Impact wall Extinction – Generic A switch to non-anthropocentrism is the only way to prevent the extinction of all species including humans.
Seed ’08 [2008, John Seed is an Australian environmentalist and the founder of the Rainforest Information Centre , Beyond Anthropocentris,m http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm]//AA
"But the time is not a strong prison either. A little scraping of the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom. Shake the dust from your hair. This mountain sea-coast is real For it reaches out far into the past and future; It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things." (1) "Anthropocentrism" or "homocentrism" means human chauvinism. Similar to sexism, but substitute "human race" for"man" and"all other species" for "woman". Human chauvinism, the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered".(2) When humans investigate and see through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognised as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one to communicate. For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like a mountain (3), sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". As your memory improves, as the implications of evolution and ecology are internalised and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in your mind, there is an identification with all life, Then follows the realisation that the distinction between "life" and "lifeless" is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air. It is they that are immortal part of us. (4) If we embark upon such an inner voyage, we may find, upon returning to present day consensus reality, that our actions on behalf of the environment are purified and strengthened by the experience. We have found here a level of our being that moth, rust, nuclear holocaust or destruction of the rainforest genepool do not corrupt. The commitment to save the world is not decreased by the new perspective, although the fear and anxiety which were part of our motivation start to dissipate and are replaced by a certain disinterestedness. We act because life is the only game in town, but actions from a disinterested, less attached consciousness may be more effective. Activists often don't have much time for meditation. The disinterested space we find here may be similar to meditation. Some teachers of meditation are embracing deep ecology (5) and vice versa(6). Of all the species that have existed, it is estimated that less than one in a hundred exist today. The rest are extinct. As environment changes, any species that is unable to adapt, to change, to evolve, is extinguished. All evolution takes place in this fashion In this way an oxygen starved fish, ancestor of yours and mine, commenced to colonise the land. Threat of extinction is the potter's hand that molds all the forms of life. The human species is one of millions threatened by imminent extinction through nuclear war and other environmental changes. And while it is true that the "human nature" revealed by 12,000 years of written history does not offer much hope that we can change our warlike, greedy, ignorant ways, the vastly longer fossil history assures us that we CAN change. We ARE the fish, and the myriad other death-defying feats of flexibility which a study of evolution reveals to us. A certain confidence ( in spite of our recent "humanity") is warranted. From this point of view, the threat of extinction appears as the invitation to change, to evolve. After a brief respite from the potter's hand, here we are back on the wheel again. The change that is required of us is not some new resistance to radiation, but a change in consciousness. Deep ecology is the search for a viable consciousness. Surely consciousness emerged and evolved according to the same laws as everything else. Molded by environ mental pressures, the mind of our ancestors must time and again have been forced to transcend itself. To survive our current environmental pressures, we must consciously remember our evolutionary and ecological inheritance. We must learn to think like a mountain. If we are to be open to evolving a new consciousness, we must fully face up to our impending extinction (the ultimate environmental pressure). This means acknowledging that part of us which shies away from the truth, hides in intoxication or busyness from the despair of the human, whose 4000 million year race is run, whose organic life is a mere hair's breadth from finished.(7) A biocentric perspective, the realisation that rocks WILL dance, and that roots go deeper that 4000 million years, may give us the courage to face despair and break through to a more viable consciousness, one that is sustainable and in harmony with life again. "Protecting something as wide as this planet is still an abstraction for many. Yet I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems - the oceans, the rainforests, the soil , the grasslands, and all other living things - will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it". (8) Jerry Brown, Governor of California. The term "deep ecology" was coined by the Norwegian professor of Philosophy and eco-activist Arne Naess, and has been taken up by academics and environmentalists in Europe, the US and Australia. "The essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper questions... We ask which society, which education, which form of religion is beneficial for all life on the planet as a whole." (9)
Anthropocentric views exploit resources far enough to push life to extinction
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction: The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,” http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]
2.3.3. Materials and fuel Many of the materials we use in our daily lives come from living organisms. 43 Most notably wood that is used in everything from paper towels to houses, but also plenty of other materials. 44 Wood and other organic products are also important as fuel. 45 More than half of the fuel used in developing countries comes from wood. In some countries like Tanzania and Uganda, wood comprises four fifths of the fuel. Even in industrialised countries, wood is an important source of energy. In the relatively densely forested Sweden, it makes up 17% of the energy consumption.46 Bio fuel is a renewable energy source that many people see as an important alternative to the present non-renewables. In many respects, the harvesting of other species for material is similar to harvesting them for food. One difference is that once the material is extracted, it can be used for a longer period of time. Once food is eaten, it is gone and we need a new harvest. One might think that this makes the pressure on the supplying species smaller when it comes to material, but unfortunately it is not so. The demand for materials that we find valuable is often close to insatiable, and our use of material resources is usually very wasteful. Many species have disappeared and even more are threatened as a result of our “hunger” for materials. The use of wood as fuel, paper pulp, timber, etc. has e.g. led to the cutting down of a large portion of the world’s forests. The rainforest in particular. The latter is the world’s riches ecosystem, and many other species have been brought down in the fall. Cutting down the rain forest, both in order to exploit the trees, and in order to make room for agriculture, might even be the most important cause of extinction today. Apart from wood, a number of animal and plant species are directly threatened because we value some material they supply. The use of wild animal products is in fact the primary factor behind the endangerment of many vertebrate species. 47 Ivory and rhinoceros horns e.g. have been very popular among human beings. This popularity has nearly caused the extinction of both elephants and rhinoceroses. 48 Some other species have already disappeared because they have turned out to give us useful materials. 49 Maybe this can be explained as an effect of irrationality rather than as something that follows from anthropocentric instrumentalism? We are quite often very irrational in our use of resources, but I am not sure all cases of extinction due to our utilisation of the species can be explained this way. We discussed this problem briefly in the last sub-chapter when we talked about food and pointed out that there are probably cases where it is in fact rational from a strict anthropocentric point of view to use our sources of nutrient in such a way that some species go extinct. This is probably, at least sometimes, also the case with material and fuel. There is another aspect of the use of other species as material or fuel that we have to take a closer look at. When discussing food, I mentioned that it might not always be irrational from an anthropocentric point of view to exploit a species to such a degree that it goes extinct. This may also be the case when we talk about material and fuel. This conclusion is difficult to establish however. Marian Radetzki believes that there are some identifiable cases where extinction has had negative economic effects. One such case is the over-fishing of cod in the north Atlantic. He does not believe that this is always the case however. 50 As we saw, some sources of nutrient can e.g. be substituted by other sources of nutrient. This is also the case with other resources such as materials of different kinds: One material can often be substituted by another that does the same job – maybe even better than the original. 51 The possibility of substituting a resource is an important issue in this discussion. The possibility of substituting one material for another is usually overrated by economists due to the fact that in economic terms, everything is per definition replaceable by the right amount of anything else. This is of course not the case in the real world. None the less, materials are constantly replaced by other materials and this is something that has to be accounted for when we decide whether a certain species is expendable. This argument goes both ways however: It is also possible to substitute material and fuel from non-living nature with material and fuel from living organisms.
Anthropocentrism leads to Human exploitation We as humans have placed a binary between us and natures even though the entire world is contiguous. These power relationships are uniquely bad and cause inhumane actions towards not only us but nature as well.
Fox and Mclean 8 (Michael Allen Fox has a phd from Toronto and researches in environmental philosophy, animal ethics, and science of peace. taught a diverse range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada for 39 years. Lesley Mclean is a lecturer of humanities at the school of New England. “animal subjects: an ethical reader in a posthuman world, Pg 155-156)
Most of us are accustomed to thinking of the world as made up of people and places, that is, of humans and the venues in which they do things. But this way of looking at things omits some dimensions that are vital to determining what we are and how we become what we want to be. For starters, the world contains much more than people and places; it is the biosphere in its seamless totality, including its organic and inorganic ingredients, all the animals, all the ecosystems in their interdependency. Next, all the “places” of the world are contiguous; we only separate them artificially (geopolitically, in terms of interests, travel destinations, zones to be avoided, etc) The world is properly one vast space containing many places, each designated as it is for pragmatic, symbolic, intellectual or other purposes. Furthermore, some authors demonstrate, the extent to which nonhumans transform humans and the conditions of their lives, and the reverse is also true, of course. But this is not all, for as Lynn rightly comments, the “shared contexts of all life-forms…inform our moral understanding and relationship to animals.” These contexts too are spatial and meaning-giving aspects of the world. The question of who, or what, belongs in the moral community has always been a vexed one. Membership and non-membership are functions of inclusion and exclusion respectively, of recognition and non-recognition, validation and denial and so on. As Michel Foucault has so carefully demonstrated, such choices and decisions are made at the conceptual level and reinforced at the social and political level; but in either case they are expressions of power relationships. The dominant group determines who is “in” and who is “out” (or “other”). But for our purposes here, what is interesting to note is that such determinations have operational significance in the ways they are carried out, that is they become more loaded with meaning as they are applied in the physical space of the lived world. Thus, Foucault wrote, ghettos, reservations, affluent suburbs and the like are created and maintained. The same dynamics apply in general in our dealings with animals. In the mores apparent sense, we have created zoos, laboratories, factory farms, aquariums, circuses, hunting and fishing zones, wildlife refuges and other forms of confinement and separation; but we have also created natural history museums in which animals are safe, but dead and statically on display.
Genocide The anthropocentric mindset allows for the oppression of all life
Heydt 10 (Samantha Heydt is a photographer and journalist who writes about her social advocacy, “American Abattoirs”, 10/20/2010, http://samheydt.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/224/, Bennett Gilliam)
The conceit of anthropocentrism is rooted in the inability to recognize the role non-humans play in shaping history. Humanity does not exist, only humans, who “bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman” (Agamben, 1999: 77). This hybridization obscures fixed notions of civil rights. The modern anthropological machine differentiates citizen from body, man from human. The justification for cruelty is constructed on the dismissal of the victim being primitive, barbarian, savage and akin to animals. Yet, the fate of human beings is not far off from the fate of animals. “In terms of human- animal relations, it is the former that hoard “sovereign jouissance” for themselves, by virtue of assumed authority and ownership. But when it comes to human-human relations, the question of “who wears the pants”—in its most nuanced and metaphysical sense—becomes harder to identify with any certainty” (Pettman 140). Heidegger’s theory of “enframing” buttresses the notion that human’s relationship with nature influences how we relate to one another (Zimmerman 23). The power apparatus that allows for human domination over animals emerges from the same violent pathology that subjugates humans to suffering. Isaac Bashevis Singer argues that “everything the Nazis did to Jews we are today practicing on animals” (Patterson 221). “The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – that we can do anything we want to those we decide are ‘different or inferior’ – is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We’re asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms” (Prescott 2003). In the United States today, we’re all aware (to various degrees) of the brutality that takes place to satisfy our hunger for cheap meat- yet few call for reform. During WWII the “good Germans” lived in denial of the Holocaust even as outside the crematoriums ash fell from the sky. The cruel experimentation conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele on Jewish prisoners was also met with silent indifference. Stripped down to bare life, the victims of these tests were met with the same disregard as the 50-100 million animals experimented on annually today. It is significant to mention that Mengele’s father founded the slaughterhouse machinery company,Karl Mengele & Sons, which may have planted the seed of cruelty exercised first on animals. Also during WWII, lampshades were made from human skin and sold as highly coveted commodities in Germany. Similarly today, fur coat and alligator skin are fetishized objects of seduction stripped of the stigma of sporting another specie’s skin. In tracing the trajectory of exploitation, it is clear that the atrocities inflicted on humans have been rehearsed on animals. We are surrounded by “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (Coetzee 21). Descartes’ notion Cognito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) aligns animals with machines- facilitating cruelty sans the sting of remorse. This perverse perception is applicable to a spectrum of suffering. “The oppression of human over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal” (Best 23). As long as ethical responsibility fails to embrace all living creatures, these moral limitations are as much a threat to humanity as they are to animals.
The subjugation of animal life justifies genocide
Sanbonmatsu ’11. – John Sanbonmatsu—Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institue—Critical Theory and Animal Liberation – 2011
The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally wounded animal falls on a human being. What is crucial to bear in mind, however, as Victoria Johnson points out in her chapter here the very “power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural understanding of other animals themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded, and hence worthy of extermination.” The animal, thus, rests at the intersection of race and caste systems. And nowhere is the link between the human and nonhuman clearer than “in facist ideology” for “no other discourse so completely authorizes absolute violence in the weak.” In our own contemporary society too, Johnson emphasizes, we find daily life and meaning based on elaborate rituals intentded to keep us from acknowledging the violence we do to subordinate classes of beings, above all the animals. So numerous in fact are the parallels—semiotic, ideological, psychological, historical, cultural, technical and so forth – between the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews and Roma and the routinized mass murder of nonhuman beings, that Charles patterson’s recent book on the subject despite its strengths, only manages to scratch the surface of a topic whose true dimensions have yet to be fathomed.
The aff is a Passive Bystander who is aware of genocide, but do nothing about it.
Vetelson 2k (ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN, b. 1960, PhD in philosophy (University of Oslo, 1993); Associate Professor, University of Oslo (1994— ). Most recent book in English: Close-ness: An Ethics (ed. with Harald Jodalen; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997); author of eight books on ethics, political philosophy, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. Within this card, Vetelson quotes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an international conference. Article published July 2000)
Most often, in cases of genocide, for every person directly victimized and killed there will be hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions, who are neither directly targeted as victims nor directly participating as perpe trators. The moral issues raised by genocide, taken as the illegal act par excellence, are not confined to the nexus of agent and victim. Those directly involved in a given instance of genocide will always form a minority, so to speak. The majority to the event will be formed by the contemporary bystanders. Such bystanders are individuals; in their pri vate and professional lives, they will belong to a vast score of groups and collectives, some informal and closely knit, others for mal and detached as far as personal and emotional involvement are concerned. In the loose sense intended here, every con temporary citizen cognizant of a specific ongoing instance of genocide, regardless of where in the world, counts as a bystander.
Bystanders in this loose sense are cogni zant, through TV, radio, newspapers, and other publicly available sources of infor mation, of ongoing genocide somewhere in the world, but they are not — by profession or formal appointment — involved in it. Theirs is a passive role, that of onlookers, although what starts out as a passive stance may, upon decision, convert into active engagement in the events at hand. I shall label this category passive bystanders.
Inaction is the same as accepting, approving, and complying with ongoing genocide
Vetelson 2k (ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN, b. 1960, PhD in philosophy (University of Oslo, 1993); Associate Professor, University of Oslo (1994— ). Most recent book in English: Close-ness: An Ethics (ed. with Harald Jodalen; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997); author of eight books on ethics, political philosophy, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. Within this card, Vetelson quotes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an international conference. Article published July 2000)
Ricoeur's proposed extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight articulated, albeit not developed, in the passages quoted is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the case of genocide as a reported, ongo ing affair, the inaction making a difference is the inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when con fronted with such action, as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure which carries a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed. Knowing, yet still not acting, means granting accept ance to the action. Such inaction entails 'let ting things be done by someone else' —clearly, in the case of acknowledged geno cide, 'to the point of criminality', to invoke one of the quotes from Ricoeur. In short, inaction here means complicity; accord ingly, it raises the question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive bystander, by which I mean the bystander who decides to remain inactive.
Biodiversity
Anthropocentric policy instrumentalizes non-human life - Legitimates the destruction of biodiversity
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction: The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,” http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]//AA
2.2. The right answer? Sverker Sörlin, who has studied our attitudes towards the environment from a historical perspective, claims that the best reason to believe that we will establish what he calls “a contract with nature” is that the arrogance we have shown towards nature will eventually be detrimental also to our own species and our culture. 18 Sörlin thus seems to consider anthropocentric instrumentalism the correct – and the most instrumentally useful – answer to our question. He is apparently not alone in this. Steven Luper-Foy and Bryan Norton e.g. believe that anthropocentrism does give us strong reasons for becoming better at protecting nature. 19 Is this judgement correct, and if so, is it sufficient to account for our moral intuitions concerning extinction? I.e.: To what degree can anthropocentric instrumentalism account for our moral intuitions against species extinction? The rest of this book will be concerned with this question. In order to answer it, we have to answer three sub-questions: 1. How important are other species to us human beings? 2. If other species are important to us, are they important enough in comparison to the values they have to compete with? 3. If so, can this be a complete explanation of why it is at least in general morally wrong to contribute to the extinction of a species? I will start by trying to answer the first two questions by discussing different ways in which other species can have instrumental value for human beings, and by looking at some particular forms of instrumental value that are especially relevant for our investigation. When I have done that, I will approach the third question by investigating whether our moral intuitions concerning extinction can be completely satisfied with anthropocentric instrumentalism as the sole answer. Let us however begin with the first of the sub-questions by looking at some ways in which other species can have instrumental value for human beings 2.3. Some kinds of instrumental value of non-human species for human beings. All our nutrients come from other species directly and indirectly. Most of the species used directly for food are domesticated, but even wild species contribute to our food supply, especially in developing regions but even the most technologically advanced countries depend in many ways on wild species for their food.20 All our domesticated species today originate from wild species, and some of today’s wild species will probably be the basis for domesticated species in the future. 21 Since it is assumed by anthropocentrism that only human beings have moral standing, the fact that we are killing the proximate source of our nutrients (including killing and eating sentient animals) is not in itself a problem according to anthropocentrism as long as the species continues to exist and supplies us with new individuals to eat. This will give us a strong incentive for conserving the species even without involving ethics. Rational selfishness alone is an incentive for conservation. If we also admit the moral responsibility not to deplete the food sources for other human beings, the argument will be even stronger. It also makes the argument more inclusive since we probably need more species to supply the whole of humanity with food. A species that is well suited for being farmed/hunted/gathered etc. in Sweden may not be equally well suited for the same activities in e.g. India. 22 This looks promising, but the case is not as simple as it looks above. That a species is found suitable as food for human beings has not always been good news from a preservation perspective. We have literally eaten a large number of species to extinction.23 This is probably quite often a result of imprudence or irrationality rather than as something that necessarily follows from anthropocentric instrumentalism, but maybe we do not need to save all the sources of a particular nutrient to secure the supply of that nutrient? Maybe we do not need to save all species that supply us with protein in order to secure our supply of protein e.g.? Economically, it may well be rational in many cases to replace natural species with bred or cultivated ones that are more productive and easier to manage (as long as the wild species are not important for other reasons). 24 This means that if we find one species that is a good provider of different nutrients and is easy to breed etc. we have a tendency to domesticate that species and breed large numbers of it. At the same time other species that play the same role but less effectively lose their importance. It is also argued from an economic perspective that it can sometimes be perfectly rational to deplete a non-renewable resource if we know or at least have good reasons to believe that we can replace it with another resource. It may even be economically required to do so if extensive use of the first resource is necessary to drive the economical and technological development that is needed for us to develop the means of utilizing the other resource. If this is right, it substantially weakens the argument that we need to preserve any given species as sources of nutrients for human beings as long as there exist other species that can supply us with the same nutrients. There is another reason why it might be a problem from a preservation perspective that a species turns out to be a valuable nutrient source for human beings: If we domesticate a species, we will probably change its genetic make up. The properties that make it more suitable for human utilization may well make the domesticated form less suited for a life in nature. If this is combined with the usual human fear of competition, the result can be that other species including the non-domesticated relatives of the species are eradicated in order to protect or give room for the domesticated version. This behaviour is quite common and has e.g. resulted in destruction of forests and wetlands to gain land for different types of agriculture, as well as to fierce eradication campaigns against everything from plants and animals competing for nutrients, via plants and animals competing for space, to all kinds of predators that see domesticated animals as easy prey.25 Domesticated forms of different plants, grasses and animals have taken over large areas of the planet. This has contributed substantially to the extinction of wild species. One illustrative example is when rain forests are cut down to grow soy used as fodder to cattle in order to provide us with meat and milk.26
Loss of biodiversity causes extinction of humans
Diner ‘94 [David, Ph.D., Planetary Science and Geology, "The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?," Military Law Review, 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161]//AA
To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew 74 could save [hu]mankind may be difficult for some. Many, if not most, species are useless to[hu]man[s] in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively.In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. 75 Moreover, as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. 77 As the current mass extinction has progressed, the world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the number of species, and within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. 78 [*173] Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79 By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects,could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80 [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
XT: Speciesism Speciesism leads to debaticide and loss of knowledge production.
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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