a tractable and potentially solvable scientific problem, to be dealt with by credible agents. 228 Public Understanding of Science 16(2) Link – Climate Climate science is framed in a way that necessitates decision making even if there is uncertainty Rommeveit, Funtowitzcz and Strand, Kjetil, philosopher and a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, Silvio, scientific officer at the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), European Commission Joint Research Centre, Roger, Professor and Director at SVT; Visiting Prof., Institute of Environmental Science and Technology ,2010 [KjetilRrommeviet, Silvio Funtowitcz, Roger Strand, “Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice,” Google Books, MA]

Problems of science and action in the IPCC policy discourse It was the creation of the IPCC as such that formally established the global discourse of climate change as a threat to the global environmental system. Prior to this, models of climate would he locally constituted and would, at the most, be of relevance to regional politics. As told by Clark Millet, ‘By the early 19805 there was an alternative to viewing climate as merely the aggregation of the weather. Based on computer models of the general circulation of the atmosphere, climate scientists increasingly represented the Earth’s climate as an integrated, global system' (Miller, 2004, p, 54). Therefore, as far as moral and political implications have been drawn from the findings of the IPCC reports, they remain strongly dependent on the scientific discourse that opened up the perspective of global action in the first place, This is problematic in so far as the seeming certainty about climate change taking place cannot be matched by a corresponding and comprehensive vision for action, In this section we look at how the IPCC reports frame the language of decision making, and how a framework is established for the containment of the problem within the boundaries of climate science, economy and the ‘social attitudes towards risk’, We single out three problems related to that framing. In spite of growing scientific certainty, so fat topped by the statement of the 4th Assessment Report that climate change is ‘highly likely' caused by human intervention, the necessity of acting under conditions of (scientific) uncertainty has made up an integral part of the policy advice built into the IPCC reports. In the 2001 Synthesis Report it is stated that â€˜Climate change decision making is essentially a sequential process under general uncertainty’ (Watson, 2001, p. 5), This also leads to a recognition of the value-based and political character of many decisions, such as setting the measures for ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference' (ibid., p, 35), But rather than letting uncertainty getting the upper hand on science, a conceptal move is made that contains the variables and render the situation manageable: ‘Scientific evidence helps to reduce uncertainty and increase knowledge, and can serve as an input for considering precautionary measures. Decisions are based on risk assessment, and lead to risk management choices by decision makers, about actions and policies' (ibid,, p, 39). Therefore, even where uncertainty is recognised as immanent to climate change decision making, this uncertainty is of such a kind that the information we gather from models is considered sufficient to represent the general development of the system in question. This way of framing the scientific issues also carries important implications for the ways in which broader policies have come to be defined. The kind of uncertainty that is being recognised is mainly quantifiable, thereby also working to internalise the impacts and effects of variables about which we are ignorant (Hoffmann-Riem, 2002). What is especially noteworthy for our purposes, however, is the ways in which risk assessment (the paradigmatic case being the graduations of uncertainty given to the scientific findings) and risk management, are translated into the related policy context that is opened up by the reports. Whereas the policy context is recognised as even harder to predict than the climate system itself, also here the number of factors that enter into the equation is limited: Decision making has to deal with uncertainties including the risk of nonlinear and/or irreversible changes and entails balancing the risks of either insufficient or excessive action, and involves careful consideration of the consequences (both environmental and economic), their likelihood, and society’s attitude towards risk, (Watson, 2001, p. 41) The main risks faced by policy makers are defined as either doing too much or doing too little. It is hard to disagree with that particular statement. But the language in which such action is framed is problematic, as action is conceived

The media distorts actual scientific research transforming the public’s view points on climate change. Carvalho, Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal, 2007 [Anabela, “Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: re-reading news on climate change”, April 2007, “Public Understanding of Science” vol. 16 no. 2 223-243, MA] Studies of the relation of science and the media were for long dominated by a “transmissional” notion of communication. The “canonical view,” typically conceptualizing science communication as “popularization,” was centered on issues of quantity and rigor: how much scientific knowledge was reported in the media and how accurately (cf. Bucchi, 1998).2 Efficiency in the flow of data seemed to be the main goal. In recent decades, research has become more sophisticated. Awareness of the media’s transformative logics and mechanisms has led to investigation of the news values in operation in science reporting, the representations of risk associated to environmental issues, as well as the multiple modes of consumption of mediated meanings of science and the environment (e.g. Burgess et al., 1991; Anderson, 1997; Allan et al., 2000). As the constitutive role of language became clearer, attention turned to the discursive processes involved in the management of science and policy (e.g. Hajer, 1995). Studies of media coverage of science have concluded that news values are applied to science and any other topics in similar ways (Friedman et al., 1986; Einsiedel and Coughlan, 1993; Hansen, 1994). Novelty, controversy, geographic proximity and relevance for the reader, for example, are important determinants in the selection of science news. Various scholars have contributed to a better understanding of media representation of climate change. Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) have argued that the journalistic norm of balance has led to biased depictions of knowledge on climate change in the US prestige press with an excessive weight of those that deny its anthropogenic origins or that the problem is scientifically provable. Antilla (2005) has analyzed the frames constructed by a large number of American newspapers and wire services in relation to climate change science between March 2003 and February 2004. She contrasts the growing consensus in the scientific community with a media-generated image of controversy or uncertainty, with a great deal of attention being given to a handful of climate “skeptics.” In a wider analysis of the insertion of media coverage in social action, McCright and Dunlap (2000, 2003) have examined how the anti- environmental movement mobilized in the US to construct the “non-problematicity” of global warming by constructing alliances between conservative think tanks, fossil fuel interests and “skeptic” scientists, and looked at the repercussions of this in the media and in policy-making. Other research on media coverage of the greenhouse effect in the US has emphasized the cyclical nature of narratives (McComas and Shanahan, 1999) and the variable weight of different social actors (Trumbo, 1996) in the media. The media are key elements in the mediation of the “relations of definition” (Beck, 1992) between science, the public and the political spheres. The notion of science as an “ivory tower,” exempt from public exposure and debate, is increasingly inadequate. As our “risk society” (Beck, 1992) generates new problems that require scientific interpretation but affect us all, science is asked to “come out to the street” and to be the basis of political decisions. Policy-makers often expect scientists to provide answers to problems that are debated in the media and other public arenas, and make a variety of public uses of science to legitimize action or inaction. Scientific knowledge is also utilized by a number of other social actors, including business and activists, to justify particular programs. As new links are established between citizens, scientists, politicians and media professionals, the embeddedness of science and politics has become increasingly public and science has become more exposed to criticism, contestation and deconstruction. As a forum for the discourses of others and a speaker in their own right, the media have a key part in the production and transformation of meanings. Gamson (1999) suggests that the media can be an important “validator” of science. Considering facts as “institutionally validated claims about the world” (p. 23), Gamson argues that social institutions with the capability to bestow facticity on claims in a given realm are the “primary validators.” An example is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the field of climate change. The media act as “secondary validators” by reporting on and diffusing the factual claims of “primary validators.” But the media also act as “primary validators” in certain cases. In controversial issues, their gatekeeping role is more important as they decide which “wouldbe primary validators will be given voice, and how much of a voice” (p. 24). In the media, as in other arenas, there is no such thing as “pure facts.” Instead, “truth claims” are embedded with certain worldviews, judgments and preferences. A number of analyses of the representation of social and political matters in the media have indicated that there are significant ideological factors in play (Hall et al., 1978; van Dijk, 1991; Fairclough, 1995). Various authors have noted that there is no systematic critique of science (Nelkin, 1987; Gregory and Miller, 1998) in the media, which tend to reinforce the dominant “ideology of science”—the social authority and power of science as the guardian of the truth (Edmond and Mercer, 1999). News organs would thus contribute to a reification of science. and framing procedures of the greenhouse effect in the media. Link – Risk Analysis Scientific and environmental problems are rooted in risk analysis which re-entrench the public sphere. Wynne, Professor of Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), 2002 [Brian, “Risk and Environment as Legitimatory Discourses of Technology: Reflexivity Inside Out?”, May 2002, “ Current Sociology” May 2002 vol. 50 no. 3 459-477, MA]

Consistent with the opening up of technological 'black boxes', the sociological perspective on technology has delineated some of the contingent organizational-cultural conditions creating dramatic forms of risk such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster (Vaughan, 19961 Wynne, 1988), which may or may not be regarded as 'inevitable' consequences of a technology (Perrow, 1984). The technical neglect, or rationalization, of such social contingencies at the heart of the issue of rendering modern technologies viable and controlled, has nude cases such as Challenger (and also, for example, the neglect by experts of mundane slaughterhouse and rendering-plant practices as key to the human risks from the UK BSE epidemic) iconic in the modern cultural mood of pervasive human-created risk and insecurity along decaying trust in technical expertise and its institutions. This has become a defining theme of late-modern politics and culture, encapsulated in the theoretical discourse of reflexive modernization (Beck et al., 19942 Irwin, 20012 Kerr and Cunningham- Burley 201112 Welsh and McKechnie, 2002). Institutional bodies of government and policy have been forced to experiment with increased public participation in various arenas of expert decision over risks and technology regulation, in response to waning public trust in their processes and outcomes. The influential House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology (2000), composed of former senior scientific advisers and policymakers, described British public confidence ir1 scientific advice as ir1 a state of wholesale crisis. The European Commission White Paper on Governance (EC, Z(l]l), contained a chapter on "˜Democratizing expertise' which acknowledged the same broad crisis across Europe. Risk issues, from the BSE-vC]D fiasco to genetically modified crops, food safety crises, nuclear energy, contaminated blood services, haurdous wastes and genetic cloning, are the basic fuel and currency of this ramifying discourse and its associated institutional initiatives. The greater transparency and inclusiveness of these processes has been championed as the route to greater trust and thus more effective governance. Thus, official institutions have implicitly echoed Beck’s (1992) account of risk society and reflexive modernization, which involved the growth of a new defining public consciousness of risk, but with growing public alienation from the inability of official science to control those risks which it created. However, it is necessary to examine the extent to which these processes of public involvement have addressed the real origins of that widespread public disaffection. This requires closer examination of the meanings assumed by the institutional discourses which are imposed on the public, as well as asking what the origins and character of that negative public consciousness may be in the first place. Thus it is worth first reviewing how risk and its accompanying critical theme, environment, came to prominence in such a way. Further, it is worth addressing the implications of this dominant overall language of objective reflex – of nature speaking back to our choices and intentions through the unanticipated and unintended environmental or other consequences of those commitments. Beck (1992: 176) suggested in 1986 that ‘statements on risk are the moral statements of scientised society’. More recently, he stated: ‘In risk society theory, environmental problems are no longer conceived as external problems. Instead they are theorized at the centre of institutions’ (Beck, 2000: 224). However, elsewhere he has been criticized for giving too realist an account of the cultural reflexivity processes produced by these now-uncontrollable natural reactions to our escalating interventions in nature (e.g. Lash, 1994; Wynne, 1996b; see also Beck, 2000). But his proposals that risk is a moral discourse shaped in a scientized culture, and that environmental problems are inseparably intertwined with institutional problems of order and coherence, hint at a more complex epistemic status to risk and environmental knowledge. This has not been recognized or addressed in institutional responses to public disaffection and environmental critique. Indeed, to the extent it has been recognized at all, this non-instrumental, human dimension of public disaffection has been lampooned as unfounded in objective reality, as purely emotive and irrational, as in urgent need of education; or alternatively accommodated as legitimate but still intellectually vacuous and thus secondary, ethical or trust concerns (Wynne, 2001a). It is not seen to bear at all on the very same simple-realist cultural discourse which divides reality so rigidly in this way into the objective and the subjective, the real and the unreal.

Impact – Value to Life Modernity creates a “placeless space” from the erasure of location Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274, MA]

l begin with a quick further delineation of what is intended by the terms "place" and "space" and what this article calls the "placeless space" of modernity. Recently, much has been written about the promising return to theoretical significance of concepts of social space, in part inspired by Foucault’s reminder that space is a concept central to modem power and that the creation of modern space anchored in modern places allows the practice of modern life (Foucault l980; Livingstone 1992; Pred and Watts 1992). Here I follow strains of Anglo-American geography and French theory, as briefly embodied in Yi-Fu 'tuan and Michel de Certeau, and their deceptively simple separation of categories of space and place. Tuan reminds us that human experience involves movements and pauses, the former corresponding to our sense of space and the latter to our sense of place. "What begins as undifferentiated space," he writes, "becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value" (Tuan l977. 6). In de Certeau , this observation translates into a clear distinction between place, as a description of position, and space, as a description of practice, establishing a grid on which to map a geography of science and technology. Together. space and place describe the extent of life; the particular is realized through action, in vectors of motion across bounded locations. We know a street or a mountain by walking it, taking its measure through time (Certeau l984. I 17). Thus space and place, while defined in opposition to each other, can only be understood in their relationship as stable binary categories, linked through experience. Yet one central ambition of a modernist ethos could be described as the erasure of location in nature The experience of natural place is to be replaced by that of built space, given conditions with a controlled environment. Streets can be standardized, ordered by type and function and evenly paved. To maximize speed, an ideal highway would have no hills or curves and, as a result, would offer a uniform experience. With its uniform buildings, the modernist city can be located anywhere, positioned by charts of reason rather than history or by a national vision rather than a river or coast (Holston 1989). Thus what began as a clear distinction between human experience of mobile spaces and fixed places grows more complicated when considering distinctively modern settings. What develops in such situations can be described, then, as a sense of "placeless space," a state of experiencing mobility without geographical locality.

*Impacts Impact – Social Division The affirmative’s approach to create a technological frontier in space creates a social division that separates who “can” and who “can’t” Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274, MA]

Modern machines, then, can create a sense of universality, but at differing costs. By opening the possibility of outer space and reordering connections on the globe, a modern sky redefines human place. Categories as distinct as heaven and earth grow intertwined while artifice extends beyond horizons to see the world as one. Connections between what can be considered modern (civilization in an older rendering) and what is not (wilderness) lie exposed; certain boundaries between them blur. The same news broadcast can be heard simultaneously in Paris and Kourou, while a rocket can find a home in a rain forest. But at the same time, other boundaries are reinforced or even more starkly overlaid. The rocket comes and goes; it uses open space, preserving aspects of it, transforming others along its greater trajectory. A modern outpost, even a central one, is still not quite a center but rather an element of a frontier. And while the sky above us may be thought modem and by definition may bind the entire globe as one, it does not render an older human geography obsolete. There is another way in which the opening postcard is an accurate illusion. The empty central panel awaits command; it is free, available, open to any viewer. And yet not just anyone can be in front of any machine; modern technology requires modem technicians. The room that could be anywhere welcomes an inhabitant who could be anywhere, or rather an inhabitant who has been somewhere else to learn how to live properly within these glowing walls. Placeless space is not free from culture or social norms, even if blurs location. Rather, it depends on mastery of a set of cultural and social codes that allow for the possibility of universalized, mobile experience-the recognition of things one has never specifically seen before. The stationery store in Cayenne was, in this sense, familiar to me before I entered it, for to live a modern life is to live with such experience of dislocation, with neutralized environments and transported technologies. lt is the ability to imagine oneself a part of a placeless community, one extending well beyond the local horizon (Anderson |99 l). Technical knowledge divides those who can face screens, who speak the language of machinery, from those who cannot. And the borders of modern technical knowledge, as well as its certification, are perhaps the most mobile and yet entrenched of all. The final frontier, it seems, is indeed a technological one , if not quite in the manner conceived by some of its enthusiasts. This invocation often term frontier in relation to technology is a deliberate appeal to colonial geography-to extensions, appendages, and the space of border societies. A frontier is a space of change, of boundaries and bridges, translations and things partly known or understood (Certeau l984. I27). Its images prove useful in Kourou, where the space of technical activity varies across social and natural landscapes: actions correspond to decisions made in Europe; buildings that could stand anywhere rise in a place chosen for its particularity; and people living in an Amazonian landscape receive information and commodities directly from Paris. Migration occurs in several directions: skilled workers from Europe, manual labor from surrounding countries. Materials are transported to an open shoreline, only to be assembled and sent aloft. Below, however, rest the attendant technologies, the airconditioning, computers, telephone booths, cars, and video equipment, for engineers, while they may hunt for pleasure, can hardly be expected to hunt and gather. The last point runs deeper than irony, for in the Guiana Space Center we have the anthropological story in miniature: different ends of "development” collapsing together, rain forest to rockets, the sudden transi tion of humanity from Stone Age to Space Age. As one visiting French executive pointed out, where else can you buy wooden arrows one day and watch a satellite launch the next?" Irony lies on the surface here, but it is an irony born of technique. Beneath the swirl of unintended encounters (and attempts to talk about them) lies an instrumental rationale, translating the same set of local conditions into different languages of global possibilities. These encounters in turn call on other rationales and associated technologies, as production and consumption mingle together, as the culture of satellite extends back through the material of the rocket. Alt – Re-thinking The alternative is to acknowledge modernity while re-thinking the mindsets that re-entrench placeless space. Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274,MA]

Anthropology is a discipline long concerned with space and place. Its prefered source of knowledge is the "Held" (a destination requiring physical or psychological movement on the part of the researcher), and its preferred object of study is a geographically bounded group (in the case of ethnography, often localized to the level of a village). Along certain strands of the ethnographic tradition in cultural anthropology, the rhetorical function of this focus on the local scale and setting has often been to challenge overly categorical statements of human nature. To write an anthropology explicitly acknowledging modernity (Rabinow l989; Faubion 1988), and especially one that recognizes modem technology (Escobar l994), one would want to review the general narrative of placeless space and test its analytic fabric against experience in the world, for it is precisely along this divide between local and universal where domains of "traditional" and "modem” find definition as well as their respective narrations: ethnography and theory. Contrast the careful, occasionally numbing detail at the root of an ethnographic monograph describing a traditional society and its particular milieu (say Evans-Pritchard l940) with the wide sweep of a theoretical discussion of modem existence (say, Heidegger I977). ln the one, we find exact coordinates of a locatable people (The Nuer); in the other, we find an effortless abstraction of universal concept (The Question Concerning Techno1ngy). Exceptions exist, of course, in both directions; ethnography makes certain appeals to human universals and theory to located examples. But between the two, the force of gravity is neatly reversed: modernity floats upward while tradition roots in the ground. By explicitly concentrating on knowledge and tools, key symbolic and material aspects that constitute modem life, the social study of science and technology offers a natural gateway into the spatial distribution of modernity. Indeed, recently there has been considerable interest in issues of social space within its parameters (Ophir and Shapin 1991; Lynch 1991) as well a increased cross-fertilization with strains of anthropology (Hess and Layne 1992; Pfaffenbeager I992). Borrowing a trick or two from the traditional pursuits of tradition, the new ethnographers of the world of modem knowledge (e.g., Latour and Woolgar 1986; Traweelt 1988) have described laboratories and experiments as the key locations within it (Knorr-Cetina 1992; Pickering 1992). Yet social studies of science, exuberantly focused on the fruitful site of the laboratory, have spent less time outside its extended bounds in the fields beyond. When ethnographic procedures have been introduced into the social study of science, the study of a restricted domain-the research center or laboratory-becomes a project framed against philosophical debates about knowledge claims. ln such a setting, the discussion, although appealing to social context, frequently retains a universal rather than a local flavor. The social spaces in question lie at the heart of modernist science and technology, close to the great arteries of the industrially developed world. Local place recedes behind a typology of urbanized spaces while the lived interactions of professional practice overshadow those of cultural practice. Such is the vision of the laboratory. Yet laboratories themselves can be located within hierarchies of prestige and influences-an imperial map of knowledge-and their inhabitants recognize variants of cultural style amid professional practice (Traweek l992: Zabusky 1995). Recent studies of technology (e.g.. Bijker. Hughes. and Pinch 1987; Galison and Hevly 1992; Williams 1993; Winner 1986) succeed in reinstalling the material in culture, carefully positioning tools within systems and society and large-scale scientific research. Recent histories of science (e.g.. Cittadino 1990; Palladino and Worboys 1993; Osbome 1994; Pyenson 1993) recall the imperial scope of the scientific enterprise and its colonial extensions, acknowledging the material and symbolic effects of specific technologies (Adas I989; Headrick 1988). Indeed, recent work in urban planning reminds us that physical complexes can be-and increasingly are-designed throughout the world with the express hope of fostering modem technological growth, as economic engines and symbols (Castells and Hall 1994). Thus, for all their neutralizing elements, laboratories and machines are not simply neutral. And science and technology outside the core, probes and instruments outside laboratory walls, and machines outside of urban environments operate amid a welter of climates and encounters, observing and influencing, acting and malfunctioning. ln following such phenomena, one encounters a world of natural and social places amid the technical space of science, remnants of an older space of knowledge-the held-a space that can in turn reveal human terrains hidden behind the tools of the laboratory; for while modern sensibilities may stress pure categories, modem technologies rarely keep still, and bearing down their specific intersections often leads one far afield, across conceptual and disciplinary boundaries and between ideas and actions (Haraway 1989; Latour I987). Thus we retum to classic motions of anthropology: gyrations between situated and general, traditional and modern, natural and cultural. The challenge, however, is to take the modem as seriously as that which it has been positioned against, to respect the present as well as the past (Rahinow 1992), to become, in Latour's (1993) terms, symmetrical, to cease insisting on the pure gravity of categories. In this way, we can turn to asking the central question at the edge of modern place: what then, is outer space, and how did it come to be?

*Alts Alt – Critical Sociology Social construction is the starting point of critical sociology. We must go by a social evaluation of science. Restivo and Loughlinx Sal Restivo- Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies & Information Technology Program Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , Julia Loughlin- Professor at Syracuse Univerity, 1987 [Sal Restivo and Julia Loughlin, “Science Communication” Pg 486-508, http://scx.sagepub.com/content/8/3/486.full.pdf+html, MA] ln order to appreciate Kafka, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Eco we must recognize that when we talk about science, truth, logic and related ideas we are always talking about social relations. This way of "seeing" things sensitizes us at once to the progressive and regressive aspects of words, concepts, and terms that as social relations can embody inequalities, destroy environments, inhibit individual growth and development, and undermine inquiry. As epistemic agents, we may and do choose to pursue inquiry under self-imposed limitations because we find the social, personal, or ecological costs of "knowledge for its own sake" unacceptable. When Campbell writes about "fit-increasing processes," the emancipatory epistemologist wants to know-"fit for what?" If the answer is "fit to the physical world," it must be remembered that we are always (intentionally and unintentionally) changing things on the phenomenal level of reality. By changing the phenomenal world, by constructing and reconstructing the world we study, we also affect the object world and therefore the "laws of nature" to which we have access. When, finally, we recognize that social life is not only the source of concepts of nature and scientific theories, but itself part of the "reality as a whole" we are in fact studying, we see why the Campbellian program runs aground; it does so because even while promoting interdisciplinary approaches it insists on separating social and physical worlds, and social and physical sciences. Campbell gives us a "strong program"in the sociology of science, that is, he assumes with Bloor (1976) and others that the best way to study science is to use the methods of the "successful” sciences. This is a problem because sociology within his program is considered an "immature" science but is called on to give an account of science that encompasses the "mature" natural and physical sciences, and simultaneously to serve as a basis for promoting the maturity of the social sciences- including, presumably, the sociology of science. Aside from any contradictions this implies, the approach places sociology under the banner of science (in its prevailing organizational and ideological form) and makes sociology of science a demarcationist junior partner to epistemology. It can be contrasted with an approach that draws attention to problems of authority and competence in science as a central feature of its agenda (Phillips, 1974). Science is a social institution, and scientific activities, representations, and products are intimately identified with that institution. Therefore, any evaluation or critique of science is an evaluation or critique of social relations, social power and social control, the balance of conservative and transformative social forces, and values. Any call for an alternative science is a call for an alternative way of organizing for and thinking about the production of knowledge, and alternative ways of, and reasons for, pursuing knowledge production, and distributing and utilizing knowledge. Campbell (l984: 30) stresses visual demonstration as a basis for science-"ln the paradigm instance, the "˜facts' are visually supported beliefs shared by the community and visual demonstrations introduced in a persuasive process." But while he gives vision a social dimension here, he does not stress-as Heelan ( l983: 75) does, for example-that "vision is always highly contextual, and in each context the foreground- background relation is different." Nor does he discuss the social construction processes that create validity out of visual demonstration, as Shapin (1984) does. This social construction-social context perspective must be the starting point for any critical sociology of science. Emancipatory epistemology adds a concern for revealing and opposing (l) the fetishism of cognitions, representations, and knowledge, especially in the theory and practice of science; (2) the fetishism of such ideas as objectivity, reality, rationality, truth, validity, and science; and (3) the alienation of knowledge specialists (including scientific workers), and people in general from the processes and products of inquiry or knowledge production. In emancipatory epistemology-or better, emancipatory theories of inquiry-the program for a free society and personal liberty is simultaneous with-and never subordinated to- the program for free inquiry (Restivo, l983b). Alt – Change Risk Analysis The alternative is to recognize the epistemological ambiguity of risk claims as essential. It is necessary to change our views on risk analysis because it creates a technological nirvana of control and hermeneutic sanitization. Wynne, Professor of Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), 2002 [Brian, “Risk and Environment as Legitimatory Discourses of Technology: Reflexivity Inside Out?”, May 2002, “ Current Sociology” May 2002 vol. 50 no. 3 459-477, MA]

In this narrative, ‘risk’ was there waiting to be discovered, carrying its own intrinsic meaning, which the visionaries, through their heroic powers of access to the mysteries of Nature, were able to reveal to men of commerce and others who could then drive the economic, cultural and technological revolution of modernity: By defining a rational process of risk-taking, these innovators provided the missing ingredient that has propelled science and enterprise into the world of speed, power, instant communication and sophisticated finance that marks our age. Their discoveries about the nature of risk . . . lie at the core of our modern market economy that nations around the world are hastening to join. (Bernstein, 1996: 2; emphasis added) and a claim of control are advanced as defining features of this new state of enlightenment. It is this scientific risk discourse which gives total control of ‘the future at the service of the present’, the implication being that risk analysis identifies and domesticates all significant future consequences of the relevant actions. In this way ignorance and unanticipated consequences – lack of control – lying beyond the reach of existing scientific knowledge, thus potentially embarrassing in future to risk assessment, are seamlessly deleted. Risk is thus assumed to define the full sphere of conceivable meaning for considering new technologies and their implications, and science reveals this independent meaning. This is the prevalent epistemic understanding of risk and risk knowledge – that they are not constructed meanings, but objectively given ones. Moreover, they exhaustively define the objective meaning of the public issues of technology. A striking contemporary resonance is to be found between this scholarly understanding of risk, and the predominant understanding of the domain of lack of control, or ignorance, exposed by Grove-White (2001) in an exchange with the chair of a key UK government scientific advisory committee. As a member of the UK Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission, Grove-White was questioning the institutional scientist at a public hearing. The relevant passage was as follows (Grove-White, 2001: 471): [Grove-White, GW]: ‘Do you think people are reasonable to have concerns about possible ‘unknown unknowns’ where GM plants are concerned? [Scientist]: Which unknowns? [G-W]: That’s precisely the point. They aren’t possible to specify in advance. Possibly they could be surprises arising from unforeseen synergistic effects, or from unanticipated social interventions. All people have to go on is analogous experience with other technologies . . . [ Scientist]: I’m afraid it’s impossible for me to respond unless you can give me a clear indication of the unknowns you are speaking about. [G-W]: In that case don’t you think you should add health warnings to the advice you’re giving ministers, indicating that there may be ‘unknown unknowns’ which you can’t address? [ Scientist]: No, as scientists, we have to be specific. We can’t proceed on the basis of imaginings from some fevered brow . . . This nicely delineates the dominant, entrenched, cultural-institutional mindset in which any consequence that may lie outside prevailing scientific risk-knowledge cannot be described – by definition, because it is a matter of scientific ignorance – and cannot therefore be given any standing, even as a general category, of which there are many real, costly, examples. Responsibility for such possible effects is thus pre-empted and externalized, and anyone who might wish to refer to their relevance suffers from ‘a fevered brow’. The public meaning of the issue is thus very tightly confined to what we can control, practically or intellectually, with the institutionalized discourse of risk. Bernstein’s historical celebration of scientific risk’s role in permitting the modern technological nirvana of control, has manifestly constructed the meaning of risk by limiting it to ‘what we can specify, predict and control now’ and then assuming this meaning as the legitimate public meaning. Grove-White’s suggestion, derived from academic research on public attitudes (Grove-White et al., 1997; Wynne et al., 2001), that the public may have different meanings which would address the implications of indeterminacy and lack of control (for example by being more rigorous in questioning original aims, purposes, controlling interests and conditions), was simply unimaginable to a modern institutional scientific actor, who seemed unwittingly to reflect identical cultural habits to those of Bernstein. Thus the forms of institutionalization of risk have not just reduced the scope of instrumental attention – they have also produced a kind of hermeneutic sanitization, deleting any other public meanings which are not subsumable to this one-dimensional realist risk framework. For the sake of democracy, not only instrumental effectiveness, I suggest that the epistemological ambiguity – implicit multivalency – of ‘realist’ environmental and risk claims, as key parts of the critique of modern scientific and technological culture, has to be recognized as essential, instead of being purified and deleted. In various technological and environmental issues ranging from nuclear power (Wynne, 1982) to GM organisms, global climate change and sustainable development (Irwin, 2001; Macnaghten et al., 1996), this simplerealist institutional discourse and its implicit meanings have been presumptively and rigidly imposed on the issues, and on those involved, with damaging effects on public identification with those same institutions supposed to be representing the public interest. Through all such issues, ever since the earliest years of expressed public concerns about nuclear technology, clearly defined human issues and meanings have pervaded and inspired those ‘environmental’ concerns, not as dishonest or misconceived ‘hidden agendas’ (as they have been caricatured, if recognized) but as authentic dimensions of public meaning – of what is understood to be at stake. Yet the sovereign institutional discourses have systematically deleted them, and the very condition of ambiguity, from sight, while perversely thereby imposing their own normative but unacknowledged human visions. Epistemological ambiguity is necessary to stabilize the scientific community Wynne, Professor of Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), 2002 [Brian, “Risk and Environment as Legitimatory Discourses of Technology: Reflexivity Inside Out?”, May 2002, “ Current Sociology” May 2002 vol. 50 no. 3 459-477, MA]

Risk has become the form of public discourse through which public meaning is given to technology and innovation, as defined in institutional discourses such as government, media, legal and commercial, all deriving from the scientific. Yet claims of risk are endemically and increasingly contested. This reflects more than mere uncertainty in propositional claims about consequences (Wynne, 2001b), which is all that official discourses recognize. I suggest that, as a matter of democratic necessity as well as instrumental effectiveness, the epistemological ambiguity – implicit multivalency – of ‘realist’ environmental and risk discourse has to be recognized as essential; instead of being lamented, purified and deleted. The same applies to the unacknowledged human discourses which shape, and are projected by, the institutional scientific policy discourses of risk (Wynne, 2001a). The dominant belief has been that properly effective public knowledge for policy needed to be not only true, but also clear. If gaining the clarity needed for public authority meant compromising strict truth, this was a sound bargain. The field of science and public policy was founded on this instrumental and positivist premise (Caldwell, 1968; Price, 1965). However, SSK in environmental and related policy fields has shown that often it is ambiguous knowledge that is necessary to sustain the hybrid epistemic networks spanning multiple subcultures and local frames of meaning (Van der Sluis et al., 1998), for example in order to maintain an epistemic network sharing a scientific and policy perspective such as climate change and greenhouse gas controls. Galison’s (1997) discussion of ‘trading zones’ between scientific subcultures, and Star and Griesemer’s (1987) concept of ‘boundary objects’, though different in detail, share some fundamentals with this perspective, suggesting the more general relevance of these questions about ambiguity, realism and coherence (see also Jasanoff, 1990; Porter, 1995). In the climate change arena, Van der Sluis et al. (1998) have shown how the framing meaning of an apparently precise scientific concept with a clear objective referent, climate sensitivity – the estimated global-average seasurface temperature rise for a doubling of carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations – has varied markedly, but apparently unproblematically. Their analysis suggests that this informal ambiguity, or hermeneutic flexibility, allowed it to be an ‘anchoring device’ in stabilizing an otherwise unstable and potentially incoherent policy-scientific community. It allowed these divergent meanings to coexist at local levels while creating normative and propositional convergence at a wider level. Waterton and Wynne (1996) have proposed a similar understanding of the informal (and fragile) role of formal realist scientific nature classifications in European policy concentration. This kind of work suggests that in the more culturally extensive, fractured social worlds typical of modern public policy, ambiguous terms of discourse may be more realistic because their meanings are multivalent and flexible. These terms are more effective than artificially precise, apparently unambiguous ones for the difficult task of representing the objects of interest to, and creating bridges of common purpose and meaning across otherwise differentiated social worlds. Even where there is apparent cohesion, alternative human meanings may still be in need of exploration and practical articulation; thus this exploration of ambiguity – plurality of meaning – is a more general issue than might appear from measures which assume such plurality must always be manifested in overt conflict. Indeed many modern technology controversies involve manifest plurality of public meanings which scientific discourses are heroically trying to translate into their own restricted one-dimensional terms, or to deny entirely. Ambiguity is fundamentally different from mere lack of precision, to which it is nevertheless often reduced by the scientistic culture of modern policy. Alt – Public Involvement The alternative is to include the public into solutions for achieving sustainability Rommeveit, Funtowitzcz and Strand, Kjetil, philosopher and a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, Silvio, scientific officer at the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), European Commission Joint Research Centre, Roger, Professor and Director at SVT; Visiting Prof., Institute of Environmental Science and Technology ,2010 [KjetilRrommeviet, Silvio Funtowitcz, Roger Strand, “Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice,” Google Books, MA]

When it comes to prescriptions for action, also the UN Report easily makes the leap from the discourse of science to the discourse of economics: ‘The very limited data we do have at least suggests a willingness by many worldwide to pay higher prices for fuel if the money raised was devoted to reducing air pollution and higher prices for electricity produced by renewable energy sources’ (Leiserowitz, ZOO7/ 2008, p. 36). Thus, in spite of admitting to large gaps in the knowledge base, and in spite of being more informed by social science models, the UN Development Report ends up by affirming the IPCC image of the ‘global lay decision maker’ as acting mainly according to the prescripts of science and economics. Hence our argument here is not that people do not understand science, or that climate science should not be communicated as important to the people of the world. The problem is, as mentioned on p. 151, that of re-contextualising, within a myriad of different policies, communities and life-worlds, the global discourse opened up with the IPCC reports, As stated by Stephen Toulmin, There is a … contrast between our local knowledge of the patterns we Find in concrete events, and the universal, abstract understanding embodied in purely theoretical points of view, The substance of everyday experience refers always to a â€˜where and when`: a ‘here and now` or a ‘there and then’, General theoretical abstractions, by contrast, claim to apply always and everywhere, and so , . ,hold good nowhere-in-particular. (Toulmin, 2003, pp. 15-16) For most people, the discourse promoted by the IPCC reports as well as the UN report speaks from this global perspective, from a great distance. That may be fine, as a first approximation, but it needs to be recognised that such discourse at- a-distance is better suited for purposes of social engineering than for engaging and mobilising people in the places, cultures and governance structures within which they find themselves. Thus, over-hasty applications of the models originating in the IPCC report may easily result in misconceptions about human agency and social action. Second, but closely related: insofar as the ‘risk perception’ model remains the main platform for conceiving of the ‘social dimension' of climate change, the democratic and communicative challenges connected to large scale restructuring of society are left out. According to one conception of democracy that has become increasingly popular throughout the latter years, ‘… outcomes are legitimate to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation by all those subject to the decision in question’ (Dryzek, 2001, p. 651). This perspective remains absent in the IPCC reports, as well as the UN Development Report: Citizens, communities and publics are recognised as parts of the problem of achieving sustainability, but they are not included in the creation of solutions,

Reps Shape Reality Representations of outer space matter- shape our own society Redfield, Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 1996 [Peter, “Science Technology and Human Values, June 1996, “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground” pg 251-274, MA]

This essay examines a portion of the history of technology behind that image with an eye to where things fall on and off maps. The case at hand is particularly germane became it involves the realization of natural space beyond the confines of the globe: the literal "outer space" of the Space Age and consequent redefinitions of the human sphere below. Thus this discussion revolves around twin meanings of the term "space." one thought in physical terms and the other in human terms. This unavoidable word play serves to underline the historicity of the abstract expanse of the universe, recalling that before the launching of the first artificial satellite there was no active outer space to redefine the more immediate active one below-in a sense, no modern sky above a modem ground. I would advance the claim that technologies associated with the exploration and commercialization of outer space have significantly transformed experiences of "social space" on a global scale, exemplified by the redefinition of the equator relative to rockets and satellite orbits. The example of Kourou and the Guiana Space Center both illustrates this point and describes its anthropological significance, serving as it reminder that human technologies unfold between horizons of human history and geography and also amid narratives of human temporal location embedded in expressions such as "Stone Age" and "Space Age," for technologies, in addition to acting on the world, play significant roles-literal and symbolic-in efforts to differentiate between groups of humans inhabiting it, both past and present. What follows, then, is written between theory and empirical observation, moving back and forth from general themes to a particular instance and invoking more than one modern narrative tradition. Even as its subject is alternately abstract and exact, so too will be the language, for I would make my point as I have found it: between general statements, personal experience, reflection, and the words of others' lf there is a special promise in the social study of science and technology, l believe it lies in the incongruities of the objects under scrutiny, their mixture of irrepressible artificiality and naturalizing certainty. Unsettling definitions of realms social and natural, scientific practices. and technological artifacts open a back door to anthropology, returning us to an order of humans through an order of things. By its very existence, the space center in French Guiana negotiates the boundary of worlds, providing means of transportation across them. In examining the context of this technical center with respect to issues of place and space, then, the goal is to dislodge discussions of modem technology, reorienting global and local realities, machines, and human lives.

*Representations*A2s A2: Females in NASA Female astronauts still uphold the gendered program: Only with the domestication of space have women been allowed a role in manned spaceflight as the missions allow women to be a part of “homesteaders” instead of “explorers” reinforcing traditional gender roles Sage ‘9 Daniel, PhD in Space, Place and Politics, is a Research Associate with Loughborough University (The Sociological Review, “Giant leaps and forgotten steps: NASA and the performance of gender”, Vol. 57: 146-163, May 2009) While Glenn’s reference to ‘undesirable’ may be telling of shifting attitudes towards women, he nevertheless asserts that there is something inherently masculine about these interactions between bodies, risk and technology, so that only particular bodies were deemed not just more desirable but almost factually suitable. After the hearing, female astronauts were frequently the subject of further derision, often evoking the ‘heterosexual matrix’ of submissive female sexuality, as Wernher von Braun demonstrated in a speech given at Mississippi State College (19 Nov. 1962): Well, all I can say is that the male astronauts are all for it. And as my best friend Bob Gilruth [director of Johnston Space Center of manned spaceflight] says, we’re reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment (from Parade Magazine Sunday Supplement, December 1962 – quoted in Kevles, 2003: 4). Harry Hess, a Princeton Professor and Chair of the Space Studies Board at the National Academy of Sciences, adopted a similar approach to explain away female astronauts by stating unequivocally that ‘leaving the kids behind was not part of womanhood’s idealized image’ (quoted in Kevles, 2003: 47). Ultimately, as Weitekamp (2004) surmised of the Apollo era: ‘NASA had no room in its mission objectivities for acting as an agent of social change’ (p. 157). Indeed it was not until 1978, and the development of the shuttle programme, that NASA would select women as astronauts.8 By this point frontier analogies were being drawn upon retrospectively to excuse the omission of women from past astronaut selections; NASA’s media rhetoric talked of the shift from explorers to pioneers, or from surveyors to homesteaders (Kevles, 2003: 56). Making a similar nod to spatialized gender roles, Carolyn Huntoon, describes what she saw as the reasons behind the new policy for astronaut selections to the space shuttle: ‘It was going to have more space in it for the crews. It was going to have some of the conveniences of home that previous space capsules had not had. And the laws were changing in our country that women could no longer be discriminated against. The decision was made that we would select qualified women to fly in space’ (2002). Again the domestication of space missions appears to go hand-in-hand with the presence of women in outer space. In both cases, stereotypical gender roles, frequently made through a gendered (mis)reading of American frontier expansion in the 19th century, provided an ill-fitting though seemingly seductive temporal analogy to explain away almost thirty years of institutionally prejudicial accounts of bodily difference and space exploration. This re- telling of a spatial division of labour, as a teleological sequence, where male explorers precede female pioneers, reveals the way prescriptive bodily performances were retrospectively legitimated within a heterosexual matrix, even by women themselves.

*Links Link – NASA NASA remains a male-dominated institution with oppressive gendered identities Sage ‘9 Daniel, PhD in Space, Place and Politics, is a Research Associate with Loughborough University (The Sociological Review, “Giant leaps and forgotten steps: NASA and the performance of gender”, Vol. 57: 146-163, May 2009) Across these varied sources, from films to oral histories, I have sought to render visible some of the performances surrounding the dis/organization of gendered identities within NASA. Just as Butler (1990) proposes, my methodological choices are manifestly also my political strategy. I have focused on those moments within and surrounding NASA where gender roles became disengaged from a straightforward alignment with biological sex. My intention here has been to reveal the lived circumstances and embodied practices through which totalizing gender discourses are enacted. Following Butler (1990), I have focused on the way embodied performances, from grass-cutting to astronaut testing, inscribe and transform normative binaries. My reading of NASA is, of course, partial, developed from a particular theoretical stance towards gender, combined with three extended, though unavoidably limited, slices of NASA history. I have sought to foreground how a diverse set of statements concerning gender implicitly perform the gendered subjects they were explicitly trying to represent. The elision of the performativity of gender, which is perhaps best exampled by John Glenn’s reference to the social factuality of gender roles, both obscures and reinforces its normative power-effects. My focus upon women and NASA, while in keeping with Butler’s (2004) own understanding of women as a necessary aspect of treating gender as a ‘becoming’, has ostensibly downplayed some of the multiple masculinities within NASA. However, as the tensions between the Mercury 7 astronauts and rocket scientists near the start of this chapter reveal, as well as NASA’s use of a non-coherent concept of risk in the ‘Lovelace’ hearing, I suggest that multiplying gendered identities, whether male or female, does not necessarily help expose and challenge their normative power-effects. Put more formally, perhaps it is problematic to valorize ‘Self’ multiplicity and then risk overlooking the way multiplicity can sometimes subjugate that which appears ‘Other’. This reading of the experiences of women within NASA illustrates the sacrifice and cost for women who failed to repeat a recognizable gendered identity, yet perhaps equally it provides a great deal of potentiality to rethink the prevalent reading of NASA, particularly during the Apollo era, as an uncontested masculinist realm. As Judith Butler (1990) maintains, gendered identities must be constantly performed, hence are capable of being otherwise. While the accounts of Carolyn Huntoon testify how NASA, and in particular the human spaceflight programme, continues to remain a male-dominated institution it is perhaps encouraging to note here the many embodied examples – from Dotty Duke’s lawn-mowing to female rocket trajectory programmers and Geraldine Cobb’s ‘expert’ body – where binary categorization, prejudice and discrimination only fuelled, and indeed frequently necessitated, transgression of prescriptive and oppressive gendered identities.

Normative gendered binaries continue to exist with employment in NASA- the Apollo era proves with the pervasive disciplinary and self-disciplinary techniques of women Sage ‘9 Daniel, PhD in Space, Place and Politics, is a Research Associate with Loughborough University (The Sociological Review, “Giant leaps and forgotten steps: NASA and the performance of gender”, Vol. 57: 146-163, May 2009) While NASA recruited women, this does not automatically prohibit the organized persistence of normative gendering practices. Indeed, by the 1960s women had long been contributing to American aeronautical science and engineering, especially during WWII, while binary assumptions persisted about the alignment of ‘masculine’/‘feminine’ and ‘male’/‘female’ work under the rubric of American progress (Kevles, 2003). Many women working for NASA during the 1960s and 1970s testify to pervasive disciplinary and self-disciplinary techniques that articulate normative gender binaries. Donna Shirley recalls her experiences working as a mission engineer in NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory during the 1960s and 70s: Well, things are a lot better than they used to be. There’s an episode in the book where my horny old boss at McDonnell Aircraft was chasing me around, a married guy, and how I finally got rid of him by subterfuge and trickery. But I don’t think that the overt sexual harassment of professional women – I don’t think it’s quite as bad. I mean, you hear a lot more about it, but it used to be there wasn’t any sense in reporting it because nobody would do anything about it so it didn’t make any difference. My impression is that the really bad stuff, for the most part, is a lot better than it used to be (Shirley, 2001). Shirley goes on remembering her accomplishments, though largely in terms of her ability to negotiate active discrimination and gender norms: I think just being able to accomplish as much as I was able to accomplish with a lot of strikes against me, mainly being female – the aerospace industry is a cold warrior kind of industry, and it’s not easy for a woman to do well in it. There are no female center directors. There’s only been one, Carolyn Huntoon, and she didn’t last long. Carolyn Griner was the deputy of Marshall for a long time, never became center director. Plenty of opportunities to promote her but she wasn’t. There are no women AAs [Associate Administrators] in NASA except things like public relations and policy and things like that. And the same is true across the centers, there’s not very many females in power positions at all, and it’s very true across the whole industry. If you go to the aerospace industry, you will not see any female faces except maybe human resources. Tellingly perhaps, Carloyn Huntoon repeats uncontested gender oppositions to articulate her experiences of gender discrimination: There were individuals in the program that did discriminate, did make life hard for me and other women. Luckily, they moved on. I outlasted most of them. So I think the idea of women not being just like men, some people can’t get over that. They would [hire] women [to] do jobs, and the fact that they didn’t behave just like another guy would do meant they couldn’t do the job. [Some managers] weren’t willing to give them a chance to develop their own way of doing things. I ran into that several times. Other women have, too. It’s not unique to me (Huntoon, 2002). She continues: But I decided that what I was accomplishing and what I was able to get done in spite of all that was worth it to me to stay there and do it, and that’s why I did. A lot of women did not, would not do that. A lot of women have left, not just NASA, but other places at mid or high-level careers because they just didn’t want to put up with what you had to put up with. To me, it was worth it, and, as I said, in general I was treated very well by most people. There was a few that did not, but that’s life. It’s not always good (Huntoon, 2002). Feminist scholars have observed (Lerman et al., 2004) that the presence of women in such stereotypically ‘masculine’ careers did eventually provide a repertoire of case studies that would help feminist writers and activists later challenge the straightforward alignment of ‘masculine’/‘feminine’ with ‘male’/‘female’. Given such experiences within NASA, it is perhaps not surprising to find how Charles Bingham, who once worked for NASA human resource development at Houston, expressed the pessimism felt by women (and ethnic minorities) towards employment in NASA during the Apollo era: If you know NASA at all, you know this is not where women and minorities would normally turn as a first opportunity for a job. At that time [during Apollo] particularly even with the best women in the world, there were not that many women taking advanced engineering programs. That’s not to say that they were not out there, but it is to say that you had to work harder to go find them or to make the fact known that Houston was a good place for women and minorities to work. A lot of them didn’t believe it. A lot of them didn’t believe that you could go into an old-fashioned engineering shop and ever be given any responsibility or become a real partner in the organization (Bingham, 2000). It is important to note that while normative gendered binaries continue to be performed within NASA into the 21st century (even in the accounts of women previously suffering from such narrow identity prescriptions), the enduring passion and skill with which many women invested themselves in spaceflight subverts many gender essentialisms, not least the premise that womanly and manly desires can only be understood through a neat heterosexual matrix of oppositions (Butler, 1990). Indeed, as Butler (2004) suggests, it is inaccurate to equate any measure of institutional identity with either strictly masculine or feminine identities, values or behaviours. Rather we should describe the ongoing dis/organization of normative gender practices and foreground those moments – as Carolyn Huntoon’s account might example – when the easy mapping of concepts of gender and sexual difference onto organizational and technical efficacy becomes problematic. The next section develops this line of thinking about transgressive desires and bodily competences by attending to a set of bodies that offered potentialities to throw into relief perhaps one of the most popularly understood ‘masculine’ technical environments: the spacecraft. Link – Human Space-flight Risk calculations in new manned-spaceflight programs are part of the masculine identity that excludes the female body Sage ‘9 Daniel, PhD in Space, Place and Politics, is a Research Associate with Loughborough University (The Sociological Review, “Giant leaps and forgotten steps: NASA and the performance of gender”, Vol. 57: 146-163, May 2009) The masculine self-identity of pilots has often been understood through an eroticized desire for risk and suffering, or what Law (2002) terms ‘Thrills and spills’ (p. 32). Similarly, McCurdy (1993), quotes one Apollo astronaut as saying, ‘Recognition of risk is what made us as good as we were’ (p. 62), while another states ‘But if it [risk of death] was like, one in one hundred, you would do it, you take it . . . There were so many ways it could happen’ (p. 63). Across such statements astronauts’ fetishized tolerance of risk as a part of the performance of manliness; risk became part of the astronauts’ identity, contributing to what Tom Wolfe’s novel (1979) famously referred to as ‘The Right Stuff’. Yet this attitude towards physical and mental subjugation was not mere blind masochism; it was, also predicated upon a set of techniques concerned with the control of bodies wherein the astronauts were rigorously tested to confirm a high degree of corporeal control and calculation over their own bodies and perform tasks in this hostile environment – to maintain control in a situation despite the discomfort and vulnerability and get the job done. Within all these images of the astronaut there exist mutually shaping essentializing associations between masculinity, corporeality, outer space, risk and high-technology that prefigure the identity construction of ‘The Right Stuff’; becoming increasingly evident when challenged with transgressive Other(s), namely female bodies.6 Such an instance occurred in 1962, when a small group of women successfully passed the some of same physical and psychological tests as the Mercury astronauts, in a privately funded women astronaut study organized by a physiologist called Dr. William Lovelace (see Shayler and Moule, 2003; Weitekamp, 2004). The women now sought NASA’s support to become astronauts. ‘Lovelace’s Women in Space Project’ (Weitekamp, 2004) or ‘The Mercury 13’ (Ackmann, 2004) de-stabilized many of the iterative bodily performances enacted through NASA that prescribed binary gendered assumptions.7 The desire of these women to become astronauts and their embodied suitability, transgressed the tacitly masculinist spatio-temporal categorization of different bodies under modernity (Massey, 2005: 93). These bodies offered, in Judith Butler’s (1990) terms, a sense of hope ‘in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’ (p. 192). Just as some homosexual bodily performances may present a particular body in an opposing gender role (see Butler, 1990: 167– 170), thus exposing the de-stabilized ‘ground’ of both gendered identities, these astronauts tacitly desired to place a female body in a hegemonically masculine guise. Yet equally, as Butler (1990) makes clear, such transgressions, while sometimes transformative, are frequently accompanied by ‘punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them’ (p. 190). For example, in 1962 Dr. Lovelace sought the Navy’s permission to expand his use of their facilities to provide further evidence of the women’s suitability. The official reply to the Navy was that ‘NASA does not at this time have a requirement for such a program’ (Weitekamp, 2004: 128). This reply was then made known to Dr. Lovelace and the women involved; it effectively cancelled the nascent woman into space project. Here, the twin spectres of technological determinism and instrumentalism (Feenberg, 1999) are used to conjure up a belief in value-neutral, automatic and unilateral technical decision-making. In turn, this meant that the space programme could be constructed as if it were an inevitable temporal sequence, expressing natural gender roles and bodily practices, and devoid of ethno-political import (Shayler and Moule, 2003). The decision was re-examined in a heated Congressional hearing in July 1962, in which the Lovelace Women, led by Geraldine ‘Jerrie’ Cobb, were crossexamined by Congressmen partly in an attempt to illustrate their technical worth objectively, above and beyond their male peers (Shayler and Moule, 2003, p. 149). The women demonstrated the capacity of their bodies to pass the same flight-tests as men, as well as possessing some important advantages, not least their requirements for less food and oxygen – on account of their smaller size (Penley, 1997: 55). Ultimately, however, the women’s transgressive bodily desires were blocked through quasi-judicial significations of risk. Namely, a belief asserted by NASA that astronauts had to be jet test pilots, a profession women were already barred from, because only jet test pilots possessed the necessary experience to undertake high-risk flight experiments. This point appeared already undermined by NASA’s own demonstration that spacecraft could fly automatically in outer space (Penley, 1997), combined with the rejection of many skilled test pilots by the astronaut selectors, such as Chuck Yeager. NASA’s Chief of Manned Space Flight, George Low, then explained to Congress how NASA support for the women-in-space project would set his work back, despite the fact that Lovelace had requested the very limited use of Navy not NASA facilities (Ackmann, 2004: 166). More implicitly, it appears the decision revolved around a belief that women were excluded from becoming jet test pilots (or astronauts) because it was deemed too risky (Weitekamp, 2004: 149). In this case, a masculinized relationship between technology and risk within American modernity proved intractable; accordingly men were able to dictate thresholds of female risk. As Weitekamp (2004) explains, the male construction of female risk prevalent in NASA was two-fold: on the one hand, NASA seemed reluctant to subject women to degrees of risk because ‘the prospect of subjecting a woman to mortal danger betrayed the rigidly defined gendered roles asserted in post-war America’ (p. 3). On the other hand, this paternalist designation of women as needing protecting might itself lead the public to conclude that if women flew in spacecraft then the craft themselves might be deemed too straightforward and safe. Thus as Weitekamp (2004) puts it, if ‘a woman could perform those tasks [it] would diminish their prestige’ (p. 3). The appropriation within NASA of risk as the legitimate means by which to exclude women from outer space appears only strengthened through its seemingly contradictory blending of different masculine identities. In this case, risk is alternately, and seemingly paradoxically, constructed as both a cipher for the rational management of hazards and the manly celebration of danger. Here the capacity to render masculinity fractionally coherent (Law, 2002) renders it more, not less, persistent in justifying patriarchal norms. The Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who had just returned back to Earth to a ticker-tape parade after being the first American to orbit the Earth, summarized his verdict in a final statement within the hearing: I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may be undesirable (quoted in Weitekamp, 2004: 151). Link – Space NMD Space-based missile defense produces sexual images of male control and violence- the feminized idea of a “space shield” leads to total control and annihilation of female presence Caputi ’88 Jane, Ph.D. , is Professor of American Studies, University of New Mexico (Feminist Studies, “Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Phallotechnology”, Vol 14.3: 486-524, Autumn 1988) And "Star Wars," although confounded by the doublethink of defense, proudly carries on this tradition of missile envy. No longer content to merely measure, the explicit vow is now to unman the enemy-a fate, however, which is intended only for the non-U.S. missiles. For however much "Star Wars" proponents want to emasculate their rivals, they desire only to bone up the home team. About 10 percent of the SDI's budget is explicitly for nuclear weapons, what the New York Times coyly refers to as the "dark side."33 Such research includes items such as advanced "penetra- tion aids" to help the obviously still potent U.S. missiles reach their targets, as well as high-speed projectiles and the futuristic laser and particle beams. As laser expert John D.G. Rather, also a strong advocate of "Star Wars," wrote in a 1982 article, any country that was the sole possessor of space lasers would thus possess "the longest 'big stick' in history."34 This obsession with lengths, measurements, and comparisons of "sticks" points to one further supreme reversal: it is not women who have penis envy.35 There is one further connection I would like to make here. For this common bond between male sexuality, force, and destruction (as obvious in the words fuck and screw and the institution of rape as in the MX missile) clearly provides a touchstone for the identification of patriarchal ideologies, paradigms, and practices.36 Hence, the patriarchal state's nuclear age began with a "fathered" bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" and dropped on a city chosen because it provided a "virgin" target. It has subsequently been marked by the development of ever more mature and destructive phallic devices. But at the same time, another form of that bond between sex and violence structures a parallel patriarchal age, an age I have elsewhere called "The Age of Sex Crime."37 By this I mean the modem phenomenon of the random, serial sexual murder (men killing predominantly women) which has been on the rise throughout this century, now reaching "epidemic" proportions.38 Just as the nuclear age had a profoundly mythic initiating event-the Trinity explosion in the New Mexico desert in July 1945-the Age of Sex Crime was first blasted into being in London 1888, with the essentially unprecedented crimes of Jack the Rip- per.39 That still-anonymous killer actually invented modem sex crime; we might think of him as its "father." These murders provided a mythic paradigm for subsequent killers such as the "Boston Strangler," "Jack the Stripper," the "Hillside Strangler," the "Son of Sam," the "Yorkshire Ripper," and the "Green River Killer," to name only a few of the most sensationalized. Jack the Ripper did not rape his victims; he first slit their throats and then mutilated their sex organs. Like their original model, the modern sex killers frequently do not actually rape their victims. Instead of using their penis as a weapon, they use a fetishized weapon as their penis: knives, guns, machine tools, clubs, and so forth. This breed of sex killer, so known today, was in 1888 an unprecedented anomaly, at first incomprehensible to his culture. Sex, weaponry, and mutilation were not yet interchangeable in the public consciousness. However, by 1891, Richard von Krafft- Ebing was able to articulate the soon-to-be common consciousness: "He does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act."40 Within a few years, Sigmund Freud would lay down his theory of sexual symbolism, explicitly equating the penis with deadly force. He wrote that the male organ first finds symbolic equivalents in things which "resemble it in shape" and, second, in things which resemble it in function, "in objects which share with the thing they represent the characteristic of penetrating into the body and injur- ing-thus sharp weapons of every kind, knives, daggers, spears, sabres, but also fire-arms, rifles, pistols, and revolvers."41 Consider the consequences to female life now that that list has expanded to include nuclear weaponry. Consider as well the parallel consequences to planetary life now that cultural perceptions of male sexuality and weaponry have been metaphorically bridged by the likes of the MX missile. Listening carefully, we might realize that whenever Reagan or anyone else sexualizes/fetishizes his weaponry, he is actually pronouncing himself the political equivalent of Jack the Ripper. Thus far, I have concentrated largely on the implicit aggression and destructiveness of "Star Wars." Yet what of this much vaunted defense, this "impenetrable shield," this diaphragm in space which will purportedly cover and protect us from the enemy emissions? Like Princess Leia in the otherwise all-male world of Star Wars, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, or like the Virgin Mary beside the men's association of the Christian trinity, the space shield seems to provide some traditional feminine symbolism- covering, protection, impregnability-to what is otherwise a flagrantly all-male venture. Yet, although those other females-the Space Princess, Warrior Goddess, or Queen of Heaven-are in- dubitably token women, they also still manage to evoke some memories of archaic female power.42 The feminized space shield, however, moves beyond this level and into a more total realm of control, for it speaks without any memory and only to a future annihilation and replacement of female power and presence. The symbolic meaning of the feminized space shield resides precisely in what McLuhan was moving toward understanding when he identified the contemporary symbol cluster of the "mechanical bride." Link – Star Wars Performance Star Wars reinforces male dominance through the patriarchal “Force” and the repression and exploitation of women Caputi ’88 Jane, Ph.D. , is Professor of American Studies, University of New Mexico (Feminist Studies, “Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Phallotechnology”, Vol 14.3: 486-524, Autumn 1988) Star Wars, directed by George Lucas and released in 1977, is one of the most phenomenally successful films in motion picture history. It has become a landmark of popular culture and has entered deeply into collective memory. When it was first released, most reviewers hailed the sheer entertainment value of the movie and stressed that it was utterly pure escapism, a science fiction movie without a message, a fun, heroic, traditionally moral and optimistic fable in the best U.S. tradition. Vincent Canby spoke for many when he not only joined in the general applause but also further declared that the film "made absolutely no meaningful comment on contemporary concerns such as nuclear war, overpopulation, depersonalization and sex."16 Reversals abound here, however, for Star Wars is deeply about all of these and more. One of the film's initially striking aspects is that it is science fiction (conventionally the "future") set in the past; the action, we are told, takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Thus evoking mythic time, Star Wars serves as the perfect vehicle for implanting traditional patriarchal values into the present and future. The movie gives us powerful old men, both good and evil, and two young, blonde, male heroes. All the human beings in the movie are white (although the embodiment of evil, Darth Vader, is encased in all-black garb and his voice is that of a Black actor). There are machines as slaves, robots with, as many critics de- lightedly pointed out, far more personality than their human coun- terparts. There are inferior and servile living species as well. Chewbacca the Wookie, one of the main characters, is an ani- malistic "primitive" who lives apart from any of his people and wordlessly plays the role of Tonto to Han Solo's space cowboy-a stereotyping as communicative of racism as that former formulaic duo. For female relief, we have virtually one woman in the entire movie, a Princess in distress, the predictably spunky token in a movie whose sexual composition resembles that of a gang rape, a common media structure for subliminally communicating and constructing male dominance.17 The idealized future/past of Star Wars is an all-white, all-male world and, like the Westerns and war movies it is modeled on, reserves its principle commitments for violence, male bonding, and war. Indeed, Star Wars takes war figuratively and literally to the heavens and gives us not only a space combat but also a holy war, a just war, a war in which God or "the Force" is ultimately on "our" side. As Dan Rubey has noted, "If Star Wars is 'about' anything, it is about power- and the source of ultimate power in the film is the Force."18s He continues by accurately naming that power as inex- tricable from the patriarchal power of fathers and sons. Moreover, the Force is identified throughout the movie as an explicitly religious or sacred power and, as in other patriarchal religious visions, is given dualistic form, having both a good and a bad (or "dark") side. Nevertheless, both the "good" and the "bad" sides are really the same, for they are bound together by their identical use for combat, death, and destruction. Thus, despite the warrior- priest Obi Wan Kenobe's sanctimonious drivel on the Force as an "energy field created by all living things that surrounds and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together," this "life" force is, at base, a death dealer. **Aff A2: Eco-Fem Ecofeminist literature re-entrenches gender norms: the connection between women and nature is based on gendered-maternal presumptions Alaimo ’94 Stacy has a PhD in English, with a graduate certificate in interdisciplinary critical theory, from University of Illinois, Champaign- Urbana and teaches critical and feminist theory at the University of Texas (Feminist Studies, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism”, Vol 20.1: 133-152, Spring 1994)

Although ecofeminism attempts to rearticulate the age-old associations of woman and nature in order to make them comrades in a struggle that would benefit them both, many of the connections it affirms can be readily deployed to support patriarchal capitalism and the domination of Others. The Mother Earth image feeds capitalist consumerism by playing into the hands of a public/private division that threatens to contain the political force of the environmental movement within the home. Not only Mother Earth, but any feminine image of nature carries dangers: the articulation of woman-native-animal-other is so deeply entrenched that to attempt to rearticulate those terms into a feminist environmentalism seems extremely difficult. Yet, abandoning a female connection with nature leaves that whole discursive field undisturbed. Leaping to a "postgen- der" environmentalism ignores the interdependent constructions of woman and nature. Simply promoting an antihierarchy stance as Murray Bookchin does in saying that "both men and nature have always been the common victims of hierarchical society"45 is not enough because some "men" have been more consistently dominated than others. Recognizing the need to critique misogynist constructions of woman and nature does not tell us whether we should ground a politics on that connection. The dangers of ecofeminism seem to result from a positive alliance that depends upon the very associations that are detrimental to both women and the earth-woman and nature as victims, women as maternal, nature as a mystified pure realm. Can we construct female alliances with nature that don't mystify nature or pose women as essentially victims or mothers? Perhaps Diana Fuss offers a fruitful direction.

Ecofeminism literature is inconsistent and motivated by a desire for political and emotional empowerment Norgaard ’99 Kari Marie is professor of Environmental Sociology at Whitman College (Ethics & the Environment, “Moon Phases, Menstrual Cycles, and Mother Earth: The Construction of A Special Relationship Between Women and Nature”, Vol 4.2: 197-209, 1999) Once you begin looking, it is not difficult to see that there are a number of inconsistencies in ecofeminist discussion of a particular closeness between women and nature. Indeed, there are many times that the nature/culture dualism discussed by ecofeminists is flipped and women are associated not with nature but with culture: women's organizing for suffrage and social change during the late 1800s rested on a conception of femininity as a moral civilizing force, girls today are often dressed in restrictive clothing, expected to stay clean and taught to fear snakes and spiders, women are associated with the private sphere and the home, and use infinitely more products to alter their physical appearance than do men. In the TV and movie Westerns so popular among Americans, women are associated with towns and civilization while men are associated with the open plains. Men may have conquered the wilderness, but women brought schools, churches, and 'society' to the frontier (Tompkins 1992). The notion that women are more civilized is connected to the idea that women are morally superior, a theme that has been popular for a long time: "From the suffragist claim that 'if women voted there would be no more war,' to the 1992 U.S. election slogans proclaiming 'the year of the woman,' many have proclaimed that politics would be more moral if only more women were involved" (Tronto 1994,1). An ecofeminist might respond that cultural taboos concerning women's bodies such as the necessity to shave hair or hide smells may be particularly important because there is an underlying fear that women really are closer to nature, and I would agree. Yet in actual practice as we apply make-up, shave, use feminine hygiene products, and cover our smells, women are representing ourselves as 'cultured,' not 'down to earth.' Similarly, the fact that girls are socialized to fear animals that many believe were associated with women in powerful ways in our past such as snakes and spiders, may be interpreted as reinforcing connections between women and these animals. But if the girls of today fear snakes and spiders, they will in very real ways, be distant from these animals. Although only a beginning, this summary should make clear that associations between women, men, and nature are played out in many more ways than the fields of women and environment, ecofeminism, or feminist political ecology have emphasized thus far. Given that there are many ways that men may be seen as close to nature, and women may be seen as distant from nature, ecofeminists and others have made a choice to tell a particular story: the story of a special relationship between women and nature. Why? I believe this story has been told for at least several reasons. First, our lack of definition of nature, combined with white normative assumptions of gender discussed earlier, has led to the essentialism of both men and nature, making less visible the many other stories our culture contains. Second, I think the women and nature story has not only fit theoretically, but has been emotionally satisfying and politically empowering to white women.

Ecofeminist literature reproduces the gendered claims it claims to reject by ignoring the place of the non-white and the non-women in nature Norgaard ’99 Kari Marie is professor of Environmental Sociology at Whitman College (Ethics & the Environment, “Moon Phases, Menstrual Cycles, and Mother Earth: The Construction of A Special Relationship Between Women and Nature”, Vol 4.2: 197-209, 1999)

*Other I believe we need to think about the idea of a special relationship between women and nature on several levels. Although I write that our work has served our own emotional needs, I equally recognize these motivations as authentic needs. To feel that we belong in this world is not only vital to the emotional survival of every woman, every human being, but in guiding how we will behave in the world. We cannot act to create beauty, perfection, or ecologically sustainable lifestyles unless we believe they are possible. We will not act as though we belong in the world unless we believe that we can. This is the difference between moving forward with creativity and staring frozen in fear into the oncoming headlights. At the same time, we must be aware of the consequences that spring from the story we have created. When we are in this position, as white women, do we then continue to ask ourselves the tough questions about racial and class privileges? How closely do we listen to the voices of native women, of black men, and other groups of people similarly implicated by the constructions of gender, race and nature we create? There is a dance we must carefully dance between knowing the place of beauty and purity within ourselves that we may act from this place, and feeling so sure of our inherent virtuousness that we fail to search for that "good" place within ourselves. Secondly, to what extent are ecofeminist constructions reinforcing gender norms that distance men from nature, or link men to nature only through violence? This leads me back to my partner's question, "If women are supposed to connect with nature what are men supposed to do?" Women can feel proud that, like the sun, we nurture one another, but none of the men I know are satisfied by answering the question of how they connect to nature by identifying with an inner violent or competitive nature! If white women find the image of connection with nature psychically pleasing and politically empowering, where does the reverse image leave white men? Looking again at the passages from Williams, if women represent mystery, what do men represent? If women refuse to be tamed does this imply that men have given in to the norms of our culture? Are all men afraid of nature? What forces do men represent? The next passage references children, but children come from men also. Are only women the mothers of words that become stories and poems? Can men also create stories and poems that speak from the nature within? All people need to view themselves as holding the potential for good in order to be creative, effective actors. Currently, progressive pro-feminist men must distance themselves from many cultural associations with nature, yet given what we argue about parallels between the feminist and environmental movements, many of these are the very men who may be most in search of ways to connect with nature. How do men rejecting traditional gender roles connect with nature? I am interested in understanding the images we create of men not only because I watch my male partner engage in struggles similar to my own to find belonging, to act meaningfully, to recreate a sense of self that is congruent with social and ecological relations, but because men do hold power in this society I do not want to reinforce patterns of masculinity with socially and ecologically damaging consequences. We must begin to see men as part of nature and a life affirming, relational masculinity as natural. Without this vision ecofeminists are not only reproducing the very gender relations we claim to dislike, we are telling a 'stock story' and leaving ourselves open to significant criticism. ***Science **Neg A2: Need Realism Sociology of Scientific knowledge doesn’t turn away from realism, it captures a high quality of reality. SSK=SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Wynne, Professor of Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), 2002 [Brian, “Risk and Environment as Legitimatory Discourses of Technology: Reflexivity Inside Out?”, May 2002, “ Current Sociology” May 2002 vol. 50 no. 3 459-477, MA]

All this offers an unusual perspective on the possible role of SSK. The conventional response to SSK work on environmental and risk knowledge has been to decry its supposed destruction of any authority for action, critical or not, by denying, or at least questioning the reality of those problems. It is assumed to be unequivocally anti-realist. Dunlap’s (1994) critique of Buttel and Taylor’s (1992) SSK analysis of the construction of global environmental problems is a typical example, though his more recent work (Dunlap, 1997) has developed beyond this. Radder’s (1998) attack on Wynne (1996a), which focused on Wynne’s refusal to tell us what to do, implied a similar complaint that to question the existing realist representation of scientific framings of climate change prediction does undermine the realist basis which tells us what should be done. However, as we see below, this interpretation of constructivist SSK from a realist perspective can read it only as either realism or its opposite, anti-realism. It seems unable to see that it may be about a more complex imagination of reality, one which accepts the reflexive need to bring implicit subject- constructions into wider question as part and parcel of corresponding object constructions – the co- construction stance (Burningham and Cooper, 1999; Irwin, 2001; Jasanoff, 1999; Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998; Latour, 1987, 1992; Wynne, 1996a). It seems appropriate to call this ‘constructivist-realism’, to distinguish it from simple-realism which does not recognize reflexive processes of subject–object co-construction, nor the essential contingency involved. Thus the more wide-ranging, multivalent and rich human meanings which constitute public concerns are excluded from official institutional discourses of technology appraisal, as if they were solely instrumental simplerealist questions of controlling a risk (as pragmatically defined by the prevailing science). These deleted meanings and concerns – natural as well as social realities-in-the-making – can be brought into play by SSK analysis. Physical reality still courses through these contending and overtly less determinate representations and meanings, but different versions of reality are not only competing in the sense of claiming or denying the reality of an element of nature. They may also be making conflicting claims that a real element is more salient once one gives the issue a particular meaning. The same natural reality thus shows up differently, depending on the intersections it is given with human questions and commitments. As Irwin has put it, SSK is ‘not turning away from the reality of environmental problems, but [is] instead capturing a richer and more diverse sense of that reality’ (2001: 159). Without quite getting to the full treatment of these reflexive issues, he hopes that the hegemonic simple-realist interpretation of the misconceived ‘realist versus constructivist’ polarization may at long last be superseded, at least in the academic world, if not yet in the public domain (see also Jasanoff, 1999). The institutional risk discourses referred to above combine a simple realist representation of the salient realities (consequences) with a presumption about what is salient, what the meaning of the issue actually is for people (predictable consequences). Thus realist public discourse imposes, not so much a propositional straitjacket on the public domain, but more perniciously, a hermeneutic one, where the supposedly universal objective meaning is left unquestioned – risk and consequences. In other words the simple- realist epistemic pre-commitment of these institutional discourses embeds a corresponding implicit projection of the citizen-subject, ‘the public’, which constructs them as having a common objective instrumental frame of meaning – risk and fear of its manifestation. Being constitutive of the institutional culture, these projections are emphatically not provisional hypotheses to be tested out in public dissemination – they are institutionalcultural dogma. It seems inevitable that public discourse requires some form of realist language. However, a key element in the current crisis surrounding public mistrust of institutional scientific policy languages of risk management does seem to be the inability of their simple-realist institutional framings to accommodate various public meanings and concerns (including instrumental ‘risk’ ones). It was already a striking exception to typical practice when the UK House of Lords (2000) Select Committee on Science and Technology report, Science and Society, acknowledged that the public mistrust crisis crippling scientifically-led public policy institutions, is not so much due to public misunderstanding, as to just this routine institutional denial of many public concerns about such issues as GM agriculture and food, or radioactive waste disposal, beyond those represented in the reductionist terms of the official framework of meaning. In other words it could be said to be due to the very reverse of ‘public misunderstanding of science’. This institutional syndrome can be understood as a self-confirming elaboration of its founding simple-realist cultural discourse, as a constitutive thinking habit, not an object of rational deliberation. Thus just as the simplerealist misinterpretation of constructivist SSK as anti-realist circles within and confirms its own unquestioned simple-realist premises, so too the common institutional response to public disaffection, criticized by the House of Lords, confirms its own premise that the public is only concerned with risk when considering broad scientific-technological enterprises such as commercialization of genetic manipulation. Since the issue’s meaning is presumed to be risk alone, a scientific matter, then the widespread public disaffection now being suffered can only be assumed to originate in rejection or misunderstanding of the science. This is a vicious, narcissistic circle of self reference – one ironically exercised in the name of self-reflexive scientific rationality.

**Aff Alt Fails – Need Institutions Criticisms of science aren’t effective- needs institutional mechanisms of evaluation Clark and Majone, Dr. Clark is a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Dr. Majone is a visiting professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 1985 [William C. Clark and Giandomenico Majone, “The Critical Appraisal of Scientific Inquiries with Policy Implications”, 1985, “Science, Technology, and Human Value” pg 6-19, MA]

We have argued in this paper for a self-conscious, sustained effort to build a systematic critical perspective appropriate for the special needs of scientific inquiry in policy contexts. We have emphasized the need for a comprehensive perspective because the partial perspectives now in use inevitably slight the integrative and synthetic considerations so essential to useful inquiry on practical problems. Rational criticism, practical criticism, ethical criticism, and the like all have perfectly proper roles to play. But their full potential will never be realized until they also have a common framework that lets them stand back and see how each partial perspective can complement and reinforce the others. We have also stressed the need for appropriate criticism because, in the vacuum created by its absence, scientific inquiry in policy contexts will continue to be criticized in terms of standards and criteria arrogated from pure science on the one hand and pure politics on the other. As we have argued, such inappropriate criteria can only distort the conduct of the scientific inquiries they seek to strengthen. We have suggested that much could be gained by focusing critical discussion through the four metacriteria of adequacy, effectiveness, value, and legitimacy. The need is to begin and sustain a wide-ranging dialogue on these criteria among the producers, users, and managers of applied scientific inquiry. In addition to better understanding of the nature and ramifications of critical criteria, there is a need to develop a much wider and more effective array of institutional mechanisms for the exercise of critical judgment, Anonymous peer review will always have a role to play, but our analysis suggests that this role is of much more limited use in appraising science in policy contexts than it has been in treatments of science per se. Above all, there is the difficulty of assembling a single community of "peers" that will appear legitimate to both consumers and producers of would be useful scientific inquiry. Useful peer communities would have to develop expertise and sophistication in handling the whole range of critical criteria and considerations we have outlined here. Such experience is very rare today, and "peer" review of science in policy contexts may consequently be more a part of the problem than a part of the solution to producing more usable scientific knowledge. Beyond peer review mechanisms, complementary critical fora are needed, The most difficult problem will probably be to engage appropriate people from outside the community of scientific researchers and program managers so that the difficult questions of value and legitimacy can be meaningfully reviewed, Institutional arrangements like the science court and the National Research Council's expert committees are demonstrably inadequate for the task at hand. A priority goal should therefore be the exploration of new institutional mechanisms for critical appraisal and evaluation of scientific inquiry in policy contexts. At least in its early states, this exploration should be frankly experimental, adopting a variety of mechanisms in actual problem contexts and assessing the results. We emphasize that this is not something that can be left to the policy analysis departments of universities or the comparable divisions of the Federal executive agencies. Rather, to be useful, the experiments will have to be done by the people directly involved in the production, management, and use of scientific inquiry on specific policy problems. Ideally, most major inquiries would include several such practical experiments in the design of critical fora. Some provision should obviously he made for the periodic comparison of results among programs.

*Alt Debate Author Indicts Criticisms of science aren’t trustworthy- don’t analyze all the role players Clark and Majone, Dr. Clark is a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Dr. Majone is a visiting professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 1985 [William C. Clark and Giandomenico Majone, “The Critical Appraisal of Scientific Inquiries with Policy Implications”, 1985, “Science, Technology, and Human Value” pg 6-19, MA]

Scientific inquiry in policy contexts can serve a wide variety of uses and users. The same inquiry may be used by other scientists as a foundation for subsequent study, by policymakers to guide their choice of actions, by program managers making funding decisions, or by reporters trying to inform the public. What is; good or useful inquiry for some of these users may not be so for others. Before we can speak sensibly about the design of criteria for the critical appraisal of scientific inquiries conducted in policy contexts, we must therefore face another question: Which interests or roles can be regarded as appropriate sources of those criteria? Who are, in fact, the peers who will be doing the reviews? It is clear, for example, that an academic statistician, a company expert, and a Congressional staff person will use different criteria to evaluate a study on the correlation of cancer deaths and particular occupations. Their conflicting judgments of the study will not be resolved by reference to less uncertain or more clearly presented data. Required instead is a mutual comprehension of the different critical perspectives being employed. That different critical appraisals are arrived at by people in different roles is not a bad thing as such. It may simply reflect different needs and concerns of different segments of society, or different degrees of freedom in making certain key methodological choices. So long as the judgments leveled from the perspective of one particular role are not presented or misinterpreted as judgments relevant to or speaking for all possible roles, we have a healthy state of pluralistic criticism. Difficulties began to arise when this neat partitioning of roles and the criticism voiced from them begin to break down. Unfortunately, such breakdowns seem more the rule than the exception in actual practice. Perhaps the most common problem occurs when an inquiry designed for use in one role receives its only critical review from the perspective of a different role with different critical standards. Because the standards are mismatched, the results of the inquiry are almost inevitably found wanting. Such difficulties arise, for example, when academic ecologists are convened as the sole reviewers of the environmental impact assessment mandated for Federal projects. From the perspective of a project manager or administrative law judge, the relevant critical criteria might be the timeliness of the assessment, the likelihood that potentially serious impacts have been noted, and, perhaps, whether practical development alternatives are suggested. From the ecologists’ point of view, however, such criteria are (at best) vaguely comprehended and given only secondary consideration. Their criticism would likely be based on such criteria as the adequacy of sampling design, the use of appropriate theory, and the accurate characterization of uncertainties. As a result, the ecologists may accept or reject attempted impact assessments for reasons largely irrelevant to the people who will eventually have to resolve the practical problems of environmental management. A third difficulty appears when well-intentioned efforts to honor the perceived critical standards of one or another group result in scientific inquiry delivering more than it knows. This point was clearly illustrated in the hearings of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, held m February 1975 to provide scientific advice on the question. What is the size of America’s remaining oil and gas resources. Senator Hubert Humphrey called the hearings in response to a National Research Council (NRC) report that had reviewed previous estimates by industry and government experts and then produced its own scientific findings. The NRC showed that serious scientific studies of the question produced estimates spanning an order of magnitude, and that government (U.S. Geological Survey) estimates tended to be two to three times the size of most industry estimates. The NRC itself concluded that the most reasonable estimate was less than half the most recent Geological Survey figure, and only slightly larger than those proposed by industry experts. Senator Humphrey was not amused. Questioning the NRC and other experts called before his committee, he lamented: You cannot imagine, gentlemen, what hits us when these come out.... The mail is incredible ... One (caller) said to me, ’Didn’t you read that report that came out from that group of scientists, aren’t you frightened?.... Now, help me. Where do you come down m this wide range of estimates? Do you feel it is the upper or the lower end or where is It? The Senator’s appeal to the scientific facts was met with the following explanation by an NRC committee member of how the committee has reached its own estimates: estimates of future supplies of oil and gas are so dependent upon unknown scientific factors and unknown environmental and political factors as to be almost unknowable. These almost unknowable estimates were nonetheless published to three significant figures by the NRC with no uncertainty ranges. How were the particular NRC values arrived at? According to another NRC member, from our point of view, we though it advisable ... to accept more conservative estimates, thinking that most of the Geological Survey estimates are relatively high, and most of the oil company estimates relatively conservative. As Wildavsky and Tenenbaum ask in their review of the case “This is science?” Congress wanted “a number” and the National Research Council gave them “a number” even though committee members acknowledged in their testimony that it was little more than guesswork--i.e., nothing like the consensually certified knowledge that its trappings and origins implied. Similar examples, of which perhaps the most notorious would involve the willingness of scientists to deliver cost-benefit assessments of long-term and large-scale environmental changes, could readily be cited. Is there a cure for such common tendencies to confound critical roles? Probably not. At a minimum, however, efforts to build a critical capacity for judging scientific inquiry in policy contexts should explicitly recognize that multiple roles (“peer” groups) exist, each with a legitimate claim to set critical criteria. Further, such efforts should appreciate the complex pulls and pushes that the resulting diversity of critical criteria will exert on the inquiry itself. For the appraisal of science conducted in policy contexts, the minimum set of roles to consider would probably include the individual scientists performing the inquiry, their disciplinary peer groups, the sponsor or manager of the research program, the client or decision making group for whose use the results of the inquiry are intended, and, in most cases, some version of the interest groups that could be expected to have a stake in decisions being contemplated. In principle, it might be possible to envision a grand scheme that would combine all the role perspectives into one common critical standard, thus providing a weighted evaluation of any scientific inquiry in its appropriate policy context. Some decision analyst has probably already proposed such a scheme, but we are grateful not to have seen it. Technical difficulties aside, we suspect that a common standard, like any other aggregational procedure, would solve none of the important problems and would create new ones of its own. Our own suspicion is that efforts to develop better critical skills for science with policy implications should aim not for a unique evaluation, but rather for an enhanced understanding of

*Other different evaluative criteria on the part of all role players. We most need, in other words, a more sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of the multiple perspectives involved.

Public Health has shifted from focus on the needy to re-enforcements of social control. Richard Levinson, Professor of Public Health Emory University, 1998, Modernity, Medicine and Health, medical sociology towards 2000, eds. Scambler & Higgs, p. 68-9

Not only in the delivery of services does public health acquiesce to powerful established private interests, but it defines problems so as not to threaten established institutional arrangements. Sociologists at the “interface” of public health have identified social conditions that are at the root of a population’s health status. They are not new discoveries, nor are the insights unique to sociology. In 1848, Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist who developed the field of cellular biology, commented on the association between a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia and existing social conditions. His proposed remedy for the epidemic included political reforms to address social inequity and powerlessness, unemployment, poverty and lack of education. The role of social conditions in health was reinforced more recently by McKeown (1979) who found that most of the decline in mortality over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Wales resulted from improvements in hygiene and nutrition that made populations less vulnerable to infection rather than from medical measures. As Levin (1987) suggests, a small increase in the population’s education or economic level will have a greater impact on health than all health resources combined. Nevertheless, public health has continued to concentrate on changing individual behaviors and exposures to pathology rather than targeting the conditions influencing those behaviors and exposures. “Germ theory” guided the development of both medicine and public health in the twentieth century as interventions targeted the micro-organisms producing disease with newly discovered “magic bullets” of immunizations and antibiotics. With a focus on “germs”, the socioeconomic context of exposure to the micro-organisms was often lost. Public health moved from an emphasis on environmental sanitation, aligned with engineering, to the prevention of diseases in individuals, associated with medicine. Although many recognized that major public health problems, such as tuberculosis and venereal diseases, were associated with malnutrition, poor housing conditions, hazardous work sites and urban squalor, public health moved further away from its advocacy of social reform to narrow its focus in more politically acceptable directions, emphasizing personal hygiene, prevention and medical examinations with subsequent treatment. The orientation of epidemiology, the “Mother Science” of public health, also helped narrow the focus. Epidemiology, as the “scientific core” or “glue” holding public health together, rarely considers broader social questions or community involvement with disease. Epidemiology has tended to focus on immediate causes of illness or risk factors, such as establishing a link between smoking and lung cancer rather than helping to understand how and why cigarette smoking in the West grew so much over the century, just as it is now increasing in developing nations. Epidemiology finds determinants in individuals rather than in populations and is rarely used to understand disease as a result of the way society, or its socio-economic forces, is organized. Shy (1997) charges epidemiology with the “bio-medical fallacy” of inferring that risk factors for disease in individuals can be added together to understand the causes of disease in populations. A sociology “of” public health helps to explain why the narrow focus is preferred in public health practice and why the field has tended to overlook the health consequences of social, political and economic structure and policies. To the extent that public health serves to preserve existing social institutions and their power arrangements, its function might best be understood as one of social control. Public health is among the various social welfare programs that enable the current social order to continue while minimizing public opposition. Public Health problems can’t be fixed on the individual level – the state is needed Richard Levinson, Professor of Public Health Emory University, 1998, Modernity, Medicine and Health, medical sociology towards 2000, eds. Scambler & Higgs, p. 74-5

Medical sociologists, as they practice public health through the design and evaluation of community health promotion programs, generally target individual risk behaviors for change, thus decontextualizing health status. Public health practitioners rarely address the reasons for the exposure or vulnerability to exposures because that requires addressing the fundamental causes and would therefore threaten established economic and political interests (Tesh 1988). Some public health practitioners go further with assumptions that personal health behaviors are discrete and independently modifiable, that anyone can decide to change, that al have the capacity to act on their decisions to alter behaviors and that people have a personal responsibility to live well. Becker (1993) notes that this ideology contradicts what we empirically know about the major determinants of health and prevention and essentially “blames the victim.” Health habits are acquired from social situations and supported by powerful cultural and structural forces. Intervention on an individual level is generally ineffective without concomitant attempts to alter the broader political, economic, and structural components of society that produce and support poor health (Becker 1993; Link and Phelan 1995).

**Public-Health/Disease***Public Health Links Only epidemics actually can maintain the interest of the community. Paul Farmer, Assistant professor of social medicine, Harvard Medical School, 1996, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Volume 2, Issue 4, Oct/December, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol2no4/farmer.htm

Standard epidemiology, narrowly focused on individual risk and short on critical theory, will not reveal these deep socioeconomic transformations, nor will it connect them to disease emergence. "Modern epidemiology," observes one of its leading contributors, is "oriented to explaining and quantifying the bobbing of corks on the surface waters, while largely disregarding the stronger undercurrents that determine where, on average, the cluster of corks ends up along the shoreline of risk" Neither will standard journalistic approaches add much: "Amidst a flood of information," notes the chief journalistic chronicler of disease emergence, "analysis and context are evaporating... Outbreaks of flesh eating bacteria may command headlines, but local failures to fully vaccinate preschool children garner little attention unless there is an epidemic"

Re-examining social-historical influences is the only way to fight back infectious diseases. Paul Farmer, Assistant professor of social medicine, Harvard Medical School, 1996, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Volume 2, Issue 4, Oct/December, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol2no4/farmer.htm

Here I have discussed the limitations of three important ways of viewing the health of populations--tropical medicine, "the" epidemiologic transition, and national health profiles--because models and even assumptions about infectious diseases need to be dynamic, systemic, and critical. That is, models with explanatory power must be able to track rapidly changing clinical, even molecular, phenomena and link them to the large-scale (sometimes transnational) social forces that manifestly shape the contours of disease emergence. I refer, here, to questions less on the order of how pig-duck agriculture might be related to the antigenic shifts central to influenza pandemics, and more on the order of the following: Are World Bank policies related to the spread of HIV, as has recently been claimed? What is the relationship between international shipping practices and the spread of cholera from Asia to South America and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere? How is genocide in Rwanda related to cholera in Zaire? The study of anything said to be emerging tends to be dynamic. But the very notion of emergence in heterogeneous populations poses questions of analysis that are rarely tackled, even in modern epidemiology, which, as McMichael has recently noted, "assigns a primary importance to studying interindividual variations in risk. By concentrating on these specific and presumed free-range individual behaviors, we thereby pay less attention to the underlying social -historical influences on behavioral choices, patterns, and population health". A critical (and self-critical) approach would ask how existing frameworks might limit our ability to discern trends that can be linked to the emergence of diseases. Not all social- production-of-disease theories are equally alive to the importance of how relative social and economic positioning--inequality--affects risk for infection. In its report on emerging infections, the Institute of Medicine lists neither poverty nor inequality as "causes of emergence". A critical approach pushes the limits of existing academic politesse to ask harder and rarely raised questions: What are the mechanisms by which changes in agriculture have led to outbreaks of Argentine and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, and how might these mechanisms be related to international trade agreements, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement? How might institutional racism be related to urban crime and the outbreaks of multidrugresistant TB in New York prisons? Does the privatization of health services buttress social inequalities, increasing risk for certain infections--and death--among the poor of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America? How do the colonial histories of Belgium and Germany and the neocolonial histories of France and the United States tie in to genocide and a subsequent epidemic of cholera among Rwandan refugees? Similar questions may be productively posed in regard to many diseases now held to be emerging.

Desire to maintain a “healthy” body is a cultural presentation and identifier: the quest to achieve health makes one believe that one can reconstitute oneself. Alan Petersen & Deborah Lupton, Sociology University of Plymouth & Social Sciences University of Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 22-3

The body has become the target of many of the new health risk-management strategies, as both Giddens (1991) and Shilling (1993) have observed. In a context of risk and uncertainty concerns about the social and 'natural' environments are projected onto a concern about the body. A central feature of the way that health risk is currently perceived and understood is the perception that 'the world is getting smaller'; that events in one part of the world have the potential to have an impact on distant other parts. It is not only regions and countries that are linked together in this discourse, but also individual bodies: our health is now connected to social processes occurring in areas remote from where we live. This raises the issue of another feature of contemporary human existence, which has been termed `globalisation'—the tendency towards lack of differentiation between nations or cultures in conjunction with greater diversity within nations and a concomitant fragmentation of identities (see Chapter 6). As environmental and technological risks are generalised to the point where everyone, regardless of social location, is 'at risk', there is a tendency for concern about the body to be globalised (Shilling 1993, p. 73). The body offers at least one 'island of security' in a global system of multiple and inescapable risks. Strict adherence to self-care regimes is seen as the only real means of avoiding the cancers, heart diseases and other afflictions that constantly threaten the integrity of the self in a generalised climate of risk. In the consumer culture of modem society, the consuming body has become a key marker of identity. It provides the point of reference for subjects in constructing themselves both in conformity with social norms (the 'social self') and as separate and distinctive from other selves (the 'individual self') (Falk 1994, pp. 136-8). The discourses and practices that have emerged around 'healthy' bodies constitute probably the most clear instance of how the body has become a project to be 'worked on' as part of a person's self- identity. It is so pervasive that even those who smoke, drink, and consume other drugs cannot help but reflect on the effects of such actions on the health and appearance of their bodies (Shilling 1993, p. 6). Attention to the 'healthy' body, therefore, is not simply about warding off disease. It is also concerned with how we present our bodies to ourselves and to others. While 'old' public health strategies focused almost entirely on issues of public hygiene—the cleanliness of the streets, the regulation of industry, sanitation and water supply—the new public health has directed its attentions towards the conduct and appearance of the individual body. Treating the body as a project implies that it is open to reconstruction in line with the designs of its owner, so that one can, in effect, reconstitute the self in accordance with one's own desires. There is a certain 'open-endedness' or 'unfinishedness' about this project since the body is continually shaped by social, cultural and economic processes. The body therefore bespeaks fashions in bodily practices emerging from both aesthetic and health- related imperatives: the plump body, the angular body, the jogging body, the taut body, the tanned body, the pale body are all testaments to changing notions of what is considered both attractive and healthy in different eras (see also Garner et al.1980; Koval 1986).

Epidemiology is a social construct- the science is predicated off of created patterns as opposed to pre-existing facts Alan Petersen & Deborah Lupton, Sociology University of Plymouth & Social Sciences University of Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 33

What is routinely glossed over in the official accounts of epidemiological research—the articles published in scholarly journals and reports produced by bureaucratic organisations, for example—is the socially constructed nature of the findings. While most epidemiologists recognise the 'fuzziness' of their practice, they continue to strive after scientific objectivity. Bruce, for example, contends in relation to epidemiological practice, that '[a]bsolute scientific objectivity and purity of method are never achievable even in the most rigorous research situation, but these are nevertheless important goals to be striven for' (1991, p. 104). Biomedicine, and as a corollary, epidemiology and biostatistics, are presented as emerging from a 'neutral' knowledge base supported by scientific principles of observation and testing, untainted by the entry of the social or the cultural. Like other scientific facts, epidemiological facts gain their credence from being published in scholarly journals, in which process the historical and sociocultural dimensions of their construction, as well as the more personal imperatives such as maximising one's career opportunities, are effectively hidden. We assert that—contrary to the vision of scientific neutrality entertained by many epidemiologists—such research, like any other form of 'fact' generation (including sociological research), is a practice of constructing 'problems', defining them and proposing ways of dealing with them in the context of 'ways of seeing' which shape the 'facts' that consequently emerge. Thus the 'patterns' identified by epidemiological research are not pre-existing, simply waiting to be 'discovered' using the right tools and insights, but are constructed through the expectations and processes by which they are detected: 'Data gathered, then, is [sic] also data produced' (Jackson 1994, p. 427).

State controlled public health policies prevents individual policies that allow narcissistic competition for health Alan Petersen & Deborah Lupton, Sociology University of Plymouth & Social Sciences University of Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 175-6

One central tension emerging from our sociological analysis of the new public health is the relationship between the state and the individual. Although much of the apparatus of the new public health is invested in state-funded and state-run organisations, particularly within local and federal bureaucracies, it is clear that the discourses of the new public health seek constantly to shift the responsibility of the state for protecting the public's health from the state to members of the public themselves. This shift, as we have argued, is supported by the neo-liberal humanist philosophies held by governments in contemporary Western societies. While new public health authorities and agencies continue to adopt overtly coercive strategies such as quarantine, isolation and enforced medical treatment when they seem required and most justified (such as in the face of a serious epidemic of infectious disease), they are equally, if not more, reliant upon the use of strategies that position citizens as acting of their own free will and in their own interests to protect their own health. These discourses are particularly articulated in the goals and practices of health promotion and community participation. Discourses of personal responsibility and good citizenship have potentially great appeal to the late modern subject, who has been acculturated to accept and privilege the notion of autonomous individuality, not simply through health-related discourses and institutions but also through such institutions as the family, the mass media, and the education and legal systems. As a result, the new public health philosophies tend to make eminent 'sense' because of their emphasis on people participating in activities to improve their own health status. It is for this reason, among others, that the new public health philosophies, discourses and strategies have been little challenged thus far. We have argued, however, that the strategies of self-care that have become central to the philosophy of public health can lead to a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. The notion that individuals should conduct themselves like an enterprise implies that they should be in competition with others and seek to maximise their own potential even when, as is invariably the case, this is at the expense of others who are less able or less willing to conform to dominant sociocultural norms. A strong emphasis on the ethic of self-care would seem to be directly at odds with the stated ideals in the new public health of nurturing social support, redressing inequality, and creating a tolerant, democratic polity. It can serve to divert attention from increasing inequalities in wealth and power and from attacks on established rights during a period of retreat from welfare provision. Although the development of a new duties discourse implies empathy and concern for fellow citizens and 'the environment', it is not clear how this can be reconciled with competitive individualism and entrepreneurial ideals.

Public health interventions fail- individuals subvert the dominant relations of power Alan Petersen & Deborah Lupton, Sociology University of Plymouth & Social Sciences University of Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 179-80

In our discussions of the ways in which the new public health seeks to construct specific subject positions, we do not argue for a view that sees individuals as passive, manipulated dupes. Whether or not public health strategies are overtly coercive or reliant upon the alignment of individuals' personal objectives, we need to acknowledge the way that individuals often fail to conduct themselves according to the goals of public health. Foucault's reflections on the 'practices of the self' in his later writings suggest that although individuals constitute themselves as subjects in relation to external imperatives, there is a complex relationship between dominant norms and individual behaviour and actions, leaving much room for playful engagement with norms and even for resistance. Foucault was interested in the possibilities that this presented for the development of modes of existence that broke with the 'normalising' tendencies in contemporary society, particularly the endless examination of one's inner self which he saw as a dominant characteristic of modern society. The idea of one's life as the enterprise of oneself would suggest that there is some degree of open-endedness and indeterminacy at play in the process of privately managing risk. Public health interventions are consequently liable to produce outcomes at variance with what the experts may have intended. Thus, although rules for personal conduct are recommended to the individual by the social context, often issuing forth from dominant institutions such as public health, different contexts provide different degrees of freedom to act and to interpret, negotiate and resist norms: 'bodies are active creators of new power relations, and sustain individuals in their confrontations with and against systems of power' . Individuals routinely turn imposed laws, practices and representations to their own ends as a way of 'making do' within, and of subverting, the dominant relations of power.