Food Chain not protected by clean up

Clean Up Fails- Logistical Nightmare -- Location/Depth of plastics/Sea Life/ Ocean Conditions/ Economic viability

A passive collection system would face a litany of deployment issues that would make it impossible to be effectives.

Kazo, President at Wildlife Research Team, 2013

(Donna, President/Director/co-founder at Wildlife Research Team, Inc, http://wildliferesearchteam.wordpress.com/tag/boyan-slat/)

Briefly, here are the basic challenges Slat’s system will face, according to MarineDebris.info and 5 Gyre’s Stiv Wilson:¶
1. the size and depth of the ocean gyres within which floating marine plastics tend to gather; Slat may have to moor his platforms at 4,000 meters, twice as deep as BP’s Atlantis dual oil and gas production facility, 190 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico which at 2,000 meters, is the deepest mooring in the world.¶
2. depth and concentration of microplastics; Slat’s system uses long, flexible surface booms, but debris can drift down the water column, to 150 meters or more.¶
3. capturing tiny particles of plastics while not harming microscopic marine organisms such as plankton mingled with the plastics.¶
4. potential for entanglement of larger marine life in the systems. Wilson: “If one endangered sea turtle was caught up? The fines that Slat would face would bankrupt his project in a second.”¶
5. strength and stability in extreme sea conditions; Slat’s array would not survive weeks of thirty-foot waves. It would become marine debris itself, a hazard to maritime navigation.¶
6. maintenance and fouling; Wilson: “Outer space is less corrosive to machines than the ocean is” and sea life grows rapidly on any surface.¶
7. the physical properties of ocean-weathered plastic; Slat claims that plastics retrieved from the five gyres for recycling would be financially profitable. He does admit it would not be of top quality; other sources state it would be worthless due to degradation. Recycled materials must be clean to be utilized, and this material would be fouled by sea life such as barnacles.¶ 8. legal issues; a bewildering multitude of laws regulate the deployment of structures at sea.¶

Clean Up Fails- Logistical Nightmare- General Extensions

[___]

[___] Multiple barriers to successful system of clean up

Cho, staff blogger for the Earth Institute, 2011

(Renee, “Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup”, Earth Institute, 1-26, http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/01/26/our-oceans-a-plastic-soup/)

Despite all these environmental and potential human health impacts, most scientists agree that it is not feasible to clean up the plastic soup in our oceans. The areas are huge, and the debris is unevenly distributed and always shifting. A cleanup would entail filtering enormous amounts of water, and the by-catch of plankton and other marine organisms would be harmful to ocean ecosystems. Moreover, the fact that the trash gyres are in the open ocean, in international waters, makes it difficult to get governments to invest in research or cleanup efforts.

Clean Up Fails- Logistical Nightmare- Sea Life Extension

[___]

[___] Sea life will colonize the clean up project jamming equipment shortly after deployment.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
Little sea life attracts big sea life. Big sea life means entanglement issues. And unfortunately, sea life big or small is notorious for not doing what designers assume it will do. Slat’s design depicts massive booms sticking out of the sides in a ‘V’ pattern thus corralling the floating plastic into some mysterious filter that will separate plankton and plastic. First up, life would colonize the booms, weight it down, and create their own current and eddies around it which would affect the ‘flow’ of how the thing is supposed to work. Fish, attracted by the littler life and the protection from larger predators tend to be voracious ‘munchers’ and thus, really destructive. Oh and storms? You can’t imagine the ferocity we’re talking about until you’ve sailed in full gale. The wind itself becomes audible.

Clean Up Fails- Logistical Nightmare - Ocean Conditions Extensions

[___]

[___] The rough conditions of the oceans will destroy any clean up system.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
But beyond the size of the ocean, the sea is one giant corrosive force. Even on just a month-long sail across The South Atlantic, we tore our sails twice, broke some rigging, and utterly destroyed a wind-powered generator—all due to the force of nature. Any blue water sailor will tell you about how destructive the sea is to anything with moving parts. That’s why sailors say, ‘a boat is a hole you fill with money.’ Heck, outer space is less corrosive to machines than the ocean is.
But let’s look at a practical example. My home state of Oregon has been trying to create North America’s first offshore wave energy farm. The first test buoy that was launched, just about 2.5 miles offshore, sank after just a few months. That buoy had a ‘100 year survivability’ rating, and wasn’t just an idea on an Ipad. That was the result of an incredible amount of engineering and venture capital. The company, Finavera Renewables, has since abandoned their wave energy ambitions. Is it because Finavera lacked vision? No. Whether you like it or not, Finavera, like all for-profit schemes, is governed by profit and loss. What’s interesting is that Finavera actually had a product (energy) that was worth money, and still it didn’t pencil out. Eventually, because energy IS so valuable and wave farms are near shore, the technology will become more viable. Which leads me to my next point.

Clean Up Fails- Size of the Ocean

The oceans are too big to be cleaned by the Ocean Cleanup Project. The stations will miss most of the trash.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
The ocean surface is 315 million square kilometers; 70% of the earth’s surface. Plastic isn’t just contained within the borders of the gyres, it’s everywhere in the ocean. Half of it, like Coke bottles and PVC pipe, sinks. What does a garbage patch look like? Imagine the night sky on a cloudless, moonless night. Now replace the ocean surface with space, and the stars with plastic; it’s dispersed and it goes on infinitely. Yes, humans have managed to create a problem on a degree of scale that’s nearly incomprehensible and so overwhelming we’re predisposed to like ideas like Slat’s because it has the appearance of near divine simplicity. Every time a gyre cleanup proponent has shown me a design for addressing the problem, the first thing I ask is, ‘do you have the money to make 20 million of those doo-hickies?’ They look at me with a puzzled look, and I just mutter, ‘The ocean is really, really, really, big.”

Clean Up Fails- Depth of the Ocean

Ocean is too deep in most places to anchor the system, it will blow away in the first storm.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)

Slat claims that 24 of his devices are all that is needed to cleanup each gyre in 5 years. How massively long are the booms, and how do they stay in a ‘V’ shape that Slat assumes is needed to gather the plastic? Where on earth does the 24 number come from? Slat mentions that these would be anchored to the seabed. That’s great, but it’s not currently possible to anchor anything in 4,000 meters of water (the average depth of the open ocean). The deepest known mooring is 2,000 meters. Even if you could anchor it, one big storm and his device is going to be ripped from its mooring. Ask NOAA about how many data buoys they lose to storms, even in shallow water.

Clean up fails- Sinking plastic

Most plastic sinks to the bottom and kills the ocean from the sea floor up.

Matthews, consultant, eco-entrepreneur, green investor, 2014

(Richard, “Plastic Waste in Our Oceans: Problems and Solutions”, April 10, http://globalwarmingisreal.com/2014/04/10/ocean-garbage-problems-solutions/)

Despite these creative approaches to removing debris from the world’s oceans, they will not be able to reach the majority of plastic which have accumulated on the ocean floor.
Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean. Much of which (approximately 70 percent) sinks to the bottom and harms life on the ocean floor.
In the North Sea alone, Dutch scientists have counted around 110 pieces of litter for every square kilometre of the seabed. This amounts to a staggering 600,000 tonnes in the North Sea alone. This garbage can smother the sea bottom and kill the marine life.

Clean up fails- Experts Agree

[___] Ocean plastic cleanup projects like the affirmative will fail, go with the scientific consensus not a 19 year old.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
As the policy director of the ocean conservation nonprofit 5Gyres.org, I can tell you that the problem of ocean plastic pollution is massive. In case you didn’t know, an ocean gyre is a rotating current that circulates within one of the world’s oceans – and recent research has found that these massive systems are filled with plastic waste. There are no great estimates (at least scientific) on how much plastic is in the ocean, but I can say from firsthand knowledge (after sailing to four of the world’s five gyres) that it’s so pervasive it confounds the senses. Gyre cleanup has often been floated as a solution in the past, and recently Boyan Slat’s proposed ‘Ocean Cleanup Array’ went viral in a big way. The nineteen-year-old claims that the system can clean a gyre in 5 years with ‘unprecedented efficiency’ and then recycle the trash collected. The problem is that the barriers to gyre cleanup are so massive that the vast majority of the scientific and advocacy community believe it’s a fool’s errand – the ocean is big, the plastic harvested is near worthless, and sea life would be harmed. The solutions starts on land
If an outlier subset of the movement to end oceanic plastic pollution exists, it would be the proponents of gyre cleanup. These guys pop up now and again (make no mistake, Slat’s idea and drawings are not new), but for some reason his idea got big media attention. No serious scientist or policy advocate believes that microplastic gyre cleanup is a real strategy for ridding micro-plastics from the oceans—not even The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Industry often backs ‘gyre cleanup’ concepts because they give the impression that we can continue to consume more and more and good old human ingenuity will figure out how to solve all the environmental problems. The public, for their part, loves the thought of a quick fix and wants to believe that a ‘boy genius’ can come along and solve a problem that all the old crusty PHDs can’t.¶

Clean up fails- Experts Agree Extensions

[___]

[___] No scienctists support the passive collection method.

Kazo, President at Wildlife Research Team, 2013

(Donna, President/Director/co-founder at Wildlife Research Team, Inc, http://wildliferesearchteam.wordpress.com/tag/boyan-slat/

¶ Experienced marine debris researchers, on www.MarineDebris.info compiled guidelines for cleanup of debris, especially plastics, from the open sea. Slat did attempt to address these issues but I have yet to find an actual scientist who supports his plan (doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just that the community of researchers who have been battling marine debris for years do not agree with him).¶

Overconsumption Kritik 1NC

Impact: America is a consumer society with a consumer economy. We have fallen into the trap of buying and consuming to create fulfillment. This cycle of consumption is unlike any in history. We have quadrupled our consumption of goods and services in the last 40 years. This cycle of consumption will eventually led to the destruction of many life forms and forever alter Earth.
Dennis Soron, University of Alberta in the Journal of Labor 2005

(Dennis, Researcher with the Neoliberal Globalism and Its Challengers Project at the University of Alberta, Canadian Committee of Labour Institute, “Death by Consumption”, accessed online 7-09-08, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/55/soron.html)

As in past years, one strength of this year's edition of State of the World is its ability to combine exceptional readability with an enormous amount of illuminating empirical detail. This combination of accessibility and empirical richness enables the volume to move beyond both the heady abstractions of much current academic work on consumer culture and the easy platitudes of popular anti-consumerist discourse, bringing the ecological consequences of our current consumption practices into sharp relief. The array of statistics assembled in its pages leaves little doubt that today's "consumption juggernaut" is fundamentally endangering the future of life on this planet. Globally, as Gary Gardner, Erik Assadourian, and Radhika Sarin write in the opening chapter, private consumption expenditures have more than quadrupled in the last 40 years, driven by both overall population growth and rapidly escalating rates of per capita consumption. (5) Consequently, the same time period has witnessed an exponential rise in the use of basic goods such as paper, water, fossil fuels, metals, wood, minerals, synthetics, and resource-intensive foodstuffs, alongside a continual proliferation of ever-more elaborate consumer "needs" and the ephemeral commodities designed to satisfy them. Such trends, as we've acknowledged, are overwhelmingly concentrated in North America and Western Europe, where 12 per cent of the global population now account for over 60 per cent of consumer spending — in marked contrast to areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 11 per cent of the world's population consume at roughly one fiftieth of that rate. (6) All told, our overheated consumption regime is putting unprecedented demands upon the environment — exhausting non-renewable resources, shrinking wetlands, decimating forests, draining aquifers, driving thousands of plant and animal species to extinction, degrading soil, and generating levels of pollution and waste far beyond the natural world's capacity to assimilate.

Overconsumption Kritik 1NC

Link: We must resist quick fixes like the plan because it will delay changes to our mindless adherence to consumerism.
Kazo, President at Wildlife Research Team, 2013

(Donna, President/Director/co-founder at Wildlife Research Team, Inc, http://wildliferesearchteam.wordpress.com/tag/boyan-slat/)

In closing, I quite liked this comment from “Harry,” who watches over a particular beach in Maine, and discusses his findings in his blog, on Slat’s plan: “This idea that if we’ve messed something up, there’s science/tech out there that can fix it. That keeps us from having to make the hard choices about our lifestyle. In this case, there isn’t. It is not possible to clean the oceans up of their debris. Not without breaking the bank of every nation on earth and scooping out and killing all the life in its first 100 feet of depth. That’s what we have done to our planet in just a couple generations. That’s plastic’s legacy. We cannot actively go out and clean it up in any meaningful way. What we can do is to change consumption behavior, change materials, improve waste management; do the things that stop persistent plastic from getting in the ocean in the first place.”¶ It starts with me, and with you.

Alternative: Don’t consume the plan. Instead focus on reducing your consumption.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
Here’s something that will blow your mind—to clean the ocean of floating plastic, you don’t need to go out and get it, it will come to you. Yep, that’s right. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbsmeyer, author of, Flotsametrics describes a rarely talked about phenomena that occurs naturally in the ocean called Gyre Memory. Gyre Memory demonstrates that upon each orbit of a gyre, the gyre will spit out about half its contents. These contents will then either enter another current or gyre or wash up on land. As this repeats, it means that eventually, all the plastic in the ocean will be spit – out which is why you find plastic fragments on every beach in the world. Beach cleanup is gyre cleanup.
The solution to this problem isn’t elegant, and there exists no silver bullet. The first step in solving the problem is to personally lower your plastic consumption. The next steps are to get involved in cleanups, get involved in campaigns to eliminate problem products, and demand that companies take responsibility for their products post consumer. There is a lot to be hopeful about, even if the real solutions don’t appear real sexy. But with engagement, en masse, there is light at the end of the sewer pipe. Unfortunately with Slat’s idea, I see only wasted resources and more ocean garbage in the making.

K – Impact - Ocean Extinction

We are in the middle of Earths six extinction event and the damaged oceans are proof.
John Charles Kunich, Associate Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 2005 Losing Nemo: The Mass Extinction Now Threatening the World's Ocean Hotspots
A mass extinction now threatens much of life on Earth. We are currently in the midst of at least the sixth mass extinction in this  [*2]  planet's history-catastrophic death spasms in which vast numbers of species and higher taxa swiftly disappear. ⁿ¹ In this Article, I will examine the appalling extent to which the Sixth Extinction has reached into the world's oceans, and I will demonstrate that stacks of international and domestic laws have done nothing more to prevent this devastation than to act as a dangerous placebo. My conclusion will provide an antidote to this syndrome of law as the new opiate of the masses.

Human actions based around consumption have caused the Earth’s sixth extinction event. The oceans are emptying of life and more than one million species will die.

John Charles Kunich, Associate Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 2005 Losing Nemo: The Mass Extinction Now Threatening the World's Ocean Hotspots

Our collective image of life in the seas is still shaped today by the stories and memories from only a few decades ago. Some people alive in 2004 were actual witnesses to the teeming waters of not many years past, waters bursting with seemingly limitless schools of great fish. Accounts, verbal and visual, of living waves of numberless marine organisms, large and small, attained near-mythic status in the minds of many people. These pictures of oceans overflowing with almost infinite expanses of vibrant life-swirling, silvery clouds of swimming swarms-remain locked in our common assumptions, and serve to fill in the large voids of hard facts about marine biodiversity as it really exists now. As I will show, in far too many cases, these epic cascades of hyper-living seas are no longer anything but a fading ripple. Mass extinction has left emptiness in the once-crowded waters. With regard to extinction spasms, Earth's oceans, along with all other habitats, have been there, done that, long before now. It is generally accepted that there have been no fewer than five mass extinctions in the earth's history, at least during the Phanerozoic Eon (the vast expanse of time which includes the present day).  [*5]  These "big five" mass extinctions occurred at the boundaries between the following geological periods: Ordovician-Silurian (O-S); near the end of the Upper Devonian (D) (usually known as the Frasnian-Famennian events or F-F); Permian-Triassic (P-Tr); Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J); and Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T). ⁿ⁴ In terms of millions of years ago (Mya), the mass extinctions have been placed at roughly 440 for O-S, 365 for F-F, 245 for P-Tr, 210 for Tr-J, and 65 for K-T, ⁿ⁵ with the mass extinctions taking place over a span of time ranging from less than 0.5 to as long as 11 million years. ⁿ⁶ There is some evidentiary support for other mass or near-mass extinctions in addition to the big five, including events near the end of the Early Cambrian (about 512 Mya) and at the end of the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, among several others. ⁿ⁷ Although much has been written in the scientific literature about these historical extinctions, relatively little attention has been showered on extinctions in the oceans. ⁿ⁸ For those areas that often remain submerged under thousands of feet of sea water, the usually-formidable challenges of piecing together the ancient evidence are greatly magnified. It is extremely difficult to arrive at a satisfactory estimate of the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, whether in the marine realm or on dry land. One problem is that we know so little about life on Earth today in the first place, even in areas much more accessible that the oceans' depths. If we do not know how many species exist, we cannot know precisely how many are ceasing to exist; respectable estimates as to the number of species now extant vary by an order of magnitude. Moreover, for many of the species we have identified, we know very little about their range, their  [*6] habits, their life cycles, and other details important to an understanding of their health or risk status. Although there is some scientific dispute because of these considerable gaps in our information base, the most widely held expert view is that the Earth is now in the midst of a mass extinction that rivals the great disappearances of ages past, i.e., a sixth mass extinction. ⁿ⁹ According to this theory, the vast majority of species now extant will be extinct long before scientists have even identified and named them. In his seminal work on the extinction situation decades ago, renowned British ecologist Norman Myers of Oxford University hypothesized that the current extinction crisis is primarily a result of habitat destruction and other human actions. ⁿ¹⁰ Myers warned that the world could soon suffer an "extinction spasm accounting for 1 million species." Tragically, his estimates may have been overly optimistic, as he himself now recognizes. ⁿ¹¹ To put this in historical context, the background or natural rate of extinction has been estimated to average only a few species per million years for most taxonomic groups. ⁿ¹²

K – Impact - Environment

Consumption is at the root cause of the world’s greatest environmental problems.
Albert C. Lin Professor of Law, University of California at Davis. Brigham Young University Law Review 2008


Consumption is at the root of many of the world's greatest environmental challenges, including climate change, toxic waste, pollution, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity. Laws or policies that directly address consumption, however, are few and far between. Consumption decisions reflect lifestyle choices that democratic governments are generally loath to question. The difficulty of confronting consumption head-on highlights the need for alternative approaches to address consumption and its impacts. These approaches ideally would harness or take advantage of current trends and predominant values, rather than run counter to them.

The consumption of everyday goods causes great environmental harm.
Albert C. Lin Professor of Law, University of California at Davis. Brigham Young University Law Review 2008

To get a handle on the problem, it is helpful first to examine the effects of consumption on a more manageable scale. Taking ah production inputs into account, the individual consumption of ordinary items can have surprisingly disproportionate environmental impacts. For instance, the production of one kilogram of beef in the United States requires an estimated 47,000 to 200,000 liters of water. ⁿ¹⁹ Beef production is costly with respect to energy consumption as well, requiring forty kilocalories of fossil energy inputs for every kilocalorie of beef protein produced for human consumption. ⁿ²⁰ Other consumer items also have resource requirements that are striking, but not immediately obvious. The production of the amount of gold used in a single wedding ring generates approximately three tons of toxic mining waste. ⁿ²¹ The production of one liter of soda, taking raw materials and packaging into account, requires an average of five liters of water. ⁿ²² And production of a cotton t-shirt requires nearly four pounds of fossil fuel and one-third of a pound of pesticides. ⁿ²³

Ending over-consumption is the most important issue in the debate round.
Andreski, Professor of Sociology @ University of Reading, Stansislaw, World and I, April 2005 (pages 299-300)
The utopian follies of the Greens do not justify complacency about the ecological predicament, which in one respect is even graver than the danger of collective suicide through a nuclear war which, after ah, may never happen. In contrast, mankind (sic) cannot go on indefinitely poisoning and destroying its environment without ensuring its extinction. In the face of this danger ah other issues pale into insignificance. It will not matter which political system or ideology prevails if there is no water fit to drink nor air fit to breathe and nearly everybody is dying of cancer. Nothing can be more important than to prevent this.

K Link – Plastic Clean Up

Quick technology fixes to environmental problems like the plan will divert attention and resources from the anti-consumption movement.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013

(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array"

, Inhabitat, July 17, http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/)
It’s a great story, but it’s just a story. I find debating with gyre cleanup advocates akin to trying to reason with someone who will argue with a signpost and take the wrong way home. Gyre cleanup is a false prophet hailing from La-La land that won’t work – and it’s dangerous and counter productive to a movement trying in earnest stop the flow of plastic into the oceans. Gyre cleanup plays into the hand of industry, but worse, it diverts attention and resources from viable, but unsexy, multi-pronged and critically vetted solutions.¶ Slat’s project as it stands is in the fairy tale phase, which is where all the other gyre cleanup schemes out there are, too. So far Slat’s is not a ‘design schematic’ nor is it ‘engineered’ nor is there a business plan attached to it—a fact that Slat all of the sudden underscores in an update to the website, saying he’s just conducting a ‘feasibility study,’ and that his intention was never to suggest that it was presently viable. But that certainly is not what his website suggested before the media attention—and this is precisely why it got so much media attention. From the website: “Extract 7,250,000,000KG of plastic from the oceans in just 5 years per gyre, Contribute Now!”¶ Well, if Slat’s intention is to funnel the money into a feasibility study, maybe I can save him some money. Let’s look at gyre cleanup schemes from a vantage governed not by dreams, passion and media preciousness, but from something a little more effective and a lot more boring—reason. The sea is cruel and it’s really really really big¶
Consumption is the root cause of most environmental problems – including the plastic pollution in the oceans.
Albert C. Lin Professor of Law, University of California at Davis. Brigham Young University Law Review 2008

Consumption can create environmental problems during ah aspects of a product's lifecycle: from the extraction of raw materials in environmentally destructive ways, through the generation of pollution during production and/or  [*57]  use, to the disposal of waste in the air, water, or landfills. Plastics provide one example. The annual production of disposable plastic water bottles - 166 for each American - uses enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year, ⁿ³⁹ contributing not only to climate change but also to toxic air pollution. Plastic pellets used to manufacture trash bags and other plastic products are spilled on the ground by the millions each day, often winding up in the oceans. ⁿ⁴⁰ These pellets, which are the most commonly seen plastic debris in the world, absorb toxic chemicals and become poison pills for fish, seabirds, and other marine life. ⁿ⁴¹ So much plastic debris has accumulated in the oceans that they now contain an estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile. ⁿ⁴² One mass of such debris floating in the Pacific Ocean, dubbed the "Eastern Garbage Patch," is twice the size of Texas. ⁿ⁴³ Not only is plastic waste unsightly and hazardous to marine life, but its chemical components may be harmful to human health. ⁿ⁴⁴ Furthermore, competition for natural resources such as the petrochemicals used to make plastics may contribute to social and political unrest, economic dislocation, and wars. ⁿ⁴⁵ The unsustainability of current consumption suggests that national economies are destined to face stark and dramatic adjustments in the future. ⁿ⁴⁶

K Link – Oceans

The oceans are a prime site for consumption. People believe the oceans offer an inexhaustible bounty, and because of this false notion the oceans are in grave danger.

Robin Kundis Craig, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Environmental Programs, Florida State University College of Law. Utah Environmental Law Review 2011 SYMPOSIUM: THE CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABILITY: Avoiding Jehyfish Seas, or, What Do We Mean by "Sustainable Oceans," Anyway?

This second set of challenges to marine sustainability reflects the fact that very few people view the oceans as an exhaustible resource, instead pursuing the paradigm of inexhaustibility that has characterized marine resource management almost from the beginning of human civilization. ⁿ¹⁸² While focusing on fisheries, the MEA in 2005 aptly described the basic need for a paradigm shift: Marine systems are still considered a new frontier for development by some people, and therefore a number of choices and trade-offs over fisheries will need to be made in the future. History has shown that once humans exhaust resources on land they look to the sea for alternatives. In repeating history, coastal environments are becoming degraded ... and biodiversity is declining, beginning with the loss of large predators at high trophic levels. Now areas deeper and further offshore are increasingly exploited for fisheries and other resources such as oil and gas. ⁿ¹⁸³

Ocean exploration and development is a means for capital circulation and consumption.
Stefan Helmreich Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology BioSocieties (2007), 2, 287–302 Blue-green Capital, Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy
The ‘globe’ imagined in ‘globalization’ is a closed system, a finite sphere crisscrossed by flows of people, goods and media. Such an encircling topology coalesced from circuits of mercantilism, capitalism and colonialism. With the Cold War and the rise of environmentalism, the globe acquired a scientific icon in the image of Earth from space, a blue-green orb of mostly oceans. At the millennium’s turn, the Pacific, once the westward limit of the American frontier, morphed into a futuristic force field holding together the Pacific Rim, host to new cur- rents of transoceanic market and telecommunication processes. For believers in the end of history, West spiraled around to meet East, fulfilling a market manifest destiny. The ocean has been a key stage for this tale since, as Philip Steinberg argues in The social construction of the ocean, the West has developed an ‘idealization of the deep sea as a great void of distance, suitable for annihilation by an ever-expanding tendency toward capital mobility’ (2001: 163). ‘The ocean’, writes Chris Connery, ‘has long functioned as capital’s myth element’ (1995: 289), a zone of unencumbered capital circulation, most evident, perhaps, in oceanic vectors of conquest and commerce, from the triangular trade to the trans- national traffic of container ships. But the ocean has been more than a channel for trade; it has also been a resource. Nowadays, it is being inspected for a new kind of wealth that might travel into global markets: marine biodiversity transmogrified into biotechnology.

K Link – Fed Gov/State

The affirmative asks you to explore and develop the oceans through the US federal government. But this is the last thing we should do because consumption is at the heart of the state and modern economy.
Princen, Associate Professor of Natural Resource, Maniates Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science and Conca, Associate Professor of Government and Politics, Confronting Consumption 2002 (Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, July 2002,)
How might ordinary people living in high-consumption societies begin to clarify and act on these unsettling intuitions? Where can they turn for insight, systematic analysis, support, intervention strategies, or hope of effective action? Certainly not to the policymaking arena. There one finds processes of thought and decision dominated, perhaps as never before, by two forces: a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of growth that cuts across the political spectrum. According to prevailing economic thought, consumption is nothing less than the Purpose of the economy. Economic activity is separated into supply and demand, and demand-that is, consumer purchasing behavior-is relegated to the black box of consumer sovereignty. The demand function is an aggrega" non of individual preferences each set of which is unknowable and can only be expressed in revealed form through market purchases. Thus analytic and policy attention is directed to production-that is, to the processes of supplying consumers with what they desire. <4>

The state serves the interests of the corporations which means money will always continue to be elevated over environmental health. Putting your hopes in the state to solve environmental problems should be avoided, the state will not solve.

Princen, Maniates and Conca, 2002 (Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, July 2002, Confronting Consumption)

Western-style economic development has flourished largely because societies invented legal and institutional mechanisms that favored commoditization and expansion. If noncommercial values such as human rights and ecological integrity are to be serious goals of public policy, legal and political instruments designed to favor the noncommodity sat¬isfaction of human wants must be adopted to counterbalance the force of commoditization. Commercial law is now evolving into a global legal framework designed to unleash commercial energies worldwide by minimizing the capacity of states to restrict access to markets. As a result, commoditization pressures are expanding worldwide. Since the legal and political actors unleashing these forces operate at the global level, countervailing pressures must also operate globally. But since noncommodity solutions to human needs and wants are inherently local, the effects of these countervailing forces must be felt at the local level. New legal and political capacity to stimulate investment in community-based, less commoditized satisfactions for human needs and wants must devolve to the level nearest to the people with those needs and wants. There have been several efforts to describe the emergence of global civil society as a pre¬cursor to a governance capacity that can act with some effect and au¬thority at both the global and local levels 40 None of this work addresses consumption efficiency, however, let alone commoditization and its po¬tential for stimulating material and energy throughput. At the same time, nation-states must invent new legal frameworks that allow localities to innovate economically and that protect them from the colonizing impulses of global forces and actors.

K Alternative – Individual Action

Clean up won’t matter unless we stop dumping new plastics into the oceans, a transition in how we consume is needed

Layton, staff writer for Discovery Communications, 2010

(Julia, “Could we clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?” http://science.howstuffworks.com /environmental/green-science/clean-up-garbage-patch.html, January 7, 2010)
If a full-scale, active cleanup is an unlikely end to the ocean dump, there are still other ways to at least begin to change to status quo. Job one is to stop the rapid growth of the patch, which means using less plastic and recycling more of the plastic we do use. Ultimately, though, the planet will have to make a deeper change in order to stem the flow of bottles, toothbrushes and bath beads out to sea. We'll have to move away from petroleum-based plastics and toward biodegradable substitutes in a much bigger way than we are now. Eco-plastic coffee cups aren't going to make a dent in the floating trash heap.
The alternative of individual action is only way to challenge consumption and solve the plan.
Vicki Robin, 2006 (New Road Map Foundation, Seattle, WA . www.rferl.org)
Let's debunk the myths.
It's a myth that our consumption patterns are "hard-wired" into us. They result from a deliberate strategy begun in the 1920s to boost U.S. markets by educating people to want things they don't need.It's a myth that our economy depends on more consumption. Leading economists are urging us to consume less and save more, for the health of the economy.It's a myth that new technology or government regulations will save us from having to reexamine our patterns of consumption. Mandating an energy-efficient car won't help if we keep making more cars and driving more polluting miles.It's a myth that recycling will save us. So far the savings are minuscule, and much of what we use we can't yet recycle. What about "pre- cycling"--avoiding needless and wasteful consumption in the first place? Let's reframe the game.
Millions of Americans are discovering the personal benefits of down-scaling, such as being debt-free and having more time, more savings and financial security. They're awakening to the simple fact that "standard of living" (what we have) is not the same as "quality of life" (how much we enjoy living). After a certain point, more stuff just means more complexity and more burden. Having fewer possessions isn't deprivation, it's freedom! Once they realize that they sell their most precious resource (time) for money, people naturally reduce their consumption by asking of each purchase: Is it worth the hours I had to work to buy this? Will it make me happy in the long run? Will it help me reach my life goals?The times are ripe for turning the tide of overconsumption. The winds of change are at our back. We have the personal motivation to lower consumption. We have the constituency for a movement toward healthy thrift. We have amongst us masters of persuasion. Surely we can create the public will to effect lifestyle change, policy change and ultimately change in every corner of community and national life. The challenge for each of us, in every role we play, is this: to know what is enough.

K Alternative – Individual Action Oceans

Appealing to personal initiative is the only way to prevent an ecological catastrophe—as long as the public thinks an authority figure is acting, no substantive action will take place

Kleindorfer and Oktem 04, a senior research fehow at Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Professor of Management Science, 9/8/04,

[“Guilt is Good: A New Approach to Environmental Problems,” http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1038]
Fines, fees, pollution credit-swaps – policymakers have advocated many different approaches for sustaining the economy, often with mixed success. Now two Wharton professors have concluded that re-framing environmental issues in such a way that individuals feel encouraged to take a personal initiative may be a better approach. While simply asking people to "do the right thing" might sound naïve, Paul R. Kleindorfer, a professor of management science, and Ulku Oktem, a senior research fellow at Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, argue that such an approach may be the most effective way to prevent a global ecological catastrophe. Since environmental degradation is the sum of individual choices, they say, the best route for policymakers who want to promote environmentally sustainable policies must be through appeals to individuals. However, they add, those appeals would need to be made in a way that emphasizes personal responsibility.The public generally sees environmental issues as problems that must be solved by governments and corporations, but Kleindorfer says that he and Oktem believe that perspective overlooks the crucial role that individuals play – both as actors in larger organizations and as consumers. "That individual perspective is one that we believe is absolutely central to this issue of the environment and environmental sustainability," he says.
The affirmative will promise you that consuming the plan will make you feel better and bring benefits. But they sound just like companies that market to you and claim their products will bring fulfillment if you just buy them. But don’t buy it. Don’t consume the plan. Instead break the imagined link between consumption and fulfillment by rejecting the plan.
Vicki Robin, Author, The New Road Map Foundation 2006 Seattle, WA http://www.populationpress.org/essays/essay-robin.html
By breaking the imagined link between fulfillment and consuming, we can engage in consumption that is sustainable--elegantly identifying and finding our real needs without robbing other people or future generations of the same opportunity. How do we do this? First, we need to recognize that there are more effective and satisfying ways to achieve fulfillment than by simply buying more stuff. Next, we need to find good basic tools for shifting to a low-consumption, high-fulfillment lifestyle. Once we see what is possible and know there's a way to get there, we can take a clear-eyed look at the problems inherent in overconsumption. 

K Permutation Answers

- The permutation sends a mixed message and absolves our guilt. It says we can have our cake and eat it too – the exact message we are critiquing!!! We ask that you take a clear ethical stand against consumption.   

- The consumption mindset the affirmative team defends is the root cause of our environmental problems. If we fail to stop consumption the Earth will be destroyed.

- The policy making arena is not the proper place to change consumption habits. Only by supporting the philosophical alternative and taking a personal stand can we really solve the problems outlined by both teams.

Princen, Associate Professor of Natural Resource, Maniates Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science and Conca, Associate Professor of Government and Politics, Confronting Consumption 2002 (Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, July 2002,)

How might ordinary people living in high-consumption societies begin to clarify and act on these unsettling intuitions? Where can they turn for insight, systematic analysis, support, intervention strategies, or hope of effective action? Certainly not to the policymaking arena. There one finds processes of thought and decision dominated, perhaps as never before, by two forces: a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of growth that cuts across the political spectrum. According to prevailing economic thought, consumption is nothing less than the Purpose of the economy. Economic activity is separated into supply and demand, and demand-that is, consumer purchasing behavior-is relegated to the black box of consumer sovereignty. The demand function is an aggrega" non of individual preferences each set of which is unknowable and can only be expressed in revealed form through market purchases. Thus analytic and policy attention is directed to production-that is, to the processes of supplying consumers with what they desire. <4>

K Permutation Answers

Passing environmental laws to clean up pollution makes the problem worse. People lose any sense of guilt about their lifestyle and continue their bad consuming habits.

 Bobertz, Assistant Professor of Law, 95 (Bradley Bobertz, “Legitimizing Pollution Through Pollution Control Laws: Reflections on Scapegoating Theory”, 3/95, lexis, Yoder)

[*715]  In contrast to other areas of social reform, however, environmental law presents some unique problems. While the causes of crime, poverty, and other social problems can, without too much intellectual turmoil, be attributed to individual behavior, environmental degradation appears to implicate all of us. Pollution can strike observers as the integral by-product of the relatively comfortable lifestyle enjoyed by a majority of Americans in the late twentieth century. Yet, with images of smokestacks, dying lakes, and oil-drenched otters constantly intruding on the public consciousness, we are forced to live out Pogo's dilemma: We have met the enemy, and he is us. ⁿ¹⁵ Because the deep-seated causes of pollution tend to implicate us all, we feel the desire for psychological guilt release or redemption with special force. Thus, laws that externalize blame to outside forces allow us to preserve a way of life to which we have grown accustomed and one that we are reluctant to change -- the very way of life that generates pollution in the first place. Environmental laws help us escape this psychological dilemma. They establish clear lines between the perpetrators and the victims, maintaining our position safely on the side of the innocent by treating pollution not as a natural, expected outcome of industrialization, but instead as an aberration from a norm of cleanliness. Environmental laws and the social patterns they reflect raise troubling questions. If we reduce the purpose of environmental law to merely stopping end-point pollution, we inevitably discourage scrutiny of our basic habits and ways of life. With pollution being "taken care of" by the government, only the most guilt-sensitive will take action to change their own behavior, and only the most fervently committed will press for deeper changes in our systems of production and waste disposal. Unfortunately, these ardent few occupy a marginalized position in mainstream America, and as the process of environmental lawmaking marches onward -- identifying and punishing its scapegoats -- the underlying causes of pollution are rarely mentioned, let alone acted upon. ⁿ¹⁶ Thus, environmental legislation presents a striking example of how the law can legitimize an existing state of affairs while simultaneously creating the appearance of reforming it.

K Permutation Answers

Passing ocean law make people assume all the problems are fixed when in fact the opposite is true.

John Charles Kunich, Associate Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 2005 Losing Nemo: The Mass Extinction Now Threatening the World's Ocean Hotspots

There is a profusion of law relevant to marine biodiversity. Global and regional international laws aim at various facets of marine environmental health, some much more directly and explicitly than others. These international agreements touch, directly or indirectly, on such topics as ocean dumping, marine protected areas, pollution prevention, preservation of important natural sites, regulation of permissible fishing methods, and restrictions on trade in endangered species. Likewise, individual nations with coastal resources have enacted, one by one, towering piles of statutes governing management of their coastal zones, fisheries, water pollution, ocean dumping, marine protected areas, and protection of endangered marine species. This multitude of laws on many levels is a veritable algal bloom of legislation, a red tide of words. I use these metaphors deliberately, with full awareness of their negative connotations. There is a dangerous placebo effect generated by the sheer number and volume of laws that appear applicable. When a layperson, or even a governmental official, sees this many laws all aimed at the same thing, the natural reaction is to presume that all is well. Just look at the names of these legal agreements: "The Convention on Biological Diversity;" "The World Heritage Convention;" "The Law of the Sea Treaty;" "The Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act;" "The Marine Mammal Protection Act;" "The Coastal Zone Management Act;" and "The Endangered Species Act." The names sound so promising, so much on point. So many pages of laws, with so many words on each page-they must be effective! All those trees that were felled to make paper to enshrine our cornucopia of legislation could not have died in vain. The combined placebo effect can anesthetize people, comforting them that the plight of the hotspots has been covered by all these  [*3]  laws. Karl Marx famously opined that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I argue that law has now usurped that dubious honor. Why should people be concerned, much less be galvanized to action, when so many laws from so many sources have already attacked and defeated the threat?

Environmental issues must be re-framed out of the policy arena and instead directed at individuals.

WHARTON INSTITUTE OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY 2004

[September 08, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1038&CFID=71196239&CFTOKEN=22081061&jsessionid=9a30e89baa5a4f53d623 / ttate]

Fines, fees, pollution credit-swaps – policymakers have advocated many different approaches for sustaining the economy, often with mixed success. Now two Wharton professors have concluded that re-framing environmental issues in such a way that individuals feel encouraged to take a personal initiative may be a better approach. While simply asking people to "do the right thing" might sound naïve, Paul R. Kleindorfer, a professor of management science, and Ulku Oktem, a senior research fehow at Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, argue that such an approach may be the most effective way to prevent a global ecological catastrophe. Since environmental degradation is the sum of individual choices, they say, the best route for policymakers who want to promote environmentally sustainable policies must be through appeals to individuals. However, they add, those appeals would need to be made in a way that emphasizes personal responsibility. The public generally sees environmental issues as problems that must be solved by governments and corporations, but Kleindorfer says that he and Oktem believe that perspective overlooks the crucial role that individuals play – both as actors in larger organizations and as consumers. "That individual perspective is one that we believe is absolutely central to this issue of the environment and environmental sustainability," he says. Kleindorfer and Oktem presented their findings at the first United Nations Global Compact academic conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, from May 30 to June 1. The conference, titled "Bridging the Gap: Sustainable Environment," brought together academics and industry experts from around the world to discuss issues related to facilitating innovation and transfer of environmentally sound technologies. Wharton and Turkey's Sabanci University worked with the United Nations to organize the conference, whose second phase will be held in Philadelphia on September 17 and 18. The sessions in Philadelphia will focus on globalization, development and environmental management.

Download 273.11 Kb.

Share with your friends: