Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Rights Malthus DA Final
Rights Malthus DA Final
RightsMalthus
RIGHTS MALTHUS
RIGHTS MALTHUS...................................................................................................................................................................................1
NINJAS
NINJAS
(1/2)............................................................................................................................................................................................2
(2/2)............................................................................................................................................................................................3
CRUNCH NOW.......................................................................................................................................................................................4
CRUNCH NOW.......................................................................................................................................................................................5
CRUNCH A2: DEMOCRACY SOLVES.......................................................................................................................................................6
CRUNCH A2: POPULATION STABILIZE...................................................................................................................................................7
AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE............................................................................................................................................................8
AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE............................................................................................................................................................9
AUTHORITARIANISM BETTER NOW THAN LATER..........................................................................................................................10
TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE.............................................................................................................................................................11
TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE.............................................................................................................................................................12
LINK RIGHTS.....................................................................................................................................................................................13
LINK FREEDOM..................................................................................................................................................................................14
LINK FEMINISM.................................................................................................................................................................................15
LINK SOCIAL REFORM.......................................................................................................................................................................16
CRUNCH BAD........................................................................................................................................................................................17
NINJA ATTACK INEVITABLE 2NC AWESOMENESS................................................................................................................................18
CRUNCH WAR..................................................................................................................................................................................19
AUTHORITARIANISM SOLVES OVERPOPULATION...................................................................................................................................20
IMPACT - OVERPOPULATION.................................................................................................................................................................21
IMPACT OVERPOPULATION................................................................................................................................................................22
IMPACT OVERPOPULATION................................................................................................................................................................23
IMPACT OVERPOPULATION (GENOCIDE)............................................................................................................................................24
IMPACT TYRANNY/ECO DESTRUCTION..............................................................................................................................................25
IMPACT CRIME...................................................................................................................................................................................26
TURNS THE K AFF HA!........................................................................................................................................................................27
A2: IMPACT TURN.................................................................................................................................................................................28
A2: CURRENT CIVILIZATION GOOD - MASKING.....................................................................................................................................29
GLOBAL ECONOMY UNSUSTAINABLE...................................................................................................................................................30
A2: ENVIRONMENT................................................................................................................................................................................31
AT: SQ SOLVES ENVIRONMENT............................................................................................................................................................32
A2: SPACE COL.....................................................................................................................................................................................33
A2: TECH SOLVES..................................................................................................................................................................................34
A2: TECH SOLVES..................................................................................................................................................................................35
A2: DEMOCRACY.................................................................................................................................................................................36
A2: PEOPLE ARE GOOD........................................................................................................................................................................37
A2: RACE TO BOTTOM...........................................................................................................................................................................38
A2: FREE SPEECH..................................................................................................................................................................................39
AT: MORALITY.......................................................................................................................................................................................40
AT: MORALITY.......................................................................................................................................................................................41
AT: MORALITY.......................................................................................................................................................................................42
A2: NO ALTERNATIVE............................................................................................................................................................................43
AFF ANSWERS:......................................................................................................................................................................................44
NON UNIQUE POPULATION STABALIZING...........................................................................................................................................45
AFF PLAN SOLVES SUSTAINABILITY..................................................................................................................................................46
TECH LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................................................................47
TECH LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................................................................48
HEGEMONY/MILITARY LINKS...............................................................................................................................................................49
HEG LINK TURN.....................................................................................................................................................................................50
WELFARE LINK TURNS.........................................................................................................................................................................51
A2: OPHULS...........................................................................................................................................................................................52
RightsMalthus
NINJAS (1/2)
Overpopulation is forcing us to face the crunch resource depletion and environmental destruction are looming
Jacoby, the Boston Globe, 6-18-08
[Jeff, The Coming Population Burst,
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/18/the_coming_population_bust/]
THOMAS MALTHUS has been dead for 170 years, but the Malthusian fallacy - the dread conviction that the growth of
human population leads to hunger, shortages, and a ravaged environment - is unfortunately alive and well : America's
congested highways are caused by "population growth wildly out of control," the group Californians for Population
Stabilization laments in a new ad. So are "schools and emergency rooms . . . bursting at the seams." And with every
additional American, immigrant or native-born, "comes further degradation of America's natural treasures." In a new
documentary, Britain's Prince Philip blames the rising price of food on overpopulation. "Everyone thinks it's to do with not
enough food," the queen's husband declares, "but it's really that demand is too great - too many people." Overpopulation is
"very serious - very, very serious," the Dalai Lama tells a crowd of 50,000 in Seattle. Somewhat inconsistently, he also
proclaims that "children are the basis of our hope," and that "our future depends on them." Is our planet overstuffed with
human beings?" asks columnist Johann Hari in The Independent. The "overpopulation lobby," he decides, has a point.
"How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions?
Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?" Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity
means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on
earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole
healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.
The current government is unsustainable The Affs promotion of Negative freedom will inevitably result in
ecological destruction and social extinction. Restraints on liberty are the only way to ensure Positive freedom and
create a sustainable system.
Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996 [William, Part One, Designing
Sustainable Societies, Ch 2 Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom, Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages,
p 33-35]
Sustainable development is an oxymoron. Modern political economy in any form is unsustainable, precisely because it
involves development that is, more and more people consuming more and more goods with the aid of ever more
powerful technologies. Such an economy produces nothing, it merely exploits nature. Such an economy reckons without
the laws of thermodynamics and other basic physical laws: these ordain limitation as the price of life and guarantee that the
invisible hand will generate the tragedy of the commons.2 To put it another way, such an economy is based on stolen goods,
deferred payments, and hidden costs; it continues to exist or even thrive today only because we do not account for what we
steal from nature or for what posterity will have to pay for our pleasures or for what we sweep under the ecological carpet.
In sum, development as commonly understood is intrinsically unsustainable. In addition, to treat sustainability as if it were
a merely technical problem- how can we make economies compatible with ecology? is to miss the point almost entirely.
The ecological crisis calls into question not our means, but our ends; not our ability to sustain so-called development, but its
very meaning and purpose.3 Therefore, achieving a form of development that is truly sustainable over the long term that
is, one does not involve more and more people consuming more and more goods with the aid of ever more powerful
technologies will necessarily require a radical change in our basic values, perhaps even in our very notion of
civilization. Above all, the standard discussion of sustainability begs an enormous question. That is, even supposing that
development as usual were technically possible and morally desirable, would it be politically feasible ? I believe the answer
is no: the basic premises of modern political economy are not only ecologically self-destructive but socially and
psychologically damaging as well, and the aftermath of this damage is a large part of the reason that governance is in such
trouble almost everywhere in the modern world today. In short, the most critical challenge confronting us is not economic
but political sustainability for moral and social collapse will hit us sooner and with more devastating effect than the
ultimate ecological collapse. To reduce the question of political sustainability to more manageable proportions, I propose to
focus on the tension between liberty and freedom, for this core political issue illuminates the profound challenge to modern
values that lurks within the ecological crisis. In effect, I shall respond to the question Ivan Illich raised about the developed
worlds near total dependence on so-called energy slaves: The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for
these slaves. I prefer to ask whether freemen need them.4 I begin with Isaiah Berlins famous distinction between negative
and positive freedom.5 The former means the freedom to do what we want, provided only that our acts do not directly
injure others; in other words, what liberty usually denotes in the modern, or liberal, tradition (so this is the term I shall
use from now on.) By contrast, positive freedom means subordinating desires to ideals in order to achieve some more
virtuous or nobler state of being that better accords with our higher nature. Freedom thus resides in self-fulfillment, not
self-indulgence: to promote the former and check the latter, it follows that restraints on individual liberty may be necessary.
RightsMalthus
NINJAS (2/2)
Modernity is moribund we must rise from the ashes and resist the affirmatives claims of liberty
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics]
The essential lesson of this political tragedy is that taught by the ancient philosophers: liberty is not freedom, and happiness is not
felicity, because mere liberty and the heedless pursuit of individual happiness are ultimately self-defeating. Paradoxically, genuine
freedom and felicity require self-rule: inner control of the self by the self to avert outer coercion and the cancerous growth of the
state. Not only is such inner control impossible within the social vacuum created by Hobbesian amorality and Cartesian rationality,
but the latter also systematically destroy the outer context of civic virtue and moral authority needed to sustain and support
individual self-rule. Nor can the throne left empty by the death of God be filled with some merely secular ideal of heaven on Earth:
the path of social perfectionism and political utopia leads only toward totalitarian hells.
The fatal flaw in Hobbes's political philosophy was identified centuries ago by Aristotle:
For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice . . . [because he]
is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence,
when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals.
By renouncing the aim of perfecting the political animal--that is, of teaching him to use his "weapons" for wise and virtuous ends,
instead of for contrary ones--the liberal polities founded on Hobbesian principles effectively abandoned the vocation of politics,
which is precisely to foster an Aristotelean "rule of life" among the citizens. It was thus inevitable that "the best of the animals
when perfected" would be progressively "sundered from law and justice" and turned into "the worst of all"--into an amoral or even
immoral creature of will and appetite who must be ruled by force, if he can be ruled at all. In the end, mere liberty is not and can
never be the basis for a workable philosophy of politics over the long term. Man's "weapons for . . . wisdom and virtue" must be
directed to positive ends, or the resulting social order is bound to be both "unholy and savage."
It comes down to this: modern civilization has no future. It confronts the same lethal combination of ecological collapse and inner
decay that has extinguished previous civilizations. Liberalism has no future. Its basic principles are contradictory and ultimately
self-destructive; and its mostly laudable ends are subverted by its largely pernicious means. A fortiori, the American polity in its
present form has no future. It epitomizes the modern, liberal way of life and hence exhibits all of its contradictions and problems in
their most extreme and dangerous form. The political animal must therefore reinvent politics: only radically new forms of governance can cope with the
aftermath of liberalism and meet the challenges of the coming century; only a new and radically different philosophy of governance can foster the wisdom and
virtue that are indispensable both for the felicity of the individual and for the peace, welfare, and justice of the community. We seem to be in the precise situation
described in the Prologue: modernity is moribund, so we need a major advance in civilization, yet bringing it about will all but wreck
the society in which it occurs. The question is, Will we cling fanatically to our decaying way of life and outmoded ideas or help the
phoenix rise from the ashes?
RightsMalthus
CRUNCH NOW
Crunch Coming Malthus was right about food scarcity
Hurst, feature writer for the Toronto Star, 4-12-08 [Lynda, The Coming hunger, http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/413769]
The warning bells are ringing, furiously. This week, food riots paralyzed Haiti, with angry marchers outside the president's
palace shouting "We are hungry!" Five people were killed in the chaos. In Egypt, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed this
week in two days of violence over food shortages. Last month, a two-week protest at government-subsidized bakeries
ended with the deaths of 10 Egyptians in clashes with police. Rice is the staple food of 4 billion people. But the prices for it, along with
corn, wheat and other basics, has surged by 40 per cent to 80 per cent in the last three years and caused panicked uprisings in some of the poorest countries
on Earth, from Cameroon to Bolivia. The situation has deteriorated so swiftly that some experts predict the effects of a global food crisis are going to bite
more quickly than climate change. According to the World Bank , 33 countries are now vulnerable to social unrest and political
instability because of food insecurity and that has implications for all the rest. Major rice producers like China, Cambodia and Vietnam are
already battening down, curbing exports to ensure supplies for their own populations. The Philippines, whose population has grown from 60 million to
almost 90 million in 17 years, is warning rice hoarders they'll be charged with economic sabotage. Why is it happening? Was Malthus right when he said
the world would eventually be too populated to feed itself? The United Nations already provides food for 73 million people in 78
countries worldwide. But the planet is getting hungrier. At least 4 million more people are being added to the list, most of
them living in high-density, Third World cities. The new face of hunger and thirst is overwhelmingly urban. It takes
1,000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of food, but water scarcity is affecting supplies. And, as Lester Brown,
president of Earth Policy Institute in Washington, has cautioned: "A future of water shortages will be a future of food
shortages." The current crisis was ignited by a number of elements coming together in deadly tandem. Analysts say the
most important one the jump in global fuel prices has triggered a chain reaction in the entire food-production system,
from seed planting right through to the delivery process. The world has been down this road before, of course. In 1973-74, OPEC
(Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) quadrupled the world price of oil, resulting in spiralling food prices and distribution snarls. The disaster
led to a World Food Summit in 1976, but nothing was done to prevent it happening again. Today's crisis is even worse because biofuels, a
factor unanticipated in the mid-'70s, has been added to the mix, says David Bell, emeritus professor of environmental
studies at York University. "A false environmental sensibility has led to a push on biofuel production and corn is the
product of choice," he says. "There's been a significant diversion of crops away from food use." The corn needed to produce
ethanol fuel has to be grown somewhere and when land available for food farming is converted, food prices are pushed up: "That's what's tripped off the
food riots this time." And the environmental benefits of corn fuel, he scathingly adds, are "completely illusory ." Throw in the new and exploding
demand for meat in economically booming China and India and even more land is being converted for cattle, and the
feeding thereof. Climate change is also making its toxic contribution. Major droughts have hit wheat-producing nations such as Australia and
Ukraine, leading to a 30-year low in the world's wheat inventories. This week, John Holmes, the UN's top humanitarian and emergency relief coordinator, warned that the number of global "extreme weather" disasters has doubled in the past two decades to 400 a year. What's building in consequence
of all these factors, he said, is a "perfect storm." "The security implications should not be underestimated ...Current food price trends are likely
to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity. In other words, this week's food riots may be just a
foreshadowing of what looms ahead in the not-so-distant future. It took all of human history for the world to reach a
population of 2.5 billion in 1950. Half a century later, it's risen to more than 6.5 billion. By 2030, it's expected to reach 8.2
billion, and by 2050, a staggering 9 to 12 billion. Can the world sustain that number of people? A UN report says we are
already living beyond the planet's means just as Thomas Malthus warned could occur. The early 19th-century British
demographer and political economist believed population growth was exponential and man's "struggle for existence"
eventually would outstrip Earth's capacity to sustain it. Malthus's thinking influenced Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, but it also led to
nightmare scenarios. In 1968, American biologist Paul Ehrlich notoriously predicted that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions would die because of
overpopulation and subsequent lack of food. It didn't happen. Not only did Ehrlich take a drubbing, but Malthus's theory did, as well. Critics have
continually insisted that Malthus was too pessimistic. Humans would always find alternatives to resources that have been exhausted, they say, develop
new technologies to improve crop yield. But how far, asks David Bell, can substitution go? After having dismissed Malthus, people are starting to talk
about him again, he says. "His warning of a crash as a possible outcome may not be that far wrong. Ultimately, more
mouths to feed is going to exacerbate political pressures. There will be more failed societies." Today, projections are that,
by 2030, global agriculture/agribusiness will have to double its output and use less water to do it . Fish as a food source?
Every fishery in the world is expected to have collapsed within 25 to 50 years, says Bell.
RightsMalthus
CRUNCH NOW
We are exceeding our carrying capacity and resources
Fairfax, 2K7
[Population pressure takes Earth to its limits, 10-26-2007, http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?
id=833]
THE most authoritative scientific report on the planet's health has found water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in
"inexorable decline" as 2007 became the first year in human history when most of the world's population lived in cities.
The United Nations' Global Environment Outlook-4 report, released in New York, reveals a scale of unprecedented ecological
damage, with more than 2 million people possibly dying prematurely of air pollution and close to 2 billion likely to suffer absolute
water scarcity by 2025.
Put bluntly, the report warns that the 6.75 billion world population, "has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to
sustain it exceeds what is available".
And it says climate change, the collapse of fish stocks and the extinction of species "may threaten humanity's very survival".
Launching the report, the head of the UN's Environment Program, Achim Steiner, warned that, "without an accelerated effort to
reform the way we collectively do business on planet earth, we will shortly be in trouble, if indeed we are not already".
Crunch coming increasing population and water scarcity prove
Sadoff, Kemper, & Grey, World Bank Staff, 7-7-06 [Claudia, Karin, David, Calming Global Waters: Managing a Finite
Resource in a Growing World, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTABOUTUS/Resources/Water.pdf]
But today a new and conflicting set of challenges has arisen: global food security must be achieved against a backdrop of
growing populations, increasing water scarcity, and rising environmental concerns. Reforms are needed to promote the
intensification of irrigated agriculture, through greater participation by farmers in irrigation management and in investments
to modernize and rehabilitate existing infrastructure. In the next 25 years, 90 percent of the increase in food production will
have to come from land already under cultivation. Meanwhile the need for new water supply for urban and industrial uses
and for environmental protection will increasingly take both water and land away from irrigated areas. All of this means
that the productivity of the remaining irrigated land will have to double.
RightsMalthus
minimize the suffering [7] of as many American citizens as possible by delivering basic needs[8] gratis. Unfortunately, our
democratic [9] form of government can not direct us to any specific goal because it is process politics instead of systems
politics: As the name implies, process politics emphasizes the adequacy and fairness of the rules governing the process of
politics. If the process is fair, then, as in a trial conducted according to due process, the outcome is assumed to be just or at least
the best the system can achieve. By contrast, systems politics is concerned primarily with desired outcomes; means are
subordinated to predetermined ends.[10] Indeed, all measures that our present government takes to mitigate our problems will
make them even worse! [11] Since our present government can not direct us to any specific goal, the first step in mitigation must
be to invent a new systems politics. In other words, dump our present special interest government in favor of a new common interest government
based on a new set of values: In brief, liberal democracy as we know it that is, our theory or paradigm of politics is doomed by
ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of political institutions. Moreover, it appears that the basic
principles of modern industrial civilization are also incompatible with ecological scarcity and that the whole ideology of modernity growing out of the
Enlightenment, especially such central tenets as individualism, may no longer be viable.[12]
RightsMalthus
RightsMalthus
AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE
Resource scarcity will collapse modern government order into world wars
Hanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 2K8
[Jay, A BASIC IDEA OF HOW OUR
GOVERNMENT WORKS, 6-24-2008, http://www.warsocialism.com/democratic.htm]
Our Founders saw the common good as the sum of individual goods which could be measured by spending [4] the more, the
better. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical sense not
GDP), all of our Founders core assumptions are known to be wrong BIOPHYSICAL LAWS Thermodynamic laws, evolution
theory, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of
government. The first law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter/energy. This means
that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist Lord Kelvin
had explained the principle by the middle of the 19th century.The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that energy is wasted in all
economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second laws concepts while working on heat engines. Lord Kelvin and the
German physicist Clausius eventually formalized Carnots concepts as the second law of thermodynamics. Our government was designed to require
more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the
available energy. Energy resources must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called sinks (this is known as the net energy
principle). In other words, if it costs more-than-one-barrel-of-oil to produce one-barrel-of-oil, then that barrel will never be produced the money price of oil is
irrelevant! Thus, the net energy principle places strict limits (in the physical sense) on our governments ability to solve social problems. Although bankers can
print money, they can not print energy! Biologists have found that our genes predispose us to act in certain ways under certain
environments. This explains why history repeats itself and why humans have engaged in war after war throughout history: from
time-to-time an environment emerges when inclusive fitness[5] is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources.
[6] Since our government was designed to require ever-growing energy resources, but energy resources are strictly limited
by thermodynamic laws, sooner-or-later our government will collapse into another orgy of world wars. Its just a matter of
time... ELECTIONS DONT MATTER! WHAT MATTERS ARE LOBBYISTS! A genetic process called reciprocal altruism guarantees that elected officials
and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the suggestions of lobbyists. Its a natural, automatic and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is
immune. Unfortunately, no lobbyists represent the common interest. Our Founders assumed that the common interest was the sum of individual interests. Our
Founders based our system on the ideas of the French Physiocrats,[7] which were formulated before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT: No public advocate! Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms too, but additional structural aspects of our political
system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the rich from converting local neighborhoods into cash. Our present system of government is
designed so elected and appointed officials serve as BOTH public advocate and judge. I can tell you from personal experience that its impossible. On the one hand,
we are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex economic proposals; on the other hand, we are supposed to be non-professionals just plain folks.
The result is that commissioners cant personally evaluate the proposals in front of them, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a public advocate (the
governments professional planners are known to NOT represent the public interest in fact, commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government).
Yes, commissioners DO hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are able to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals do
not bring studies (with explicitly-stated assumptions, etc.), its always unclear how much weight to give to their testimony. Moreover, commissioners are acutely
aware of their impossible double role of judge AND advocate, bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-always give the
benefit of the doubt to the developer. A good analogy for our present system is a trial composed of a defendant (the public), a prosecutor (the developer), and a
judge (elected officials or commissioners.) The public has NO professional advocate and there is no trial by jury. Moreover, the judge frequently accepts gifts
from and takes the advice of the prosecutor (the developers lobbyists). No one would argue that the defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like
this! Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social problems, the public didnt need a professional advocate to ever
question special interests. The point here is that our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual economic growth to solve social problems and
maintain public order. The political system is self-reinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible as
thermodynamics tells us it must then our present form of government becomes impossible too.
Authoritarianism is inevitable the government needs to ensure control of resources that are key to the military
Klare, five college prof of peace & world security studies & director of Peace and World Security Studies, 2008 [Michael, Rising
Powers, Shrinking Planet, p 239]
A new Cold War atmosphere would continue the trend toward state supervision of all fields related to energy exploration,
procurement, transportation, and distribution. Because energy and other raw materials are needed to sustain critical
industries and the military establishment, scarcity might well legitimize greater state intervention in the name of national
security or even national surivival. The fact that oil is regarded as strategic commodity, essential for the operation of
military forces, will justify government rationing and the diversion of available supplies from civilian to military use.
RightsMalthus
AUTHORITARIANISM INEVITABLE
American democracy is vulnerable in the Status Quo Authoritarianism inevitable
Giroux, American cultural critic, 2K6
[Henry A., The New Authoritarianism in the United States, 1-3-2006, Dissident
Voice, http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Giroux03.htm]
Recent revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administrations decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without first
obtaining warrants, the Washington Post disclosure of the chain of secret CIA torture prisons around the world, and the ongoing stories about widespread abuse and
torture in Iraq and Afghanistan are just some of the elements in the popular press that point to a growing authoritarianism in American life. The government, as
many notable and courageous critics ranging from Seymour M. Hersh to Gore Vidal and Robert Kennedy Jr. have pointed out, is now in the hands of
extremists who have shredded civil liberties, lied to the American public to legitimate sending young American troops to Iraq,
alienated most of the international community with a blatant exercise of arrogant power, tarnished the highest offices of
government with unsavory corporate alliances, used political power to unabashedly pursue legislative polices that favor the rich
and punish the poor, and disabled those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Closer to home, a silent war is being waged
against poor young people and people of color who are either being warehoused in substandard schools or incarcerated at alarming rates. Academic freedom is
increasingly under attack, homophobia has become the poster-ideology of the Republican Party, war and warriors have become the most endearing models of
national greatness, and a full-fledged assault on womens reproductive rights is being championed by Bush s evangelical supporters -- most evident in Bush s
recent Supreme Court appointment and nominee. While people of color, the poor, youth, the middle class, the elderly, gays, and women are being attacked, the
current administration is supporting a campaign to collapse the boundaries between the church and state and even liberal critics such as Frank Rich believe that the
U.S. is on the verge of becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. [1] A number of powerful anti-democratic tendencies now threaten American
democracy. The first is a market fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns, but also enshrines
a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a Social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a
war of all against all replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. Within neoliberal ideology, the market becomes the
template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in
bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in
goods, financial capital, and commodities. The logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low intensity warfare at home chips
away at democratic freedoms and high intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks, and chemical warfare. The
cost abroad is massive human suffering and death, and at home, as Paul Krugman points out, The hijacking of public policy by private interests
parallels the downward spiral in governance. [2] With the rise of market fundamentalism, economics is accorded more respect than politics; the citizen has
been reduced to a consumer -- the buying and selling of goods is all that seems to matter. Even children are now targeted as a constituency from which to make
money, reduced to commodities, sexualized in endless advertisements, and shamelessly treated as a market for huge profits. Market fundamentalism not only makes
time a burden for those without health insurance, child care, a decent job, and adequate social services, it also commercializes and privatizes public spaces,
undermining not only the idea of citizenship but also those very spaces (schools, media, etc.) needed to make it a vigorous and engaged force for a substantive
democracy. Under such circumstances, hope is foreclosed, and it becomes difficult either to imagine a life beyond capitalism or to believe
homes and businesses and industries- the policys ultimate goal the president advocated the removal of existing
restrictions on oil and gas drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; along
with increased government subsidies for Big Oil, King Coal, and the nuclear power industry; intensified efforts to gain
access to overseas oil and gas deposits; and greater reliance on arms transfers and military aid to cement U.S. ties with key
suppliers abroad.3 The adoption of statist measures of this sort will occur at the expense of both corporate and societal
autonomy. Greater governmental intervention in the procurement and distribution of oil and natural gas will usurp powers
long enjoyed by the major energy firms (though it is worth recalling that, in many parts of the world, the state often played
a key role in creating or nurturing giant firms such as BP, Total, and Eni, which are now mostly independent actors). Any
increase in state oversight of energy affairs will undermine basic democratic rights and the prerogatives of local authorities.
In general, the lower the level at which a decision is made about the design or location of a drilling rig, refinery, reactor,
dam or power plant, the greater the opportunity for public scrutiny of, and participation in, plans for such facilities; once
control shifts to central state authorities, these opportunities largely disappear. Even in the United States, where suspicion
where suspicion of and hostility toward federal authority remains strong, one can see a trend toward reduced local
control over energy-related matters. A key turning point may have been the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which gave the
Department of Energy increased authority over the siting of regasification facilities and interstate electric transmission lines major installations whose
construction can alter the character of a community and expose it to new hazards. Previously, control over the placement of such facilities was largely
exercised by state, county, and municipal authorities; under the new law, these powers will be wielded by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
This may set a precedent for the granting of authority in such matters as the placement of nuclear power plants and oil refineries, all potentially
contentious issues especially if monopolized by unelected federal bureaucrats.
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TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE
There is no such thing as democracyIndustrialization is bringing us closer to a totalitarianism age
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 233-235]
At the same time, the individual's general level of skill, competence, and autonomy has been degraded in mass society. The people
who inhabit organic communities can by and large grow their own food, make their own clothes, and even construct their own
dwellings--all of which gives them a sense of self-sufficiency and independence not enjoyed by modern men and women, who
must depend on the "system" to provide every requisite of life as an "output." Summarizing the vast sociological literature, Krishan
Kumar says,
The triumphs of industrialism . . . involved a progressive decline in the skills, competence, autonomy, and responsibility of the
bulk of the population in the industrial societies. Knowledge and skills have gone into machines and the professionalized service
institutions; authority and autonomy into the hierarchical and bureaucratic structures of large-scale organization. . . . As Marx put it
. . . "the more the worker produces, the more he diminishes himself."
In other words, the common people have been reduced to a dependent proletariat at the mercy of the corporate state. All in all,
therefore, modern men and women suffer from a pervasive sense of vulnerability and powerlessness, because they have no more
control over their physical and social environment than a savage--in fact, rather less.
Even in the political sphere more narrowly defined, although it may be true that they are no longer under the direct control of
feudal lords or village elders, citizens are subject to the overwhelming power of the modern nation-state to tax, conscript, and
generally compel. And, as Paul Johnson points out, it is not certain that the latter is necessarily to be preferred to the former--not
when the state numbers in the hundred millions, the bureaucracies that administer it answer largely to themselves or to their
special-interest allies, and the elections that supposedly make the citizens the master of the state seem increasingly manipulated
and meaningless. What Edmund Burke called the "little platoons"--family, neighborhood, parish, guild, county, and all the other
local structures of cooperation, integration, and authority within an organic community--may have constrained men and women,
often severely at times, but they also served as bulwarks against a more impersonal tyranny. These bulwarks are now gone. In fact,
the old liberal distinction between "society" and "state" has been virtually obliterated: the state is now the primary focus of
allegiance and identity and almost the only remaining source of social authority. Thus nothing but the unreliable goodwill of those
who control the state defends the individual from the "monolithic unity" of totalitarianism.
Given the sense of vulnerability and powerlessness that pervades modern existence, it is hardly surprising that many observers
have perceived a widespread fear of freedom in mass society. If "solitude" engenders personal loneliness compounded by feelings
of rootlessness, anxiety, frustration, and powerlessness--in short, existential despair--the desire to escape from the burden of this
pain would have to become compelling, consciously or unconsciously. A characteristic feature of modern or modernizing societies
is therefore the flight from freedom. This takes two principal forms: fundamentalism, or the effort to restore a lost sense of
certainty and belonging by clinging to the old verities, and anesthesia, or the effort to block out pain and abdicate responsibility.
The fundamentalist resembles the ideologue, but rather than adopt a secular religion as an antidote to the meaninglessness of a
mythless existence, he chooses to reject modern values in favor of traditional ones. By cleaving faithfully or fanatically to the old
ways and old certainties-whether these are religious, cultural, or nationalistic--the fundamentalist tries to negate the modern world
and assuage his existential pain with true belief. And like the rabid ideologue, the fundamentalist is paranoid: he not only rejects
modern values more or less categorically for himself, but he demonizes those who espouse them, seeing the devil's hand behind
their every intention and act. Although the degree of paranoia obviously varies, this is as true of the extreme religious right in the
United States as it is of the Iranian ayatollahs and the Irish Republican Army: the enemy is Satan, the personification of evil,
against whom a no-holdsbarred war is obligatory. Fundamentalism is thus responsible for many of the pathologies that afflict
modern polities--civil war, terrorism, organized racism, extreme political activism, religious and quasi-religious cults, and so on.
Fundamentalism and secular ideology are two sides of the same coin: they are both ways of fleeing the psychological burden of
individual freedom by embracing true belief, whether in a social utopia, a political struggle, a racial cause, a cultural tradition, or a
religious creed.
The dangers of fundamentalism are comparatively well understood, if only because extremist groups habitually commit violent
acts that outrage public sensibilities. Unfortunately, despite the increasing salience of the street-drug problem, the society-wide
extent of the flight from freedom into anesthesia is little acknowledged, or even denied. To the extent that we do take the "drug
problem" seriously, we tend to define it as a matter for the police rather than the polity. Yet it is probably our most basic, most
ominous, and least tractable social ill.
[CONTINUEDNO TEXT REMOVED]
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TOTALITARIANISM INEVITABLE
[CONTINUEDNO TEXT REMOVED]
As we have seen, Hobbesian political economy is fundamentally addictive in character, and addiction of all kinds is hence the
norm in liberal society: most citizens are hooked on one or more means of denying or drowning out existential pain, with the
officially proscribed drugs being only the tip of an enormous iceberg. That is, addiction is by no means confined to heroin,
cocaine, marijuana, or other illegal drugs--as extensive and damaging, both personally and socially, as the use of such substances
is. Nor does it stop with the abuse of such legal drugs as alcohol and nicotine, as well as numerous prescription and even
nonprescription drugs, although we have finally begun to grasp how pervasive and harmful such abuse is. Rather, the addictive
search for anesthesia extends to virtually the whole of our way of life--eating, shopping, sex, music, work, sports, and television, to
cite only the most obvious. The point is not to condemn all amusing activities and pleasurable substances per se: the problem is
that these tend to be used as opiates by very large numbers of people. Although we do not ordinarily classify, say, work or the
media as "narcotics," they are nevertheless used as such, as we tacitly acknowledge when we call someone "a workaholic" or "a
media junkie." Addiction to television is especially pervasive: even leaving aside the insidious way in which it pushes
commodities, purveys cheap thrills, and numbs minds with trivial pursuits, it seems literally to entrance viewers physiologically. It
has therefore become the almost universal narcotic of mass-consumption societies.
Fundamentalist fanaticism and narcotic escape are thus basic features of our social order: most people are addicted to opium, either
the opium of true belief or the opium of anesthesia. But these very same things are the basis of social control in the dystopian
visions of Orwell and Huxley. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, fanatical religious adoration of Big Brother and equally passionate hatred
of the current "enemy," supplemented by cheap gin, are the primary means of keeping the populace in line. In Brave New World,
similar means are employed with more finesse: obligatory sexuality, artificial religious ecstasy, and, when all else fails, the
anodyne of "soma" are used to keep the populace "happy." The ways that people today try to alleviate or escape their existential
pain are precisely those that Orwell and Huxley identify as constituting the basis of their totalitarian orders.
That the desire to escape reality with some form of opium is so strong in liberal society suggests that the latter is indeed
fundamentally inhuman. As Freud pointed out, all forms of civilization are shadowed by the "discontents" that arise out of the
"repression" that is seemingly required by life in complex societies. But only liberal society--Wolin's "masochistic failure" and
Wallerstein's "recipe for misery"--seems to drive the great mass of men and women toward existential despair.
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LINK RIGHTS
Even the right to food is nonsense in the real world maintaining rights would justify starvation
Hardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 2006
[Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980, Limited
World, Limited Rights, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]
Probably no right now claimed is so revolutionary in its consequences-and, I shall argue, so indefensible-as the right to food. On
23 March 1976 an organization called Bread for the World presented the following statement to the American Congress: "We
believe that every man, woman and child on earth has the right to a nutritionally adequate diet. This right is not ours to give or take
away. It is fundamental and derives from the right to life itself. The Declaration of Independence identifies the right to life as an
unalienable human right coming from God who has created all persons equal. Without the food to sustain life, that right is
meaningless." This is lovely rhetoric, but it is ecological nonsense. In a limited world, indefinitely continued exponential growth, if
food is equally shared, will lead ultimately to starvation and misery for all and "ultimately" is not far off. Every year another 90
million mouths clamor for food-another Egypt and Vietnam, as it were. The World Health Organization says that 800 million
persons are now malnourished. The advances in agricultural productivity, most conspicuous in the already advanced countries,
give little promise of decreasing the number of malnourished, in either absolute numbers or relative to the total global population.
Unrestricted Rights would destroy life they must be limited
Hardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 1980
[Garret, Limited World, Limited Rights, Commentaries: Rights
and Liberties, Society, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]
We do not keep our attention focused long enough on the problem of chronic misery to see that simultaneously asserting the
right to food and the right to breed insures the perpetuation and increase of need. Every right must be evaluated in the
network of all rights claimed and the environment in which these rights are exercised. When the human population was
periodically decimated by such crowd diseases as cholera, typhoid, plague and smallpox, claiming both the right to breed
and to be fed may have done no long-term harm (though such double claims were seldom made in those days). But the new
limit to growth-sheer want-created by substantially eliminating the old limits (disease, principally) turns the right to food
and the right to breed into a suicidal combination. If these two rights have a translegal existence if to use the language of
earlier days, they are God-given rights then we must bitterly conclude that God is bent on the utter destruction of
civilization, that He must intend to reduce human existence to the level of the Iks, so movingly described by Colin
Turnbull. Saying that both such translegal rights exist in unqualified, unquantified form is fatalism of the most extreme sort.
On the other hand, if we hold that every right, natural" or not, must be evaluated in the total system of rights operating in a
world that is limited, we must inevitably conclude that no right can be presumed to be absolute, that the effect of each right
on the suppliers as well as on the demanders must be determined before we can ascertain the quantity of right that is
admissible. From here on out, ours is a limited world. Rights must also be limited. The greater the population, the more
limited the per capita supply of all goods; hence the greater must be the limitation on individual rights. At its heart, this is
the political meaning of the population problem.
Rights cut both ways and dont assume the ecological crisis its not a valuable framework given the worlds state
Hardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 2006
[Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980, Limited
World, Limited Rights, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]
One person's right is, then, a demand upon others. Pufendorf follows his definition with a two-word prcis: Vocabuli ambiguitas.
Rights are ambiguous words, literally "words that drive both ways." This fact is conveniently neglected by those who fight most
vigorously to establish new legal rights on the basis of supposed translegal rights. The desirability of the right to the person
benefited may be admitted by all; but before acquiescing in the establishment of a new legal right, we need to examine its drive in
the other direction, in the demands it makes on those who must pay the cost of the right. The highly individualistic view implicit
in rights as currently conceived is not adequate for a world of more than four billion human beings. Our world is not the
world of Robinson Crusoe or even of Daniel Boone. It is preeminently a social world, and social relationships are fantastically
complicated and subtle. Whenever we contemplate intervening in an existing social system, we must be acutely aware that we can
never do merely one thing. Quantities matter. A right that may be bearable and even beneficial at one level of population, may be
unbearable or disastrous at another. Situation ethics is the only ethics that works.
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LINK FREEDOM
Freedom in a world of scarcity leads to ruin
Hardin, Biological Sciences @ UC Santa Barbara, 1980
[Garret, An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament,
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_ecolate_view_human_predicament.html]
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to
pursue is to add another animal to this herd. And another; and another...But this is the conclusion reached by each and every
rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to
increase his herd without limit-in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing
his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. As
a result of discussions carried out during the past decade I now suggest a better wording of the central idea: Under
conditions of overpopulation, freedom in an unmanaged commons brings ruin to all. When there is no scarcity, as is the
case in a pioneer community with ample resources, an unmanaged commons may in fact be the best distribution device
since it avoids the costs of management.4 It must be pleasant to live in such an uncrowded world; but when shortages
develop the prospect of tragedy has to be faced. Even with crowding and its consequent scarcity, the experience of such
religious communes as the Hutterites shows that formal management does not necessarily have to be invoked if the
informal power of shame is available. Apparently shame works only if the community does not exceed about 150 people;
beyond that number this informal control is not effective enough to prevent "freeloading" and the drift toward the tragedy
of the commons.5
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LINK FEMINISM
Women once held the moral fabric of society together calls for feminism just result in more selfishness that results in
the collapse of society
Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996
[William, Part One, Designing
Sustainable Societies, Ch 2 Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom, Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages,
p 38-39]
This provides the appropriate context for the promised discussion of bourgeois woman. To get right to the point, feminism
heralds the final collapse of civil society and therefore of liberal polity. Womens liberation means precisely what it says:
women now want to be just as liberated as men, just as free to pursue their own selfish ends . To obviate any possible
misunderstanding, I am neither blaming women for deciding to play by mens rules given the economic conditions and
moral climate created by generations of male selfishness, they really had little choice nor am I suggesting that some
reactionary status quo ante be restored. I am simply reporting what I believe to be the social and political consequences of
women becoming good liberals looking out for Number One in the great marketplace of life. For the fact is that, whereas
men long ago abandoned the family for the marketplace, women until very recently upheld both family and civil society by
not living according to Hobbesian premises: men lived for money, women for love. Womans role in bourgeois society was
thus utterly anomalous: putting aside all ambition for herself, she was to be the gentle custodian of traditional virtues, the
warm champion of the heart against the head, and the loving incarnation of home and hearth. And in so doing, she provided
the social and emotional glue that held together a society otherwise given over to self-interest . In short, women formerly
devoted themselves to resisting moral entropy: they tended our inherited moral capital and thereby preserved the civil
society that is absolutely indispensable to the success of the liberal polity. Now that they are no longer willing to make that
sacrifice, both civil society and liberal polity are in jeopardy, and the future is, once again, bleakly Hobbesian.
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CRUNCH BAD
The Crunch is no future to look forward to
Hanson, civil engineer from Hawaii, a retired systems analyst, 1998
[Jay, Requiem, 2-20-98,
http://www.dieoff.org/page181.htm]
What kind of future will our children have? Shortly after the year 2000, industrial activity will rise high enough for it to seriously
degrade land fertility. This will occur because of contamination by heavy metals and persistent chemicals, climate change,
salinization, topsoil loss, falling water tables, and increased levels of ultraviolet radiation from a diminished ozone layer.
Around the year 2005, global oil production will "peak", and the spike in oil prices will quickly exacerbate other major problems
facing industrial agriculture.[52] Food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now
contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. It has been estimated that about four percent
of the nation's energy budget is used to grow food, while about 10 to 13 percent is needed to put it on our plates. In other words, a
staggering total of 17 percent of America's energy budget is consumed by agriculture![53]
By 2040, we would need to triple the global food supply in order to meet the basic food needs of the eleven billion people who are
expected to be alive. But doing so would require a 1000 percent increase in the total energy expended in food production. [54]
Guess what? Eleven billion people won't be alive by 2040.
The dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, the declining fertility of the land, and the positive feedbacks imposed by
declining resource quality will force the economy to divert much more investment into the agriculture and energy sectors as part of
a desperate attempt to maintain agricultural output. Government budgets also decline in real terms as greater and greater fractions
of the economy are diverted into the resource sectors.
As resource quality and land fertility continue to fall, society will be forced to allocate more and more capital to the agriculture and
resource sectors, otherwise the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would restrict production still more -- it's circular, there is no
way to avoid the positive feedback. Ultimately, industrial capacity will decline rapidly taking with it the service and agricultural
sectors, which depend upon industrial inputs.
Constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, the availability of life-supporting resources will go into a
permanent, steep decline.
In many ways, the next hundred years will be the inverse of the last hundred. As fossil fuels dwindle, supply lines collapse, and
societies disintegrate, muscle will gradually replace machinery. "Home grown" will replace "imported". Obviously, large cities will
be mostly abandoned.
Well-intended activists from both the Left and Right -- armed with facts and ideologies -- will form political movements, select the
best liars for leaders, and take to the streets demanding that government take us back to "the good old days". The worse our
problems become, the more they will act instead of think. The less they think, the worse our problems will become. Social order
will disintegrate, and Roadside Warriors will go mad, killing, raping, torturing, and burning...
It really will be back to the good old days! Shouts of "BRING ME HIS HEAD" will ring through the land, slaves, scalps,
souvenirs and trophies of all sorts, ... exciting possibilities limited only by our ingenuity.
The good news is that recycling will finally become fashionable! We will see feral children mining the dumps for plastic to burn
(Pampers) so they can heat the hovels they are forced to live in. The strongest kids will set traps for fresh meat -- rats -- while the
weaker kids will eat anything they can cram into their mouths (old shoes, styrofoam peanuts, newspaper soup). Pandemics will
sweep the world, punctuated every so often by explosions as abandoned and rotting nuclear facilities blow up. Leaking dumps and
tanks will spew PCBs and radioactive hazwaste into the feral food chain spawning surprising new shapes for young mothers to
enjoy nursing.[55] Toxic chemical fires, blowing garbage and trash, genetic mutations, filthy water, cannibalism ...
As the Easter Islanders say: "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth".[56]
The situation will be especially serious for a short time because the population will keep rising due to the lags inherent in the age
structure and social adjustment. Then mercifully, the population will drop sharply as the death rate is driven upward by lack of
food and health services.[57] Trapped in obsolete belief systems, Americans won't even know why their society disintegrated.
A hundred thousand years from now -- once the background radiation levels drop below lethality -- a new Homo mutilus will
crawl out of the caves to elect a leader. Although we have no idea what mutilus might look like, evolutionary theory can still tell us
who will win the election. He will be the best liar running on a platform to end hunger by controlling nature.
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CRUNCH WAR
Without State action to prevent the crunch resource depletion would provoke war and its own storm of death checks
HEILBRONER, Ecologist and Author of books on philosophy, the environment and economics, 1974
[An Inquiry
into the Human Prospect, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, p. 132-133]
Therefore the outlook is for what we may call convulsive change change forced upon us by external events rather than by
conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation. As with Malthuss much derided but all too prescient forecasts nature
will provide the checks, if foresight and morality do not. One such check could be the outbreak of wars arising from the
explosive tensions of the coming period, which might reduce the growth rates of the surviving nation-states and thereby defer the
danger of industrial asphyxiation for a period. Alternatively, nature may rescue us from ourselves by what John Platt has called a
storm of crisis problems. As we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance, local disasters- large-scale fatal
urban temperature inversions, massive crop failures, resource shortages may also slow down economic growth and give a
necessity impetus to the piecemeal construction of an ecologically and socially viable social systems.
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IMPACT - OVERPOPULATION
Overpopulation kills any effort to sustain the world, destroying biodiversity, causing war, and ensuring extinction
authoritarian child policies would be a necessary check
Hedges, Senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished
Fellow at Princeton University, 2/9/09 (Chris, We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction,
http://peaceandjustice.org/article.php/20090309091429962)
All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth.
By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people,
according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the
Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis,
including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given
that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants
and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the
Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the
planet's life-forms -- an estimated 8,760 species die off per year -- because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of
these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources . The Yangtze
River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike
and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the
monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival
of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its
members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear.
Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic -- the era of solitude. As
long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again
Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland. The populations in
industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a
disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in
the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to
developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and
China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population
control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women
worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied
territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines. The
overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining
wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an
overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright
will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations
such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life
is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas
and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our
borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom-the
number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity-is about 18 million. This means
that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation
will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's
resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think. A world where 8 billion to 10 billion
people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in
Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain
effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible
only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will
be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be
solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.
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IMPACT OVERPOPULATION
Overpopulation outweighs and turns case it results in warming, war, poverty, and famine only authoritarian
control can stop it
Associated Content, 9-21-06(Steven Halverson, AC, Overpopulation: Should Having a Child Require a Permit?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/61009/overpopulation_should_having_a_child_pg2_pg2.html?cat=37)
In America a permit is required to own a gun, a business, to drive an automobile, to hunt game, and to fish. Americans live
with almost no hostility to these limitations because these permits are used to protect the population from severe harm. Gun
permits are intact to reduce crime, drivers licenses protect the roads from a state of metal anarchy, fishing and hunting
permits protect other species, like the American Eagle, which are in danger of total extinction. Permits can and have been
used as a solution (sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding) for large and complex problems, on a national and more
importantly global level. The world faces one of its most potentially disastrous crises ever: overpopulation. The rate of
growth is staggering, the severe consequences of this growth at times unimaginable. The roots of the problem lie mainly
with two phenomenons: lowering mortality rates, and rising and even stable birth rates. Population grows at an exponential
rate, and with these two roots of population growth compounded together, the problem becomes even more immense. If the
current trend isnt altered, the human race is surely on a track of self-destruction. Famine, water shortages, uncontrollable
global warming, specie extinction, energy crises, more traffic, are only a few of the consequences of overpopulation. From
these consequences more problems arise: crime from frustration of traffic and famine, war from water shortages, more
famine from specie extinction, poverty, the list of possibilities go on forever as well as the constant lingering of devastating
worldwide surprise. It is safe to say that overpopulation is a gigantic danger to all the nation-states in the world.
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IMPACT OVERPOPULATION
There are two ways the population will decrease either through authoritarian control now, or through violence,
starvation, and epidemics later prefer our evidence, its from scientists who have spent their entire lives studying
growth
Connor, Science Editor for the Independent, 1-7-06 (Steve, Overpopulation 'is main threat to planet',
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/overpopulation-is-main-threat-to-planet-521925.html)
Climate change and global pollution cannot be adequately tackled without addressing the neglected issue of the world's
booming population, according to two leading scientists. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey,
and Professor John Guillebaud, vented their frustration yesterday at the fact that overpopulation had fallen off the agenda of
the many organisations dedicated to saving the planet. The scientists said dealing with the burgeoning human population of
the planet was vital if real progress was to be made on the other enormous problems facing the world. "It is the elephant in
the room that nobody wants to talk about" Professor Guillebaud said. "Unless we reduce the human population humanely
through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation." Professor Guillebaud said he
decided to study the field of human reproduction more than 40 years ago specifically because of the problems he envisaged
through overpopulation. His concerns were echoed by Professor Rapley, an expert on the effects of climate change on the
Antarctic, who pointed out that this year an extra 76 million people would be added to the 6.5 billion already living on
Earth, which is twice as many as in 1960. By the middle of the century, the United Nations estimates that the world
population is likely to increase to more than nine billion, which is equivalent to an extra 200,000 people each day. Professor
Rapley said the extra resources needed to sustain this growth in population would put immense strains on the planet's lifesupport system even if pollution emissions per head could be dramatically reduced. "Although reducing human emissions
to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental
'footprint', the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero. Only the lack of the individual can
bring it down to nothing," Professor Rapley says in an article for the BBC website. "So if we believe that the size of the
human 'footprint' is a serious problem - and there is much evidence for this - then a rational view would be that along with a
raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed." Professor
Rapley says the explosive growth in the human population and the concomitant effects on the environment have been
largely ignored by many of those concerned with climate change. "It is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive
issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability," he says. "So controversial is the subject that it has become the
Cinderella of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private. "In interdisciplinary meetings
addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by
their absence.'' Professor Guillebaud, who co-chairs the Optimum Population Trust, said it became politically incorrect
about 25 years ago to bring up family planning in discussing the environmental problems of the developing world. The
world population needed to be reduced by nearly two-thirds if climate change was to be prevented and everyone on the
planet was to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of Europeans, Professor Guillebaud said. An environmental assessment by the
conservation charity WWF and the Worldwatch Institute in Washington found that humans were now exploiting about 20
per cent more renewable resources than can be replaced each year. Professor Guillebaud said this meant it would require
the natural resources equivalent to four more Planet Earths to sustain the projected 2050 population of nine billion people.
"The figures demonstrate the folly of concentrating exclusively on lifestyles and technology and ignoring human numbers
in our attempts to combat global warming," he said. "We need to think about climate changers - human beings and their
numbers - as well as climate change." Some environmentalists have argued that is not human numbers that are important,
but the relative use of natural resources and production of waste such as carbon dioxide emissions. They have suggested
that the planet can sustain a population of nine billion people or even more provided that everyone adopts a less energyintensive lifestyle based on renewable sources of energy rather than fossil fuels. But Professor Guillebaud said: "We
urgently need to stabilise and reduce human numbers. There is no way that a population of nine billion - the UN's medium
forecast for 2050 - can meet its energy needs without unacceptable damage to the planet and a great deal of human misery."
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IMPACT CRIME
The current order makes social decay inevitable effects like crime are just a product of liberal rights to conveniences
Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996
[William, Part One, Designing
Sustainable Societies, Ch 2 Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom, Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages,
p 37-38]
With respect to crime, for example, the principal duty of the liberal state is to keep the peace by suppressing deviant
behavior. For this reason it is often called the night watchman state. As we all know, however, the watchman has fallen
down on the job: despite prisons packed to the rafters with vicious criminals, there are even more out prowling the streets .
Indeed, in a stark admission that the authorities have lsot control of the nations capital, already one of the most heavily
policed cities in the country, the mayor of Washington in October 1993 asked the president to send in the National Guard to
help stem the rising tide of murder and mayhem. How could it be that the liberal state of today especially in the United
States, but increasingly in all other modern polities as well is failing to perform its one essential function (and a purely
negative one at that)? Leaving aside all sociological complexities, the answer is that crime is the logical and, indeed,
inevitable consequence of living by Hobbesian premises. When all members of the society are not only thrown into a fierce
competition with each other for access to the sources of satisfaction, but also into a Sadean moral wasteland in which that
satisfaction is the ultimate and only value. Eventually all that restrains them is fear of the watchmans club and when that
ceases to intimidate, crime is bound to flourish. Those who take to a life of crime in the urban wastelands of today are
simply good Hobbesians: if the sovereign does not provide enough of the necessary and appropriate conveniances of life,
then you owe the state and society neither loyalty nor obedience. As Hannah Arendt put it, Hobbes foresees and justifies
the social outcasts organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisies moral philosophy .11 In
sum, the practical effect of Hobbesian polity is paradoxically to encourage just the kind of lawless violence that it is
supposed to prevent, because living by Hobbesian premises over the long term fosters a vicious circle of antisocial behavior
that tends toward the state of nature and the war of all against all.
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but by the Oil Peak itself, followed by, Second, horrendous wars fought by the great powers desperately hoping to secure the final
precious reserves to themselves. This second stage would culminate in a horrific inversion, whereby global elites will decide to
directly immolate the vast hordes of poor, ignorant, useless eaters of the world, via some kind of bio-weapon. In other words, not
so much a Die off but rather a Kill off. Is this sketch of your analysis roughly correct?
A: Your snapshot is essentially correct. But a great deal of death will occur because food and water supply lines will collapse. Food
cannot be grown in anything like the quantities we need without oil and natural gas. Moreover, neither food nor water can be
delivered without oil and gas. Cities like Las Vegas must become uninhabitable deserts again. The population of Southern
California must fall to a few hundred thousand again. In Canada, water pipes will freeze in the winter without gas. Its a very long
list, I cant guess how many will die from each.
Q: Do you buy into conspiracy theories that posit various organizational mechanisms as the likely planners and implementers of a big Kill-off (e.g. Illuminati,
Skull & Bones, Masons, Bilderberg, etc.)? Or, do you assume that the existing governments, or the US government alone, would be sufficient to straight-forwardly
implement the Kill-off?
A: I dont think it matters. At any future point in time when people feel threatened, when the ruling elite is threatened, when the
mob is at the gates, theyll find a way to protect themselves. The details are not important. But thats what I would do if I were
them get rid of them, kill them all. You have to remember, its like playing golf as far as the genes are concerned. Its that easy. America is the best place
to ride out the coming crash because it has the best means of control to keep public order and protect us from intruders.
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A2: ENVIRONMENT
ONLY THE STEADY STATE CAN BALANCE THE MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS THE CRUNCH WILL
CAUSE
DE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996
[Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the
State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls Solution., p192,
Routledge Publishing]
A fourth reason for viewing the state as an essential actor in the field of the environment is that there is a strong need for impartial
expertise and the formulation of boundary conditions for sustainable development (e.g. what is a responsible and sustainable
utilisation of the environmental wealth of the biosphere per inhabitant). What is needed is a collection of expertise to measure the
level of pollution caused by certain specific kinds of behaviour, to decide what are 'safe' emission levels and norms, to set criteria
for environmentally dangerous substances, and to collect relevant information concerning the possibilities for preventing and
combating different kinds of pollution. These are complicated tasks that require large-scale and expensive application of funds,
which can be provided only by a state with sufficient financial strength standing above the parties concerned. Taking into account
the interests that are implied in environmental policies, it is of the utmost importance that this expertise is of an independent
character and is not in the grip of highly influential societal groups, like trade and industry. In green critiques the state is often seen
as structurally committed to adopting a pro-business stance. The impartiality that is needed must go so far that criteria, norms,
measures and solutions are adopted which are necessary for environmental protection, even when they are disagreeable for, or
even detrimental to, certain influential interest groups.
CENTRALIZATION IS KEY TO ACCOUNTABILITYDECENTRALIZATION ALLOWS NO ONE TO TAKE THE
BLAME FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION
DE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996
[Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the
State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls Solution., p196197, Routledge Publishing]
A third disadvantage of fundamental decentralisation seems to be the danger of parochialism and especially the very short distance
between governors and those being governed. In small communities a tendency to give priority to one's own interests and to
consider the outside world as hostile can easily arise. This could lead to the inclination to try to pass on the locally produced
pollution to the surrounding area, as was argued above regarding the free-rider dilemma. As pointed out by Robyn Eckersley:
historically most progressive social and environmental legislative changes-ranging from affirmative action, human rights
protection, and homosexual law reform to the preservation of wilderness areas-have tended to emanate from more cosmopolitan
central governments rather than provincial or local decision making bodies. In many instances, such reforms have been carried
through by central governments in the face of opposition from the local community or region affected-a situation that has been the
hallmark of many environmental battles.
(Eckersley 1992:173-4)
The short distance between governors and those being governed which is the direct consequence of decentralisation implies that
the former might be reluctant to take disagreeable measures. Because of the close contacts between 'rulers' and 'ruled' it is difficult
for the former to take a detached view, and this is fertile ground for the favouring of acquaintances, closing of eyes to abuses, and
cover-ups. It was shown in the Netherlands that municipalities (in particular) are not very strict with the granting of permits to
pollute to factories, farmers, and small traders and that in general the local officers do not tend to punish transgressions of
environmental laws according to the official rules (Groen 1991:6).
In the southern Dutch provinces like Noord Brabant and Limburg, investigations showed that the predominantly christian
democratic mayors and aldermen have had the utmost difficulties-to say the least-in maintaining the quite strict national
environmental regulations which they have to impose on their voters (the farmers and agriculturists who are their neighbours and
friends, and who make up their own constituency). The Dutch national policy to restrict the production of manure, and to curtail
the extensive use of fertilisers, insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, has become a complete failure for that reason. Higher levels
of government, like regions or provinces, are more distant from the local population, but this makes them far less vulnerable than
decentralised communities to local interests, favouritism, nepotism and the tendency to spare their own citizens (Wijkhuizen
1992:10-15).
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Humans, like all organisms, can only sustain themselves and their populations by having access to the products and services of
their environment, including those of other species and ecosystems. However, humans are clever at developing and using
technologies; as a result they have an unparalleled ability to manipulate the carrying capacity of the environment in support of their
own activities. When prehistoric humans first discovered that crude tools and weapons allowed greater effectiveness in gathering wild foods and hunting
animals, they effectively increased the carrying capacity of the environment for their species. The subsequent development and improvement of agricultural
systems has had a similar effect, as have discoveries in medicine and industrial technology.
Clearly, the cultural evolution of human socio-technological systems has allowed enormous increases to be achieved in carrying
capacity for our species. This increased effectiveness of environmental exploitation has allowed a tremendous multiplying of the
human population to occur. In prehistoric times (that is, more than 10,000 years ago) all humans were engaged in a primitive hunting and gathering lifestyle,
and their global population probably amounted to several million individuals. In the year 2000, because humans have been so adept at increasing the carrying
capacity of their environment, more than six billion individuals were sustained, and the global population is still increasing.
Humans have also increased the carrying capacity of the environment for a few other species, including those with which we live
in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Those companion species include more than about 20 billion domestic animals such as cows, horses, pigs, sheep, goats,
dogs, cats, and chickens, as well as certain plants such as wheat, rice, barley, maize, tomato, and cabbage. Clearly, humans and their selected companions have
benefited greatly through active management of Earth's carrying capacity.
However, an enormously greater number of Earth's species have not fared as well, having been displaced or made extinct as a consequence of ecological changes
associated with the use and management of the environment by humans, especially through loss of their habitat and over harvesting. In general, any increase in the
carrying capacity of the environment for one species will negatively affect other species.
In addition, there are increasingly powerful indications that the intensity of environmental exploitation required to sustain the large
populations of humans and our symbionts is causing important degradations of carrying capacity. Symptoms of this environmental
deterioration include the extinction crisis, decreased soil fertility, desertification, deforestation, fishery declines, pollution, and
increased competition among nations for scarce resources. Many reputable scientists believe that the sustainable limits of Earth's
carrying capacity for the human enterprise may already have been exceeded. This is a worrisome circumstance, especially because
it is predicted that there will be additional large increases in the global population of humans. The degradation of Earth's carrying capacity
for humans is associated with two integrated factors: (1) overpopulation and (2) the intensity of resource use and pollution. In recent decades human populations
have been growing most quickly in poorer countries, but the most intense lifestyles occur in the richest countries.
No matter how superawesome technology is it cant recreate resources We must change our social and behavioral
patterns
Rees, professor at the University of British Columbia, PhD degree in population ecology, serves on the National Board of Advisors
of the Carrying Capacity Network, 1995
[William, OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT, Wackernagel and Rees; New
Society Pub., http://dieoff.org/page13.htm]
Today, of course, humankind has become a global culture, one increasingly driven by a philosophy of competitive expansionism,
one which is subduing and consuming the Earth. The problem is that, unlike the wasp, even the fattest and richest among us have
no means to abandon the withered hulk of our habitat once consumed and there is no evidence yet of other Earth-like "mushrooms"
in our galactic forest.
The good news is thatalso unlike the wasphumans are gifted by the potential for self-awareness and intelligent choice, and
knowing our circumstances is an invitation to change.
The first step toward reducing our ecological impact is to recognize that the environmental crisis" is less an environmental and
technical problem than it is a behavioral and social one. It can therefore be resolved only with the help of behavioral and social
solutions. On a finite planet, at human carrying capacity, a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for
sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle. Certainly human beings are competitive organisms but they are also
cooperative social beings. Indeed, it is no small irony (but one that seems to have escaped many policy advisors today) that some
of the most economically and competitively successful societies have been the most internally cooperativethose with the greatest
stocks of cultural and social capital.
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"it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology", Huebner says.
Extrapolating Huebner's global innovation curve just two decades into the future, the innovation rate plummets to medieval levels.
"We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages," Huebner says.
"We'll reach that in 2024."
Technology wont be effective enough to overcome the impacts of scarcity a consensus of ecologist are on our side
Kates, Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College, 2004
[Reproductive Liberty and Overpopulation, Environmental
Values, February,
http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/philrel/replib.pdf]
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A2: DEMOCRACY
Only an Authoritarian state can resist trade and industry Democracies would be coopted.
DE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996
[Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the
State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls Solution., p191,
Routledge Publishing]
A second reason to consider the state as an organisation of vital importance in order to tackle environmental problems is that
industry forms a very strong centre of power in modern liberal democracy. Trade and industry will not voluntarily decide to
decrease current levels of pollution. Only a robust centre of power-the state-will be able to resist the influence of organised trade
and industry, whose primary goals are growth of production, increasing profits and long-term survival in a strongly competitive
market economy, not protection of the environment. The power of enterprises, especially that of multi-nationals, can be neutralised
only by the strong countervailing power of an energetic state organisation (or a strong supra-national organisation) that will take
into account the interests of others, like those of individual citizens and future generations.
Unrestrained Liberty is empirically destructive and unsustainable to achieve real freedom, Rights must be
restrained
Ophuls, former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, prof political science at NU, 1996
[William, Part One, Designing
Sustainable Societies, Ch 2 Unsustainable Liberty, Sustainable Freedom, Building Sustainable Societies, editor Dennis Pirages,
p 41-42]
Indeed, the fundamental problem with liberal polities is that they do not actually govern, except in the most minimal sense.
According to my dictionary, to govern means to control, guide, direct, and restrain. This is precisely what liberal
governments are not supposed to do in theory and what they try not to do in practice. (Now, of course, they are more and
more obliged to do so by force of circumstance but largely to remedy problems, rather than to achieve positive ends.) To
govern in the true sense, however, is always to control, guide, direct, and restrain in accordance with some political and
social ideal. Otherwise it is not government, but democracy at best and tyranny at worst. In sum, we now need to govern
to control, guide, direct, and restrain individuals who would otherwise behave selfishly and destructively, so that they
respect the interests and needs of the larger human and natural community of which they are a part . It seems that Rousseau
was right. As he predicted, the unbridled individualism and unrestrained hedonism of liberal polity have proven to be
morally and socially destructive. A politics based on mere liberty is unsustainable: to achieve real freedom, we must govern
our appetites. Whether we like it or not, therefore, we must be politically encourage to higher ends than self-gratification
and self-aggrandizement. We must, in other words, be forced to be free. But this does not mean to be tyrannized, only to
be governed by our own consent in accordance with some notion of morality and some vision or the good life . And
Rousseau was convinced, as I am, that to be so governed leads ultimately to a greater happiness than can be found in
gratifying egos desires to the genuine felicity that only arises when we give ourselves to some higher purpose, some
larger enterprise, than mere appetite.
Authoritarian governments are super awesome theyre the only ones who will save us in the crunch
HEILBRONER, Ecologist and Author of books on philosophy, the environment and economics, 1974
into the Human Prospect, W.W. Norton & Company Inc, p. 110]
[An Inquiry
Finally, and with great reluctance, I must advance one last implication of my argument. It is customary to recognize, but to
deplore, the authoritarian tendencies within civil society, especially on the part of those who, like myself, are the beneficiaries of
the freedoms of minimally authority-ridden rule. Yet, candor compels me to suggest that the passage through the gantlet ahead may
be possible only under governments capable of rallying obedience far more effectively than would be possible in a democratic
setting. If the issue for mankind is survival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary. What our speculative analysis
provides is not an apologia for these governments, but a basis for understanding the critical support that they may be able to
provide for a people who will need, over and above a solution of their difficulties, a mitigation of their existential anxieties.
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AT: MORALITY
We can restrict rights if its not in their best interest weigh those rights against extinction from the crunch
Raz, influential legal, moral and political philosopher, one of the most prominent living advocates of legal positivism, 1986
[Joseph, Clarendon Press, p180-183, The Morality of Freedom, Individualistic Freedom, The Nature of Rights, won the
W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize from the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and The Elaine and David Spitz Book
Prize from the conference for the Study of Political Thought, NY.
According to the definition, rights-discourse indicates a kind of ground for a requirement of action. To say that a person ought to
behave in a certain way is to assert a requirement for action without indicating its ground. To assert that an individual has a right is to
indicate a ground for a requirement for action of a certain kind, i.e. that an aspect of his well-being is a ground for a duty on another person. The specific role of
rights in practical thinking is, therefore, the grounding of duties in the interests of other beings.
Rights ground requirements for action in the interest of other beings. They therefore assume special importance in individualistic moral thinking. But belief in the
existence of rights does not commit one to individualism. States, corporations and groups may be right-holders. Banks have legal and moral rights. Nations are
commonly believed to have a right of self-determination, and so on.
Though rights are based on the interests of the rightholders, an individual may have rights which it is against his interest to have. A
person may have property which is more trouble than it is worth. It may be in a person's interest to be imprisoned, even while he
has a right to freedom. The explanation of this puzzle is that rights are vested in rightholders because they possess certain general characteristics: they are the
beneficiaries of promises, nationals of a certain state, etc. Their rights serve their interests as persons with those characteristics, but they may be against their
interests overall.
Some rights are held by persons as the agents, or organs of others. Thus company directors have rights as directors of the company. In such cases it is the interest of
the principal which the right reflects. The same applies to rights held by persons qua guardians, trustees and the like.
The proposed definition of rights identified the interest on which the right is based as the reason for holding that
some persons have certain duties. Later on I referred to the rights themselves as being the grounds for those duties. The explanation is simple. The interests are part
of the justification of the rights which are part of the justification of the duties. Assertions of rights are typically intermediate conclusions in arguments from
ultimate values to duties. They are, so to speak, points in the argument where many considerations intersect and where the results of their conflicts are summarized
to be used with additional premisses when need be. Such intermediate conclusions are used and referred to as if they are themselves complete reasons. The fact that
practical arguments proceed through the mediation of intermediate stages so that not every time a practical question arises does one refer to ultimate values for an
answer is, as we saw when discussing rules in Chapter Three, of crucial importance in making social life possible, not only because it saves time and tediousness,
but primarily because it enables a common culture to be formed round shared intermediate conclusions, in spite of a great degree of haziness and disagreement
concerning ultimate values.
For example, many who agree that people have a right to promise will disagree with my view, expressed above, of the interest on which it is based and will justify
it only by reference to some other interests of the right-holders. The importance of intermediate steps like rights, duties, rules and the like to a common culture
explains and justifies the practice of referring to them as reasons in their own right, albeit not ultimate reasons.
An interest is sufficient to base a right on if and only if there is a sound argument of which the conclusion is that a certain right exists and among its non-redundant
premisses is a statement of some interest of the right-holder, the other premises supplying grounds for attributing to it the required importance, or for holding it to
be relevant to a particular person or class of persons so that they rather than others are obligated to the right-holder . These premisses must be sufficient by
themselves to entail that if there are no contrary considerations then the individuals concerned have the right. To these premisses
one needs to add others stating or establishing that these grounds are not altogether defeated by conflicting reasons.! Together they
establish the existence of the right.
One result of the fact that a right exists where the interests of the right-holders are sufficient to hold another to be obligated should
be noted. Sometimes the fact that an action will serve someone's interest, while being a reason for doing it, is not sufficient to
establish a duty to do it. Different moral theories differ on this point. Some utilitarian theories deny that there is a useful distinction between moral reasons
for action and duties. Some moral views confine duties to matters affecting human needs, or human dignity, etc. Be that as it may , it is in principle possible
that a person should not have a right that others shall act to promote a certain interest of his simply on account of the fact that
while they should do so, while it is praiseworthy or virtuous of them if they do, they have no obligation so to act.
These considerations help to explain how it is that even if a person has a right, not everyone is necessarily under an obligation to
do whatever will promote the interest on which it is based. Rights are held against certain persons. Some rights are held against the
world at large, i.e. against all persons or against all with certain specified exceptions. Thus the right to personal security is the
ground of a duty on everyone not to assault, imprison or rape a person. Other rights are held against certain persons in virtue of a
special relation they have to the right-holder. Thus children have a right to be maintained by their parents. The reasons many rights are against some
definite people are varied. Sometimes the interests on which they are based can be satisfied only by some people and not by others. For example, since contractual
rights are based on an interest in being able to create special relations, they give rise to rights against other parties to the agreement as they are the only ones who
can satisfy that interest on that occasion. In other cases, even though many can satisfy the interests of the right-holder, these interests may be sufficient to establish
a duty on some people and not on others.
Just as rights may impose duties on some persons and not on others, so they can impose a duty to do certain things but not others. The right to life may impose a
duty not to kill or endanger the life of another without imposing a duty to take whatever action is necessary to keep him alive. Which duties a right gives rise to
depends partly on the basis of that right, on the considerations justifying its existence. It also depends on the absence of conflicting considerations. If conflicting
considerations show that the basis of the would-be right is not enough to justify subjecting anyone to any duty, then the right does
not exist. But often such conflicting considerations, while sufficient to show that some action cannot be required as a duty on the basis of the would-be right, do
not affect the case for requiring other actions as a matter of duty. In such cases, the right exists, but it successfully grounds duties only for some of the actions
which could promote the interest on which it is based.
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AT: MORALITY
Rights calculations must be made in context of ecological destruction
Hardin, PhD in microbiology, Professor of Human Ecology, 2006
[Garrett, Biological Sciences, Originally written 1980,
Limited World, Limited Rights, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_limited_world_limited_rights.html]
The principal intellectual opposition in our time comes from those who see the concept of translegal rights as a necessity for the evolution and rationalization of
law. H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin are distinguished proponents of this view. Dworkin says we cannot understand statute law without presupposing deep
principles which, though not stated explicitly in the statutes, pervade all laws and all proposals to change law. This is certainly a plausible view; yet a scientist
cannot but note the family resemblance between this concept of natural law and the concept of the "ether" held to be indispensable
in physics for more than two centuries. The wavelike properties of light were regarded as evidence of the existence of a medium ether" in which
waves could move, even though there was no positive evidence for the existence of such an ubiquitous, substanceless entity. Around the turn of the present century,
the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's relativity theory removed the intellectual underpinnings of "ether," and physicists found they could get on quite
well without the concept. Perhaps the concept of translegal rights will some day be recognized as being equally dispensable. Without settling the eventual fate of
natural rights, we can usefully point out a number of the properties of rights, whether natural or legal. Rights imply more than they say. When a right is
demanded by a human being from a. nonhuman universe, no controversy ensues. If Robinson Crusoe feels that he has a right to food, let him set about getting it.
Either he will succeed and live, or fail and die; in neither case is controversy created. But when a human being in a world crowded with some four
billion other human beings asserts a right, he asserts a claim upon his fellow beings, a claim that cannot be accepted without proof
of its value to the community.
Doing good is defined as what is best for the Human Species
Dyck, Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics in the School of Public Health, and a member of the Faculty of Divinity
at Harvard University, 2K5
[Arthur J., Rethinking RIGHTS and RESPONSIBILITIES: The Moral Bonds of Community,
Goodness Is More Powerful than Evil, Georgetown University Press, Revised Edition, p142-147]
The term goodness here refers not only to what is being accomplished by morally responsible activities, but also to positive
dispositions toward morally responsible actions and toward the powers necessary to carry them out. In our conversation, Hal was
thinking of goodness as survival of the human species and the altruistic behavior necessary to actualize that survival. Evil would
constitute maladaptive behavior, relative to survival; such behavior would be nonaltruistic or contrary to what altruism would
demand of us. Hal believed that, in the struggle for survival, altruistic behavior has been powerful enough to produce progress.
Increased altruism not only makes survival more likely, but also leads to increased self-consciousness and knowledge, and hence
greater ability to adapt to our environment. This is one way to frame the greater relative power of goodness over evil. As noted earlier in this chapter, I
am willing to affirm that we do attain a higher degree of self-consciousness and intelligence relative to other animals by means of the long period of altruistic
nurture and education we provide for our young. In addition, we have made progress if that means self consciousness and knowledge have increased over time.
However, more theoretical and technical knowledge brings with it a greater capacity for evil as well as for good. And, tragically, the
twentieth century has been the arena for massive destruction of life and the enormous increase in firepower that makes such
destruction quickly and efficiently possible. But that is not all. So much of the killing and maiming is inflicted on unarmed and
helpless innocent persons; these are the victims of genocide, terrorism, or torture. My confidence that good is superior in power
relative to evil is not based on any calculus that, in the world as we know it, the amount of good is increasing. I do not even know
how to make such a quantitative assessment.. Who does?
We have an obligation to act toward the environment for future humanity
Hardin, PhD in microbiology, Professor of Human Ecology, 2003
[Garrett, From Shortage to Longage: Forty Years in the
Population Vineyards, Originally written 1991, http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_from_shortage_to_longage.html]
With a few or no exceptions close examination of the economy of nations that chronically suffer from starvation reveals that the production factors are already
severely over-stressed. In Ethiopia, land that should not be farmed is farmed, with a resultant loss of soil; too many animals are kept on the pasture lands, leading to
the loss of soil and the replacement of "sweet grass" by weeds; and bushes and trees are removed from steep slopes resulting in a loss of soil that ultimately makes
the reestablishment of woody plants impossible. (Internationalists should note that soil lost from the mountains of Ethiopia becomes silt in Egypt's Lake Nasser,
thus shortening the useful lifetime of the High Aswam Dam.) When a country is overpopulated-when its population is greater than the carrying capacity of its land,
whatever standard of living is used in reaching a judgementsaving lives today by direct gifts of food ensures that more lives will be lost tomorrow because of the
increased environmental destruction made possible by the encouragement of population growth. The time-blind ideal, "Human life is sacred," is
counterproductive. "'Sacred," like all old words, has many meanings and connotations. What we are concerned with here is its related meaning of sacrosanct or
inviolable. When disputants say that human life is sacred they clearly mean that we should preserve every human being now living
regardless of the cost, either now or in the future. Though not given to using emotionally charged words, an ecologist would be more inclined to say that the
environment, not human beings, is sacrosanct. The moment this proposition is advanced the conventional moralist expostulates: "Oh! You mean you
prefer the life of dickey-birds to human beings? You prefer redwood trees to people?"We have all heard such contemptuous questions. The questioner misses the
point. Ecologists confer sacrosanctity on the carrying capacity of the environment in order to better the condition of men and
women in the continuing future. When an ecological moralist proposes an Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity," he is
trying to improve the quality of life over a long period of time. Redwood trees and dickey-birds are seen as the symbols of the good life for human beings.
Environmental extremists may talk of an undefined intrinsic value of the environment, but we need not follow them down this dubious rhetorical path. When we
recommend that Ethiopians refrain from overgrazing their pastures and overharvesting their woody mountains we need not demand that they worship the landscape,
merely that they take thought of what the environment will have to offer their descendants. A time-sensitive system of ethics cannot be blind to
environmental values.
Alyssa, Bob, (Mr.) Clark, Nadeem, Nate,
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AT: MORALITY
There wont be a choice for your morality claims
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics, p. 164]
This raises a terrible specter: What if it goes on the rocks? What if the administrative despotisms of our time run out of ecological
living space, implode under their own bureaucratic weight, encounter progressive technological failure, partially annihilate
themselves with weapons of mass destruction, or find themselves unable to cope with declining morale and increasing madness
among their subjects? Will they then abandon Huxley for Orwell? When they no longer deliver benefits, but mostly exact sacrifice
and obedience, it will be to late to reverse the process that turned their peoples into flocks of sheep tended by wolves. And, at that
point, our inherited political institutions will be of no availfor, said Learned Hand, when liberty dies in the hearts of men and
womenno constitution, no law, no court can save it.
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A2: NO ALTERNATIVE
Its try or die regardless of an alternative
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 233-235]
But we cannot now describe, much less prescribe, a "rule of life" for this future polity. The future contains not only many
possibilities but many that we cannot now imagine, in large part because posterity will almost certainly think and act on premises
radically different from our own. Indeed, it is all but impossible to stand in one paradigm and see into another. Thus we are bound
to understand the future anachronistically. In other words, we never see a society on the verge of radical change in terms of what it
will be in the future but, rather, primarily or even exclusively in terms of what it is now ceasing to be. Our very language betrays
us: to talk in terms of "postmodern" or "postliberal" or "post" anything is necessarily to remain beholden to the intellectual
constructs of the present. In addition, the crisis of modern civilization has no simple or straightforward solution; nor do we yet
understand the problem well enough to think in terms of a solution. And the rationalist model of problem solving does not apply:
"Cultural solutions," says Wendell Berry, "are organisms, not machines, and they cannot be invented deliberately or imposed by
prescription."
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AFF ANSWERS:
NINJA
APPEARS
IN FILE
Alyssa, Bob, (Mr.) Clark, Nadeem, Nate,
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they would like to have; the average result was 2.36 well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in
Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work.As it turns out, the situation
differs by region. Its a mistake to think of Europe as a single entity in this respect, Alasdair Murray, director of CentreForum, a London-based research group,
told me. There are really four different population changes happening in Europe. One concerns Eastern Europe, where trends date from the Communist period
and portend a special, and especially virulent, class of social problems. Bulgarias birthrate is 1.37, and life expectancy for males is seven years less than in
Belgium or Germany; the E.U. estimates that Bulgarias population will drop from 8 million today to 5 million in 2050. Since 1989, Latvias population has
dropped 13 percent; its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and its divorce rate is among the highest in Europe, according to Linda Andersone, the deputy
director of the Latvian Department of Children and Family Policy. Throughout most of Eastern Europe you see the same dark elixir of forces at
play, which commentators attribute to Westernization, though its difficult to fix causes precisely. We can see that birthrate
declines date to the fall of the Soviet Union, Murray said, but is that due to the switch to a market economy or something
else?Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. They share many of the same characteristics of other Western European countries
with regard to forces affecting family life, but in addition childlessness is peculiarly high in these countries, and has been for some time. A 2002 study found that
27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.)
When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in
Austria answered none. (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.) The main reason seems to be a basic change in attitudes on the part of some women
as to their natural role. According to Nikolai Botev, population and development adviser at the United Nations Population Fund, many observers have been
surprised to find that in recent years childlessness emerges as an ideal lifestyle. No one has yet figured out why some countries are more predisposed to
childlessness than others.But the true fertility fault line in Europe the fissures of which spread outward across the globe runs
between the north and the south. Setting aside the special case of countries in the east, the lowest rates in Europe some of the lowest
fertility rates in the world are to be found in the seemingly family-friendly countries of Italy, Spain and Greece (all currently hover around 1.3). I asked
Francesco Billari of Bocconi University in Milan, an author of the 2002 study that introduced the lowest low concept, to account for this. If we look at very
recent data for developed countries, we see that Italy has two records that are maybe world records, he said. One, young people in Italy stay with their parents
longer than maybe anywhere else. No. 2 is the percentage of children born after the parents turn 40. These factors are related, because if you have a late start, you
tend not to have a second child, and especially not a third.Plenty of anecdotal evidence squares with this. When I visited a day-care center for 3-month-olds to 3year-olds in Milan, the manager, Mara Vavassori, showed me her roster of enrollment sheets. On one line of each was a date 1964, 1967, 1963: the birth years of
the parents of her toddler-clients. She had been in this business for 20 years, she said. It used to be that first-time parents were in their early to mid-20s. Today, she
said, more than half were in their 40s.
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nonrenewable. It includes inputs into the economy, in terms of resources, and relates to the outputs of the economic system,
in terms of the assimilation of wastes. Human capital refers to the people and the bodies of knowledge that contribute to
community and to production. Human-created capital refers to products and technologies created by humans, including the
built environment. Social capital is what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls the civic-ness of regional life,
including such things as participation in the political life of the community, newspaper readership, and membership in
associations from sports clubs to the Lions Club, from unions to choral societies. This is participation that seems to depend less on who you are than
on where you are, and that underlines the importance of the relationship to place. Social capital is the reservoir of mutual trust, civic
involvement, and reciprocity, which grows as virtuous circles. It is necessary, I would argue, for economic security and
ecological integrity, particularly because of its connection to place, and it is at the heart of democracy.3 Cultural capital, as
defined by Berkes and Folke, refers to factors that provide human societies with the means and adaptations to deal with
the natural environment and to actively modify it, for better or worse.4 This includes the life stories and creation myths
that are part of all cultures that can help or hinder our search for sustainability. Witness, for example, Native American views of the
world, as opposed to what Richard Norgaard has observed are the forces of modernitys progressive, mechanical, hierarchical life story that pauperized
the coevolving natural and cultural worlds.5 Cultural capital is, in part, the dream of a universe. It is also at the core of the life of the
community, giving the community its distinctive character. The Pillars of Sustainability To continue with the definitions
within the definition:6 Economic Security is the control that individuals and communities have over their own economic
lives, and the degree to which they are capable of shielding themselves from external economic shocks. The right of
sustainable livelihood, for example, is central to economic security. Kenneth Dahlbergs buying locally and eating locally (chapter 16)
is an important aspect of economic security. Economic security involves recognition on the part of individuals and communities of
the need to achieve a balance between the scale of the economic system and the limits of the ecosystem in which it
operates. Economic security should contribute to a sense of interdependence among individuals and among communities
based upon mutual interests and equality of power. Ecological integrity is maintained when individuals and communities live in harmony
with natural systems. Clean air, clean water, and land use appropriate to meet human needs and the needs of the ecosystem are essential elements of
ecological integrity, as is the prevention and recycling/reuse of waste. Democracy is characterized by citizen by citizen participation in
community decision making through democratic processes supported by appropriate citizen education. Harmony is fostered
through efforts to increase equity, justice, and political, religious, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, and gender tolerance.
Diversity is accepted while a sense of wholeness is sought; equalization of power is a goal. These pillars of sustainability
are created and supported by the forms of capital described above. There can no ecological security without prudent use
of natural capital: the ways we use all the capitals will determine the degree to which we can attain economic security and
democracy.
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Technology innovation takes power and hope out of an Authoritarian government undermines their power and control
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 241]
As have repeatedly seen in previous chapters, the modern paradigm is explicitly aimed at power and control-in politics, in economics, and in
science. A primary vehicle through which this power drive is expressed is technology, which seems to contain an intrinsic logic that
leads toward technocracy-or, in Ellul's arresting phrase, "a dictatorship of test tubes." When the Hobbesian desire for "commodious
living" is wedded to a Baconian science dedicated to "the effecting of all things possible," the result is bound to be a restless and
perpetual quest to extend man's technological dominion over nature. The language we habitually use to describe many of our most
cherished projects is profoundly revealing-not only "domination" and "control" but "war," "conquest," "crusade," and the like. Our
clearly expressed intent is to use technology to overpower everything that stands in the way of human supremacy-be it natural barriers,
bodily diseases, social problems, or mental limitations-so that we can fulfill the Cartesian dream of making ourselves "the masters and possessors of nature." As
many myths and stories remind us, however, the possession and exercise of power has a dangerous shadow side-and the greater the power, the bigger the shadow.
Lord Actons famous dictum= "Power
tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely -is but one such warning. Hence, the
tendency megalomania so characteristic of modern civilization to be more specific, as even some of its foremost advocates admit,
technologys shadow side is that the devil exacts a price for all that power: our technological fixes involve a Faustian bargain.
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HEGEMONY/MILITARY LINKS
Democracy Promotion through hegemony is a tool to spread domination and collapses our own democracy
Ophuls, member of the U.S. Foreign Service and has taught political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which won the International Studies Associations Sprout Prize and the American Political
Science Associations Kammerer Award, 1997
[William, Requiem for Modern Politics, pp. 247]
Military power, which grows directly out of technological power, also pushes liberal policies toward totalitarianism. This
dangerous trend is clearly visible in the United States, where a national security state characterized by a military-industrial
complex and an imperial presidency has grown up during the last fifty years. The Cold War is usually blamed for this
development. However, this is only one part of the story: as we saw earlier, militarism, if not imperialism, is intrinsic to liberalism.
Because economic development is essentially predatory, it requires resources, markets, and spheres of influence or even control
that rests on the ability and willingness of so-called haves to back up the market system and their position in it with force
whenever necessary. Economic growth, technological development, and military power are therefore inseparably intertwined.
Indeed, since modern political economy is driven by the will to power, we should not be surprised when development serves
martial rather than humane ends. Or, to put it the other way around, if war is politics by other means, and if in modern times
economics has also become politics by other means, then economics is now (or soon will be) a kind of war by other means. Hence,
as virtually all of modern history attests, a struggle for resources, market shares, and influence is endemic to the modern way of
life. So the Cold War's end will not usher in automatic peace. On the contrary, far from having come to an end, history has
reawakened from nearly a half-century of hibernation: we have exchanged a kind of world order, however peculiar and perverse,
for a new world disorder that will present us with far more complex and dangerous problems. Long-frozen political, ethnic, and
religious passions have thawed, and the old basis for international cooperation is simultaneously melting away, as Countries focus
on their own problems and needs instead of on the common threat. We are therefore entering a period of turbulence in which
political borders and identities and the international rules of the game will be challenged across the board. Even the possibility of
the possibility of a classic "hegemonic war cannot be excluded. To use Hobbesian language, we are lapsing into an anarchic state
of nature, with all the political and military consequences that follow from that fact. Hence international politics will be more than
ever governed by raison d'etat, and statesmen will have to follow the principles enunciated by Lord Palmerston in 1848: no eternal
allies and no perpetual enemies, only vital interests that must be asserted I with vigor and, when necessary, defended with force.
But our world is more dangerous and less manageable than the one inhabited by Palmerston: the rapid proliferation of ballistic
missiles and other weapons of mass destruction; the even greater spread of a military technology that, paradoxically, facilitates
terrorism, insurrection, and guerrilla warfare despite the existence of these weapons; the concentration of the most critical global
resource, petroleum, in one of the most volatile global regions, the Middle East; exploding populations and increasing economic
inequalities fueling a seemingly inexorable trend towards mass migration; the impact of instantaneous communications and the
global media, especially on crowded masses in colossal "hypercities" these and a host of other complications have made the
"game" of international politics much more difficult and deadly. In such a risky and competitive environment, there will certainly
be a concerted effort to construct a stable world order based on transnational institutions-indeed, this is the only conceivable
solution to the new world disorder-but there will also be continual diplomatic and military maneuvering, albeit of a kind different
from that of the last five decades, as the various ~ nation-states (including many emerging regional powers in the Third World)
struggle to advance their interests and to control their destinies from within an unstable neo-Palmerstonian world system.
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A2: OPHULS
Ophuls predictions are fundamentally flawed They dont address three questions
DE GEUS, professor of Political Science at Leiden University, dr, 1996
[Marius, The Ecological Restructuring of the
State, Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustanability, rights and citizenship. The Problems With Ophuls Solution., p192194, Routledge Publishing]
Is it possible to save the environment without installing an ecodictatorship a la William Ophuls? His proposition that the sacrifice
of individual liberties is clearly the lesser of evils compared to the annihilation of our spaceship earth and that only the
introduction of an absolute state can preserve humankind from an approaching ecological catastrophe may sound plausible at first
instance, but turns out to be untenable at closer analysis. Ophuls overlooks the following three questions: Who are exactly the
main polluters in modern society? What do the individual liberties of the citizens constitute? What is the difference between an
absolute state and a powerful and actively intervening society?
First, Ophuls implicitly assumes that the individual citizens are the main polluters within society, not private companies
and state enterprises. On the basis of this fundamental assumption he argues that individual freedoms must be restricted in order to
secure the survival of humankind. This line of argument is flawed, however, when one notices the fact that in western liberal
democracy the private companies and state enterprises are responsible for the overwhelming part of the environmental pollution,
and not ordinary consumers themselves. The emission of greenhouse gasses (e.g. CO2, CH4, N2O), acidifying emissions (e.g. NH3,
NOx, SO2), ozone-depleting chemicals (like CFCs and Halons) in the Netherlands are caused for the major part by chemical
industries, oil refining works and electricity power stations (taken together) (Adriaanse 1990: 75-94). The introduction of strict
environmental regulations for these polluters does not have to infringe on means only that the main polluters in society are held
responsible. No freedoms of citizens need to be affected by these kinds of measures. (The figures also show that it is most
effective to introduce stringent environmental measures for industry, rather than for the individual citizens: Adriaanse 1990: 7594.)
Second, Ophuls starts from an ill-considered conception of freedom and individual rights. He suggests that every
infringement on the freedom of choice of the citizen in fact outs an end to the freedom of the individual in the state. When, for
instance, the state regulates that car drivers have to collect their motor oil carefully, this does not imply the end of their freedom
and individual rights, nor is this the case when returnable deposit systems on bottles, refrigerators, cars, etc., are introduced.
Ophuls overlooks the fact that the essence of individual liberty in western liberal consumption but in having a right to participate
in politics and to enjoy a protected position with regard to the state. Freedom of the citizen is first constituted by having social and
economic rights in addition to the civil liberties of participation, assembly, conscience, etc. (positive freedom). Further, the liberty
of the citizen takes shape by the enjoyment of a secured position. Being a member of a free political community, the citizen
obtains privacy, a restriction of its domain of authority. Through this the individual is safeguarded against abuses of state
authority. From a legally secure position citizens can actively call on their constitutional rights in relation to the state, In this
conception the state is strictly bound by its own laws and the private sphere of the citizens is respected (negative freedom) (Berlin
1971: ch. 3). This positive and negative freedom that makes up the very heart of the liberal constitutional state, in principle does
not have to be affected when the state adopts actively intervening and regulatory behavior in order to tackle the environmental
crisis.
Third, Ophuls pretends that there is no substantial difference between an absolute state and a powerful and actively
intervening state. He does not seem to realize that an absolute state is governed by some unrestrained ruler or group of rulers, not
bound by constitutional law, who can impose any policies and who can restrict and violate the private sphere of the individual as
they see fit. However, a state can just as well take stringent measures in the area of the environment, without adopting the
characteristics of an absolute Leviathan, One can imagine a democratic constitutional state in which the rulers are feely chosen,
are bound by the rule of law, and can initiate active environmental policies, while observing the private sphere of the individual.
In this respect one can better speak of a freedom-oriented and strong ecostate, instead of a Hobbesian and absolute political
structure.
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