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Kritikal

The aff isolates itself from “nature”, valuing “nature” as separate and above our siblings and half siblings


KINGSNORTH ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN & HINE co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN 2k9

Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/



The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is [5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine. We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation. We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence — all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going: Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping. Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative. And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm. Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us? We believe it is time to look down.

ALT – Reject anthropocentric thinking and replace it with an ecocentric ethic that values all life.


Deckha ’10 – Maneesha Deckha – University of Victoria—“It’s time to abandon the idea of human rights:—December 10, 2010

That the human/subhuman binary continues to inhabit so much of western experience raises the question of the continuing relevance of anthropocentric concepts (such as “human rights” and “human dignity”) for effective theories of justice, policy and social movements. Instead of fighting dehumanization with humanization, a better strategy may be to minimize the human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a hierarchical one and relies on the figure of an Other – the subhuman and nonhuman – to be intelligible. The latter groups are beings, by definition, who do not qualify as “human” and thus are denied the benefits that being “human” is meant to compel. More to the point, however, a dignity claim staked on species difference, and reliant on dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of human beings, will always be vulnerable to the subhuman figure it creates. This figure is easily deployed in inter-human violent conflict implicating race, gender and cultural identities as we have seen in the context of military and police camps, contemporary slavery and slavery-like practices, and the laws of war – used in these situations to promote violence against marginalized human groups. A new discourse of cultural and legal protections is required to address violence against vulnerable humans in a manner that does not privilege humanity or humans, nor permit a subhuman figure to circulate as the mark of inferior beings on whom the perpetration of violence is legitimate. We need to find an alternative discourse to theorize and mobilize around vulnerabilities for “subhuman” humans. This move, in addressing violence and vulnerabilities, should be productive not only for humans made vulnerable by their dehumanization, but nonhumans as well.

Without this rejection, speciesm through the lens of biopolitics becomes inevitable – mass murdering the non-human other


Wolfe ’13 (Cary Wolfe, University of Chicago Press, 2013, “Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame”)

We are returned, then, not just to the thanatopolitical site of the camps that takes center stage in Agamben’s work, and not just to the question of the biopolitical status of Nazism, but also to the central function of race—and by extension, species--in modern biopolitics. As is well known, Foucault explores this topic in the lectures from 1975-6 collected in “Society Must Be Defended.” Racism, as Foucault notes, creates “caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower”; it is “a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls” so that some populations may be killed or allowed to die—what Foucault bluntly calls “indirect murder.”137 “In a normalizing society,” he writes, “race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable.”138 And it has a second function, he argues: “the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.”139 As we have seen, Esposito’s immunitary paradigm seizes upon and develops this realization by Foucault, but the point I want to emphasize here is Foucault’s recognition that you can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t talk about race without talking about species, simply because both categories—as history well shows—are so notoriously pliable and unstable, constantly bleeding into and out of each other. Exhibit A here, of course, is the analogy between humans and animals that characterizes much of the literature on the Holocaust. As is well known, the word means “burnt offering” and was taken from the Greek word holokauston, which referred to the ancient practice of sacrificing animals.140 And even more well known, perhaps, is that fact that a common refrain of those subjected to the violence of the camps is that “we were treated like animals.”141 But as Esposito’s bracing analysis of Nazi genocide shows, the mainspring of this process cannot exactly be said to be the “animalization” pure and simple of the Jews and other victims: More than “bestializing” man, as is commonly thought, [Nazism] “anthropologized’ the animal, enlarging the definition of anthropos to the point where it also comprised animals of inferior species. He who was the object of persecution and extreme violence wasn’t simply an animal (which was indeed respected and protected as such by one of the most advanced pieces of legislation of the entire world), but was an animal-man. . . . [T]he regime promulgated a circular that prohibited any kind of cruelty to animals, in particular with reference to cold, to heat, and to the inoculation of pathogenic germs. Considering the zeal with which the Nazis respected their own laws, this means that if those interned in the extermination camps had been considered to be only animals, they would have been saved.142 While Esposito overstates his case here (as Singer points out, following Boria Sax’s extensive work on the topic, the Nazis routinely conducted painful and even brutal experiments on animals such as primates143), his analysis does have the virtue of complicating our understanding of the relationship between the human/animal distinction and the bios/zoe doublet of biopolitics (a point I’ll return to in more detail below). And with this more complicated conceptual topography in mind, we can revisit the “animal Holocaust” analogy that has been widely used to describe our treatment of animals in factory farming and biomedical testing. Jacques Derrida is particularly forceful on this point in his later work, where he pulls no punches in criticizing “this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide,” a genocide made even more perverse by the fact that millions of animals are “exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.” Derrida (an Algerian Jew) is well aware of the complexities of the analogy here, of course, and he reminds us that “one should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away.”144 Indeed, his ending observation—“by means of their continued existence”—points us toward some importance differences between the two cases that Esposito will explore as well. For example, in the Nazi camps, we find those who had been citizens, members of the community, now stripped of every legal protection and right by means of the declaration of a “state of exception,” whereas in the factory farm, we find those who never were members of the community nevertheless afforded at least some minimal protection (as in humane slaughter laws, for example), even if those laws are in fact minimally enforced.145 Similarly, the “animal Holocaust” of factory farming does not abide by the logic of genocide per se, since the minimal conditions of genocide agreed upon by most scholars are that a sovereign state declares an intention to kill a particular homogeneous group not for economic or political reasons but rather because of that group’s biological constitution, and that such a project of killing is potentially complete, resulting in the extermination of all members of the targeted group.146 Indeed, this is part of what makes the “animal Holocaust” not just horrible but in an important sense perverse—what Derrida calls a “virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals.”147 And this “interminable survival” leads, in turn, to a massive difference in sheer scale between the two cases, as nearly ten billion animals are raised for food each year in the US, the vast majority of them in factory farms. In fact, nine hundred million of these animals each year never even make it to the slaughterhouse for their merciful end, because they die first of stress, disease, or injury.148 At the same time, it hardly needs pointing out that the practices of modern biopolitics have forged themselves in the common subjection and management of both human and animal bodies—a fact brought very sharply into focus in scholarship that examines the analogies between the technological manipulation of life in the factory farm and in the Nazi camps. As one writer notes, “the methods of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory farming where billions of innocent, feeling being are taken from their families, trucked hundreds of miles through all weather extremes, confined in cramped, filthy conditions and herded to their deaths.”149 As another points out, “American eugenics and assembly-line slaughter crossed the Atlantic Ocean and found fertile ground in Nazi Germany.”150 In fact, the assembly line processes used to kill Jews in Nazi Germany derived from production models originally developed by Henry Ford (a notorious anti-Semite), who in turn reveals in his autobiography that the inspiration for his assembly-line method came from a visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse and witnessing its mechanized disassembly line for making meat out of animal carcasses.151 From the vantage of a Foucauldian biopolitics, then, we are forced to conclude that current practices of factory farming and the like – while crucially different from the logic of the holocaust and of genocide in the ways I have just noted – constitute just some embarrassing sideline of modern life that has nothing to do with politics proper, and which can be well regulated by an adjacent set of anti-cruely laws that do not intersect with politics as such in any fundamental way. Rather, such practices must be seen not just as political but as in face consitutively political for biopolitics in its modern form. Indeed, the practices of maximizing control over life and death, of “making live” in Foucault’s words, through eugenics, artificial insemination and selective breeding, pharmaceutical enhancement, inoculation, and the like are on display in the modern factory farm as perhaps nowhere else in biopolitical history. It can hardly be debated, I think, that “the animal” is, today – and on a scale unprecedented in human history – the site of the very ur-form of that dispositif and the face of its unchecked, nightmarish effects.

Speciesism leads to debaticide and loss of knowledge production – turns the aff.


Rossini 06 (Manuela Rossini, Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, PhD in English lit, MA in critical and cultural theory, “To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the new feminist materialism”, http://intertheory.org/rossini, September 2006)

What is equally sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the humanities more broadly) do not quite manage to make an epistemological break with liberal humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an unquestioned “speciesism”; i.e., in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal Liberation, “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”[17] Both postcolonial, feminist and queer theories and discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as well as the claims on the right to freedom by new social movements have recourse to an Enlightenment concept of the subject whose conditio sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of nonhuman others/objects. The rhetorical strategy of radically separating non-white, non-male and non-heterosexual human beings from animals in order to have the subject status of these members of the human species recognised was and is successful and also legitimate – given that the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse of animality or an animalistic „nature“ has hitherto served to exclude most individuals of those groups of people from many privileges – but the speciesist logic of the dominance of human animals over nonhuman animals has remained in place. If we fight racism and (hetero)sexism because we declare discrimination on the basis of specific and identifiable characteristics – such as “black“, “woman” or “lesbian“ to be wrong and unjust, then we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation, imprisoning, killing and eating of nonhuman animals on the basis of their species identity. Moreover, if our research and teaching as cultural critics endeavours to do justice to the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible towards marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about Cary Wolfe’s question „how must our work itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human?“[18] Wolfe is not making a claim for animal rights here – at least not primarily. This is also why his book puns on “rites/rights“: Animal Rites is the intervention of the anti-speciesist cultural critic who scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around the figures of animals, including the literary and cinematic enactments of cannibalism, monstrosity and normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these stagings under the heading the discourse of species, with “discourse“ understood in the sense of Michel Foucault as not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the production and ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions like medicine, the law, the church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe wants to sharpen our awareness that a speciesist metaphysics has also a deadly impact on human animals, especially because speciesism is grounded in the juridical state apparatus: “the full transcendence of the ‘human‘ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal‘ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a ‚non-criminal putting to death‘ of other humans as well by marking them as animal.“



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