This file includes the entirety of a capitalism K. That said, students may want to draw from other critique files to supplement the work here

A2: Capitalism Unsustainable

Capitalism is inevitable

And this is why Murray Rothbard went to such lengths to spell out precisely what he was endorsing when he championed the economics of capitalism. This was especially necessary when he was writing in 1973, a time which was arguably the low point for capitalist theory. Mises died that year, all economists were said to be Keynesians, Nixon closed the gold window, wage and price controls were fastened on industry as an inflation fix, and the US was locked in a titanic Cold War struggle that emphasized government weaponry over private enterprise. Murray Rothbard, meanwhile, was hard at work on his book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, an effort to breath new life into a traditionally liberal program by infusing it with a heavy dose of political radicalism. It must have seemed like a hopeless task.

The same year, he was asked to contribute an essay in a series of readings called Modern Political Economy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973). He was to address "The Future of Capitalism" (pp. 419-430), the conclusion of which might have seemed self-evidently bleak. But not to Rothbard. His contribution to the volume was lively, optimistic, enormously clarifying, and prescient to the extreme. Above all, he used the opportunity to explain with great clarity what precisely he means when he refers to capitalism: no more and no less than the sum of voluntary activity in society, particularly that characterized by exchange.

Does that seem like a stretch? Rothbard explains that the term capitalism itself was coined by its greatest enemy Karl Marx, and ever since the term has conflated two very different ideas: free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and state capitalism, on the other. "The difference between them, Rothbard notes, "is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation." This may seem like a small point, but the confusion accounts for why whole swaths of American historiography are incorrect, for example, in distinguishing Alexander Hamilton's supposed sympathy for capitalism from Thomas Jefferson's sympathy for "agrarianism." Rothbard points out that Jefferson was in fact an advocate of laissez-faire who had read and understood the classical economists; as an "agrarian" he was merely applying the doctrine of free markets to the American regional context, even as Hamilton's mercantilist and inflationist sympathies are best described as a preference for state capitalism.

As Rothbard explains, capitalism is nothing but the system that emerges in the framework of free exchange of property and the absence of government efforts to stop it. Whether you are talking about buying a newspaper from a vendor or a group of stockholders hiring a CEO, the essence of the exchange is the same: two parties finding ways to benefit by the trade goods and services. From the exchange, both parties expect to benefit else the trade would not have occurred. The global marketplace at all levels is nothing but the extension of the idea of mutual betterment through peaceful exchange.

In contrast to market exchange, we have its opposite in government intervention. It can be classified in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people or forcing someone to make an "exchange" that would otherwise not take place in the market. All government activity—regulation, taxation, protectionism, inflation, spending, social insurance, ad infinitum—can be classified as one of those two types of interventions. Taxation is nothing more than robbery (Rothbard challenges anyone to define taxation in a way that would not also describe high-minded theft), and the state itself is nothing but a much-vaunted robber on a mass scale—and it matters not whether the state is conducting domestic or foreign policy; the essence of statecraft is always coercion whereas the essence of markets is always voluntarism.

In Rothbard's conception, it is not quite correct to characterize support for free markets as either right or left. In 1973, he heard as many complaints about the supposed greed unleashed by markets from the followers of Russell Kirk as he did from the new left socialists. The right, in fact, was afflicted with a serious intellectual attachment to pre-capitalistic institutional forms of monopoly privilege, militarism, and the unrelenting drive to war.

In this, the conservatives resembled their supposed enemies, the socialists. After all, socialism was, as Rothbard put it, "essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement." Its supposed goal of liberty, peace, and prosperity was to be achieved through the imposition of new forms of regimentation, mercantilism, and feudalism. Socialism seeks, in Rothbard's words, "liberal ends by the use of conservative means." ("Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right, I, 1, Spring 1965).

Conservatives could be counted on to support the means but not the ends, and the result is something that approaches the current status quo in the US: a mixed political system that combines the worst features of egalitarian ideology with corporate militarism—a system that leaves enough of the private sector unhampered to permit impressive growth and innovation. It was precisely the productive power of market, as versus the dead-end of statist methods favored by both left and right, that led Rothbard to see that the gains of capitalism could not finally be reversed.

In addition, he may have been the first to anticipate the way in which the terms left and right would eventually come to mean their precise opposite in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe. He was fascinated but not entirely surprised by the events in old Yugoslavia, where a Stalinist system had been forced to reform into a more market oriented economy. In fact, he noted that the trend had begun in the 1960s, and extended all over Eastern Europe. What was essentially happening, Rothbard wrote, was that socialism had been tried and failed and now these countries were turning to market models.

Keep in mind that this was 1973, when hardly anyone else believed these countries capable of reform: "In Eastern Europe, then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent--I think we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable." Ten years later, it was still fashionable to speak of authoritarian regimes that could reform, as contrasted with socialist totalitarianism that could not be reform and presumably had to be obliterated. Rothbard did not believe this, based on both theory and evidence.

Rothbard saw that all sectors in all countries moving either toward capitalism or toward socialism, which is to say, toward freedom or toward control. In the US, the trends looked very bleak indeed but he found trends to cheer in the antiwar movement, which he saw as a positive development against military central planning. "Both in Vietnam and in domestic government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with tile choice: either, press on further with more interventions, or repeal them--in Vietnam, withdraw from the coun­try."

His conclusion must have sounded impossibly naïve in 1973 but today we can see that he saw further than any other "futurists" of his time:

Capitalism is fundamentally sustainable- innovation, increasing equality, improved standard of living, democracy, and empirics prove

Forbes 09 Steve Forbes, editor in chief of Forbes Magazine, (“How Capitalism Will Save Us”, https://www.forbes.com/2009/11/03/capitalism-greed-recession-forbes-opinions-markets.html, 11/3, accessed 7/7/17 EVH)
Because of the Rap, people are blind to the Reality–that far from having failed, democratic capitalism is the world’s greatest economic success story. No other system has improved the lives of so many people. The turmoil of the past few years by no means mitigates the explosion of prosperity that has taken place since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan enacted promarket reforms to free the economy from the Carter-Nixon stagnation of the 1970s. Those reforms–lowering tax rates and loosening regulations–unleashed job-creating capital. The result: a roaring economy that produced a flood of innovations–from personal computers and cellular phones to the Internet. Indeed, we may one day look back on the period of 1982 to 2007 as an economic golden age. Many conveniences we take for granted today–from automatic teller machines and DVD players to home computers and CAT scans–did not exist or were not widely used as recently as the 1970s and early ’80s. It’s not just that we have more and better gizmos. All you have to do is watch an old movie from the 1970s. Even when the past is glamorized by Hollywood, it’s obvious–looking at everything from appliances to cars to homes–that living standards back then were lower. We’ve come a long way. Not only “the rich” but people of all incomes today are doing better. No system has been as effective as capitalism in turning scarcity into abundance. Think of computers. Forty years ago, only business and government could afford the old massive mainframes. A single machine filled an entire room. Today the BlackBerry device in the palm of your hand has even more computing power than those old machines. Thanks to capitalism, Americans as a nation are living dramatically better and longer than they did at the beginning of the twentieth century. In The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years, noted economist Stephen Moore and the late business professor Julian Simon make the powerful observation that since the early twentieth century, life expectancy has increased; infant mortality rates have fallen tenfold. Major killer diseases–from tuberculosis to polio, typhoid, and pneumonia–have in most parts of the world been, if not eradicated, drastically reduced; agricultural productivity has soared. The environment is also cleaner in many parts of the world. Air quality has improved about 30 percent in American cities since 1977. Not only that, Moore and Simon write, “the affordability and availability of consumer goods have greatly increased. Even most poor Americans have a cornucopia of choices that a century ago the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could not have purchased.” Until the credit crisis, tens of millions of people a year worldwide were joining the middle class. Between 2003 and 2007, the growth of the American economy alone exceeded the size of the entire Chinese economy. We grew the equivalent of China in four and a half years. China’s growth rates are higher–but they’re coming from a much smaller base. Free-market economic reforms–especially since the fall of the Berlin wall–have brought an unprecedented explosion of wealth to India, China, Brazil, and nations in central and eastern Europe as well as in Latin America and Africa. Capitalism has helped to usher in an era of wealth and economic growth that failed foreign-aid programs since World War II were never able to accomplish. In China, for example, over two hundred million people now have discretionary income. The country has a burgeoning middle class. The current recession should be seen historically as an interruption, not an end, of this extraordinary economic expansion. Along with bringing prosperity to millions, democratic capitalism has undermined political tyranny and promoted democracy and peace between nations of the world. It is, without doubt, the world’s most moral system. This last statement may raise eyebrows in an era that has seen scandals from the collapse of Enron to the devastation of personal and charitable wealth caused by Bernard Madoff. That is not to minimize the crimes of individuals like Madoff and others or the damage they cause. As we explain, the off-the-charts criminality of individuals like Madoff no more reflects the immorality of free enterprise than the murderous crimes of a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer reflect a fundamental breakdown of democratic society. Democratic capitalism, as a system, is more humane than government-dominated economies, including those in countries that are otherwise democracies. Nations that liberalize their economies, that allow people greater economic self-determination, end up moving, sooner or later, toward democracy. Since the nations of the world began to liberalize their economies in the mid-1980s, the percentage of democratically elected governments has surged from 40 percent to more than 60 percent today. China, for example, is not yet a Western-style democracy. But the nation is freer today than it was during the era of Mao Tse Tung and the repressive Cultural Revolution. Despite all the gloom and doom voiced by its critics, the free-enterprise system is–and has always been–the best way to unleash the creativity, inventiveness, and energy of people and mobilize them to meet the wants and needs of others. That’s because free-market transactions, far from being driven by greed, are about achieving the greatest possible mutual benefit, not only for the parties directly involved but eventually for the rest of society.

A2: Democracy---2AC

Democracy resilient – overwhelming public backing supports gains

Wollack 16 ---- Kenneth, president of the National Democratic Institute, former co-editor of the Middle East Policy Survey, former senior fellow at UCLA’s School for Public Affairs, “How Resilient is Democracy?” This text is the transcript from an interview with Alexander Heffner, PBS – The Open Mind, 10/15, http://www.thirteen.org/openmind/government/how-resilient-is-democracy/5553/
Well I think we’re seeing a number of phenomena that take place. Um, first of all you have new democracies around the world, that are struggling to deliver for its people. New institutions, political institutions that for the first time have legitimacy among the people, but in order to succeed and sustain their democratic system, they have to deliver on quality of life issues for, for the entire population. And if those institutions don’t deliver in many of these new democracies that have emerged over the last forty years, uh, then you’re gonna see backsliding and people will either go to the streets or vote for a populist demagogue who promises to bring sort of instant solutions to their problems. And then in non-democratic countries, you have what is called authoritarian learning, and that is autocrats today that are smarter than they were before, uh, that are fearful of diffusion of political power, uh, fearful of losing power themselves. Um, and they are using uh, traditional means and new legal means in which to repress the population, prevent the emergence of civil society, and not to speak of opposition political parties. And then you have a situation that you see in a number of countries in the Middle East where you have a sectarian strife and conflict. Uh, but in all of these situations, what you find is democratic resilience. That people around the world basically want the same thing. They want to put food on their table, uh, they want to have jobs and shelter and they want a political voice. And that, those aspirations and those hopes, uh, and those desires as I said are universal, and if you look at public opinion polls around the world, uh, people do want to have democratic systems that allow them to participate in the political life of their country. And that is, we are in the optimism business, and we believe in people and I think that ultimately those efforts, um, will, will succeed. But they need a lot of support, they need backing, um, uh, in order for uh, some very brave and courageous people to, to move the democratic for—uh, process forward in some of the most unlikely places in the world.

Democracy doesn’t cause peace – statistical models are spurious and don’t assume economic growth

Mousseau, 12 (Michael – Professor IR Koç University, “The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy” International Studies Quarterly, p 1-12)
Model 2 presents new knowledge by adding the control for economic type. To capture the dyadic expectation of peace among contract-intensive nations, the variable Contract- intensive EconomyL (CIEL) indicates the value of impersonal contracts in force per capita of the state with the lower level of CIE in the dyad; a high value of this measure indicates both states have contract-intensive economies. As can be seen, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.80) is negative and highly significant. This corroborates that impersonal economy is a highly robust force for peace. The coefficient for DemocracyL is now at zero. There are no other differences between Models 1 and 2, whose samples are identical, and no prior study corroborating the democratic peace has considered contractintensive economy. Therefore, the standard econometric inference to be drawn from Model 2 is the nontrivial result that all prior reports of democracy as a force for peace are probably spurious, since this result is predicted and fully accounted for by economic norms theory. CIEL and DemocracyL correlate only in the moderate range of 0.47 (Pearson’s r), so the insignificance of democracy is not likely to be a statistical artifact of multicollinearity. This is corroborated by the variance inflation factor for DemocracyL in Model 2 of 1.85, which is well below the usual rule-of-thumb indicator of multicollinearity of 10 or more. Nor should readers assume most democratic dyads have both states with impersonal economies: While almost all nations with contract-intensive economies (as indicated with the binary measure for CIE) are democratic (Polity2 > 6) (Singapore is the only long-term exception), more than half—55%—of all democratic nation-years have contract-poor economies. At the dyadic level in this sample, this translates to 80% of democratic dyads (all dyads where DemocracyBinary6 = 1) that have at least one state with a contract-poor economy. In other words, not only does Model 2 show no evidence of causation from democracy to peace (as reported in Mousseau 2009), but it also illustrates that this absence of democratic peace includes the vast majority—80%—of democratic dyad-years over the sample period. Nor is it likely that the causal arrow is reversed—with democracy being the ultimate cause of contract-intensive economy and peace. This is because correlations among independent variables are not calculated in the results of multivariate regressions: Coefficients show only the effect of each variable after the potential effects of the others are kept constant at their mean levels. If it was democracy that caused both impersonal economy and peace, then there would be some variance in DemocracyL remaining, after its partial correlation with CIEL is excluded, that links it directly with peace. The positive direction of the coefficient for DemocracyL informs us that no such direct effect exists (Blalock 1979:473–474). Model 3 tests for the effect of DemocracyL if a control is added for mixed-polity dyads, as suggested by Russett (2010:201). As discussed above, to avoid problems of mathematical endogeneity, I adopt the solution used by Mousseau, Orsun and Ungerer (2013) and measure regime difference as proposed by Werner (2000), drawing on the subcomponents of the Polity2 regime measure. As can be seen, the coefficient for Political Distance (1.00) is positive and significant, corroborating that regime mixed dyads do indeed have more militarized conflict than others. Yet, the inclusion of this term has no effect on the results that concern us here: CIEL ()0.85) is now even more robust, and the coefficient for DemocracyL (0.03) is above zero.7 Model 4 replaces the continuous democracy measure with the standard binary one (Polity2 > 6), as suggested by Russett (2010:201), citing Bayer and Bernhard (2010). As can be observed, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.83) remains negative and highly significant, while DemocracyBinary6 (0.63) is in the positive (wrong) direction. As discussed above, analyses of fatal dispute onsets with the far stricter binary measure for democracy (Polity = 10), put forward by Dafoe (2011) in response to Mousseau (2009), yields perfect prediction (as does the prior binary measure Both States CIE), causing quasi-complete separation and inconclusive results. Therefore, Model 5 reports the results with DemocracyBinary10 in analyses of all militarized conflicts, not just fatal ones. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyBinary10 ()0.41), while negative, is not significant. Model 6 reports the results in analyses of fatal disputes with DemocracyL squared (after adding 10), which implies that the likelihood of conflict decreases more quickly toward the high values of DemocracyL. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyL 2 is at zero, further corroborating that even very high levels of democracy do not appear to cause peace in analyses of fatal disputes, once consideration is given to contractintensive economy. Models 3, 4, and 6, which include Political Distance, were repeated (but unreported to save space) with analyses of all militarized interstate disputes, with the democracy coefficients close to zero in every case. Therefore, the conclusions reached by Mousseau (2009) are corroborated even with the most stringent measures of democracy, consideration of institutional distance, and across all specifications: The democratic peace appears spurious, with contract-intensive economy being the more likely explanation for both democracy and the democratic peace.

A2: Democracy---Ext---No War

Democracy doesn’t solve war

Taner, 2 (Binner, PhD Candidate – Syracuse U., Alternatives: Turkish Journal of Int’l Relations, 1(3), p. 43-44, http://www.alternativesjournal.com/binnur.pdf)
The discussion above suggests that the most important drawback of the “democratic peace” theory is the essentialization of the political regime as the only factor contributing to international peace and war. The ‘democratic peace’ theory underemphasizes, and most often neglects, the importance of other domestic factors such as political culture,35 degree of development, socio-economic and military considerations,36 the role of interest-groups and other domestic constituencies,37 strategic culture38 among others in decision-making. In other words, it is easily the case that the “democratic peace theory” lacks sensitivity to context and decisionmaking process. Although one should not dispute the fact that domestic political structure/regime type is an important component of any analysis of war and peace, this should be seen as only one of domestic variables, not necessarily the variable. Devoid of an analysis that gives respect to a number of other factors, superficial and sweeping generalizations will leave many details in decision-making unaccounted for. Consequently, although “democratic peace” theory should not be discarded entirely, current emphasis on the importance of “democracy” in eliminating bloody conflicts in the world should not blind scholars and policy circles alike to the fact that “democratic peace” is theoretically and empirically overdetermined.

A2: Environment---2AC

No impact on human survival

Raudsepp-Hearne 10 (Ciarra, PhD in the Department of Geography, Elena M. Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment, Graham K. MacDonald is a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, and Laura Pfeifer is a master’s student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the McGill School of Environment, all at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec. Garry D. Peterson is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, at Stockholm University. Maria Tengö is currently a researcher at the Department ofSystems Ecology and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Tim Holland currentlyworks for SNV Netherlands Development Organisation in Hanoi, Vietnam. Karina Benessaiah is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. September 2010; “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?”; http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Raudsepp-Hearne.pdf)
Although many people expect ecosystem degradation to have a negative impact on human well-being, this measure¶ appears to be increasing even as provision of ecosystem¶ services declines. From George Perkins Marsh’s Man and¶ Nature in 1864 to today (Daily 1997), scientists have described¶ how the deterioration of the many services provided¶ by nature, such as food, climate regulation, and recreational¶ areas, is endangering human well-being. However, the Millennium¶ Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a comprehensive study of¶ the world’s resources, found that declines in the majority of¶ ecosystem services assessed have been accompanied by steady¶ gains in human well-being at the global scale (MA 2005). We¶ argue that to understand this apparent paradox, we need to¶ better understand the ways in which ecosystem services are¶ important for human well-being, and also whether human¶ well-being can continue to rise in the future despite projected¶ continued declines in ecosystem services. In this article, we¶ summarize the roots of the paradox and assess evidence¶ relating to alternative explanations of the conflicting trends¶ in ecosystem services and human well-being.¶ The environmentalist’s expectation could be articulated¶ as: “Ecological degradation and simplification will be followed by a decline in the provision of ecosystem services, leading to a decline in human well-being.” Supporters¶ of this hypothesis cite evidence of unsustainable¶ rates of resource consumption, which in the past have had¶ severe impacts on human well-being, even causing the collapse¶ of civilizations (e.g., Diamond 2005). Analyses of the¶ global ecological footprint have suggested that since 1980,¶ humanity’s footprint has exceeded the amount of resources¶ that can be sustainably produced by Earth (Wackernagel¶ et al. 2002). Although the risk of local and regional societies¶ collapsing as a result of ecological degradation is much¶ reduced by globalization and trade, the environmentalist’s¶ expectation remains: Depletion of ecosystem services translates¶ into fewer benefits for humans, and therefore lower¶ net human well-being than would be possible under better¶ ecological management.¶ By focusing on ecosystem services—the benefits that¶ humans obtain from ecosystems—the MA set out specifically¶ to identify and assess the links between ecosystems and¶ human well-being (MA 2005). The MA assessed ecosystem¶ services in four categories: (1) provisioning services, such¶ as food, water, and forest products; (2) regulating services, which modulate changes in climate and regulate floods,¶ disease, waste, and water quality; (3) cultural services, which¶ comprise recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and¶ (4) supporting services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis,¶ and nutrient cycling (MA 2003). Approximately 60%¶ (15 of 24) of the ecosystem services assessed by the MA were¶ found to be in decline. Most of the declining services were¶ regulating and supporting services, whereas the majority of¶ expanding ecosystem services were provisioning services,¶ such as crops, livestock, and fish aquaculture (table 1). At the¶ same time, consumption of more than 80% of the assessed¶ services was found to be increasing, across all categories. In¶ other words, the use of most ecosystem services is increasing¶ at the same time that Earth’s capacity to provide these¶ services is decreasing.¶ The MA conceptual framework encapsulated the environmentalist’s¶ expectation, suggesting tight feedbacks between¶ ecosystem services and human well-being. However, the¶ assessment found that aggregate human well-being grew¶ steadily over the past 50 years, in part because of the rapid¶ conversion of ecosystems to meet human demand for food,¶ fiber, and fuel (figure 1; MA 2005). The MA defined human¶ well-being with five components: basic materials, health,¶ security, good social relations, and freedom of choice and¶ actions, where freedom of choice and actions is expected to¶ emerge from the other components of well-being. Although¶ the MA investigated each of the five components of well-being¶ at some scales and in relation¶ to some ecosystem services,¶ the assessment of global¶ trends in human well-being¶ relied on the human development¶ index (HDI) because of¶ a lack of other data. The HDI¶ is an aggregate measure of¶ life expectancy, literacy, educational¶ attainment, and per¶ capita GDP (gross domestic¶ product) that does not capture¶ all five components of¶ well-being (Anand and Sen¶ 1992).¶

Ecosystems are resilient

McDermott, 9 (Mat, Editor for Business and Energy sections; Master Degree from NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in environment and energy policy. May, 27, 2009: “Good News: Most Ecosystems Can Recover in One Lifetime from Human-Induced or Natural Disturbance”; http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/good-news-most-ecosystems-can-recover-in-one-lifetime-from-human-induced-or-natural-disturbance.html)
There's a reason the phrase "let nature take its course" exists: New research done at the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Science reinforces the idea that ecosystems are quiet resilient and can rebound from pollution and environmental degradation. Published in the journal PLoS ONE, the study shows that most damaged ecosystems worldwide can recover within a single lifetime, if the source of pollution is removed and restoration work done. The analysis found that on average forest ecosystems can recover in 42 years, while in takes only about 10 years for the ocean bottom to recover. If an area has seen multiple, interactive disturbances, it can take on average 56 years for recovery. In general, most ecosystems take longer to recover from human-induced disturbances than from natural events, such as hurricanes.¶ To reach these recovery averages, the researchers looked at data from peer-reviewed studies over the past 100 years on the rate of ecosystem recovery once the source of pollution was removed.¶ Interestingly, the researchers found that it appears that the rate at which an ecosystem recovers may be independent of its degraded condition: Aquatic systems may recover more quickly than, say, a forest, because the species and organisms that live in that ecosystem turn over more rapidly than in the forest.¶ As to what this all means, Oswald Schmitz, professor of ecology at Yale and report co-author, says that this analysis shows that an increased effort to restore damaged ecosystems is justified, and that:¶ Restoration could become a more important tool in the management portfolio of conservation organizations that are entrusted to protect habitats on landscapes.¶ We recognize that humankind has and will continue to actively domesticate nature to meet its own needs. The message of our paper is that recovery is possible and can be rapid for many ecosystems, giving much hope for a transition to sustainable management of global ecosystems.

A2: Environment---Ext---No Impact

No invisible threshold – new technology allows us to revive extinct species

Ridley 12 (Matt, 2007 Davis Award winner for the History of Science, “Reversing extinction”; March 13, http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/reversing-extinction.aspx)
The fruit of a narrow-leaved campion, buried in permafrost by a ground squirrel 32,000 years ago on the banks of the Kolyma river in Siberia, has been coaxed into growing into a new plant, which then successfully set seed itself in a Moscow laboratory. Although this plant species was not extinct, inch by inch scientists seem to be closing in on the outrageous goal of bringing a species back from the dead. I don't expect to live to see a herd of resurrected mammoths roaming the Siberian steppe, but I think my grandchildren just might. The mammoth is the best candidate for resurrection mainly because flash-frozen ones with well-preserved tissues are regularly found in the Siberian permafrost. Occasionally these have been fresh enough to tempt scientists to cook and eat them, usually with disappointing results. Just last week a Chinese paleontologist in Canada, Xing Lida, filmed himself frying and eating what he said was a small mammoth steak. Cells from such carcasses have been recovered, encouraging a rivalry between Japanese and Russian scientists to be the first to revive one of these huge, elephant-like mammals by cloning. Four years ago the mammoth genome was sequenced, so we at least now know the genetic recipe. The news of the resurrected flower does, apparently, remove one obstacle. After 32,000 years the plant's DNA had not been so damaged by natural radioactivity in the soil as to make it unviable, which is a surprise. Mammoth carcasses are often much younger - the youngest, on Wrangel Island, being about 4,700 years old, contemporary with the Pharoahs. So the DNA should be in even better shape. However, plants are much better at cloning themselves from any old cutting. Coaxing an elephant cell into becoming an embryo is not at all easy; though, as Dolly the sheep showed, not impossible. To do the same for a mammoth cell would be harder still. And then there is the problem of how to get the embryo to grow. Implanting it into the womb of an Indian elephant (its closest living relative) is the best bet, but experiments with implanting rare embryos into other species' wombs have been mostly unsuccessful. For example, a rare form of wild ox, the gaur, was going to have its embryos reared in cattle wombs, but it did not work. So do not book the Siberian mammoth safari trip just yet. Equally, don't bet against it eventually coming off. Which other species might follow? One that only recently went extinct (last seen in 1936) is the marsupial carnivore called the thylacine, or "Tasmanian tiger". A few years ago, genes from a dead thylacine were injected into a mouse and "expressed" in its tissue. The great auk, the dodo and other creatures that died out before the invention of refrigeration are going to be much harder to revive. Perhaps fortunately, Neanderthals, dead for 28,000 years, unfrozen and not very closely related to their likely surrogate parent (you and me), would be harder still, though their DNA sequence is now known. And as for the dinosaurs - 65 million years dead - forget it. Although come to think of it, re-engineering a chicken until it looks like a dinosaur cannot be ruled out, once people learn to play genetics well enough. The real significance of the Siberian flower, though, is that it makes future extinctions potentially reversible. So long as we can flash-freeze seeds and tissues from threatened species (a disused mine in a frozen mountain in Spitsbergen already holds a seedbank of rare plant varieties), then we can give posterity the chance to resurrect them. Combine this with the news that extinction rates, at least of birds and mammals, have been falling in recent decades, and there are grounds for a glimmer of ecological optimism. The great spasm of extinction caused by humans - mainly when we spread our rats, weeds and bugs to oceanic islands - may be coming to an end. Far more significant than the reversal of extinction, however, is the revival of wild ecosystems. Ecologists are finding that wild habitats can be put back together more easily than they thought. A marine reserve off Mexico is now teeming with large fish again. Yellowstone Park's ecological revival following the introduction of the wolf is remarkable: by cutting the numbers of elk, wolves have brought back aspen trees and long grass and hence beavers, rodents and hawks. In Costa Rica, a rainforest rich in tree species is now thriving on what was, in 1993, exhausted farmland. Once a canopy of sun-loving trees was planted, hundreds of other tree species moved in naturally. One commentator says: "The accepted belief is that once destroyed, tropical rainforests could never be restored. But is that really the case or just a myth?" Environmentalists will worry that such optimism breeds complacency about habitat destruction. But it might instead breed ambition to restore habitats and revive rare species. Over the past 50 years, agricultural yields have risen and, in real terms, food prices have fallen, with the result that marginal land has been released from growing food worldwide. Forest cover has increased in most of Europe and North America; nature reserves have expanded even in the tropics. So here's an image of the future. With much of the world's meat grown, brain-free and legless, in factories, and much of its fruit and vegetables in multi-storey urban farms lit with cheap fusion power, there will again be vast steppes, savannahs, prairies and rain forests, teeming with herds of wild game. Perhaps even a few woolly mammoths among them.

A2: Environment---Ext---Resiliency

Destruction only increases resiliency

Cote 10 (Isabelle M., tropical marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University; Emily S. Darling, marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University; July 27, 2010, “Rethinking Ecosystem Resilience in the Face of Climate Change”, http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000438 DA:7/11/2012)
The two predictions of the conventional view of ecological resilience are poorly supported by empirical evidence pertaining to coral reefs. We believe that the selective culling of disturbance-sensitive taxa by local stressors can explain why more intact reef communities do not appear to be more resilient to climate disturbance. If a species' tolerance to a non-climatic disturbance is correlated with its tolerance to climatic impacts (e.g., positive co-tolerance, [55]), then degradation can actually increase the abundance of disturbance-tolerant species within a community [26],[28] and thus the ability of an ecosystem to resist the impacts of climate disturbance.

This alternative view, which is more consistent with the majority of empirical observations, is depicted in Figure 1. Thus, with continued degradation caused by local stressors, altered communities become composed of disturbance-tolerant species and the tipping point in response to climate change will shift to the right (Figure 1B; black arrows), making the ecosystem more resilient to climate disturbance. Management that seeks to control local anthropogenic disturbances and reverse degradation (Figure 1B; red block arrows) will inadvertently shift the tipping point back to the left, towards lower resilience (Figure 1B; red arrows) to climate disturbance. Thus, management that controls local stressors to reverse degradation and recover original species assemblages will actually increase the proportion of sensitive taxa within the assemblage, and may effectively decrease ecosystem resilience to climate change.

Note that the alternative states depicted in Figure 1 are not assumed to be stable. Moreover, our conceptual model works with or without thresholds. If ecosystem state declines linearly with climate disturbance, we expect that the slope of this relationship will decrease as degradation increases (i.e., as the intercept decreases).

A2: Root Cause/Turns Case

Root cause wrong

Geras 5 (Norman, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, "The Reductions of the Left," Dissent, 52:1, Winter, p. 57-58)
THE SECOND PART of the answer- to which I now turn—is a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. This is a complementary failure. Elsewhere I have argued that Marxism is as familiar as any other intellectual tradition with the realities of human violence and oppression and the more negative traits and potentialities in the makeup of human beings. At the same time, because of its Utopian aspiration—-which I do not mean in any pejorative sense—because of its progressive and meliorative impulse, there has always been a tendency within this tradi¬tion to minimize, or sometimes just deny, the independent force of such negative character¬istics. They come to be treated, genericallv, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described—in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs—should be transparent. The effect of the tendency, however, is, to denature what one is looking at when one looks at the horrors of the world: a massacre of in- nocents; a woman being beaten in a public place or hanged in a football stadium; a place in which a man can have his ears surgically re¬moved or his tongue cut out, or be broken and destroyed, to be followed by the next such vic-tim, and the next, in a continuous sequence ol atrocity; or a place in which a parent can be forced to watch her child tortured and mur¬dered in front of her; or a place in which a hus¬band can be forced to watch his wife repeat-edly raped; an "ethnic^leansing" or a genocide in progress, in which entire communities are pulled up by the roots-arid people are shot or hacked or starved to death by the thousands or the tens of thousands; mass graves opened to yield up their terrible story. The list, as anyone knows who keeps read¬ing when the overwhelming temptation is to look away, could be much extended. The items on it are moral and political realities in their own right. They need to be registered and fully recognized as such. To collapse them too quickly into their putative original causes, to' refer them immediately, or refer from them, to other things that have preceded them is not to give them their due as the specific phenomena they are, the horrors, tor those destroyed by them or enduring them, for those whose lives are torn and wrecked and filled with grief by them, are in a double sense reduced by this quick and easy reference back to something else, putatively their real cause or origin. Furthermore, not all the contributory causes of such grim events are of the type that the section of the left under discussion here likes to invoke—that is, causes arising else- where, either geographically (in the United States) or societally (in the dynamics of capi- talism). Moral and political evils of this order and I make no apology for calling them that— can and generally do have causes that are more local in a spatial sense; and they are governed or influenced by political, ideological, and moral specificities every bit as real as the capitalist economy. Not everything is systemic, in the sense of being an effect of pressures or ten¬dencies of economic provenance, whether from the global economy or from some more par¬ticular region of it. There are independent patterns of coercion and cruelty, both interper¬sonal and embedded within political structures; forms of authoritarian imposition; types of invasive assault and violence, at the micro-level and at the macro-level, involving large social forces.

A2: Serial Policy Failure

No policy failure or offense – concrete action is inevitable

Friedrichs, Oxford politics lecturer, 2009(Jorg, “From positivist pretense to pragmatic practice: Varieties of pragmatic methodology in IR scholarship. International Studies Review 11(3): 645–648)
As Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1994:1; cf. Wilson 2002) knew, the knower isstrangely unknown to himself. In fact, it is much more hazardous to contemplate the way how we gain knowledge than to gain such knowledge in the first place. This is not to deny that intellectuals are a narcissistic Kratochwil lot, with a penchant for omphaloskepsis. The typical result of their navel-gazing, however, is not increased self-awareness. Scholars are more likely to come up with ex-post-facto rationalizations of how they would like to see their activity than with accurate descriptions of how they go about business. As a result, in science there is a paradoxical divide between positivist pretenseand pragmatic practice. Many prominent scholars proceed pragmatically in gen-erating their knowledge, only to vest it all in a positivist cloak when it comes topresenting results. In the wake of Karl Popper (1963), fantasies about ingeniousconjectures and inexorable refutations continue to hold sway despite the muchmore prosaic way most scholars grope around in the formulation of their theo-ries, and the much less rigorous way they assess the value of their hypotheses. In proposing pragmatism as a more realistic alternative to positivist idealiza-tions, I am not concerned with the original intentions of Charles Peirce. Theseare discussed and enhanced by Ryto¨ vuori-Apunen (this forum). Instead, Ipresent various attempts to make pragmatism work as a methodology for IR scholarship. This includes my own preferred methodology, the pragmaticresearch strategy of abduction. As Fritz Kratochwil and I argue elsewhere, abduction should be at the center of our efforts, while deduction and induction areimportant but auxiliary tools (Friedrichs and 2009).Of course, one does not need to be a pragmatist to proceed in a pragmatic way. Precisely because it is derived from practice, pragmatic commonsense is a sold as the hills. For example, James Rosenau (1988:164) declared many yearsago that he coveted ‘‘a long-held conviction that one advances knowledge most effectively by continuously moving back and forth between very abstract and very empirical levels of inquiry, allowing the insights of the former to exert pressurefor the latter even as the findings of the latter, in turn, exert pressure for the for-mer, thus sustaining an endless cycle in which theory and research feed on eachother.’’ This was shortly before Rosenau’s turn to postmodernism, while he wasstill touting the virtues of behaviorism and standard scientific requisites, such asindependent and dependent variables and theory testing. But if we take his state-ment at face value, it appears that Rosenau-the-positivist was guided by a sort of pragmatism for all but the name. While such practical commonsense is certainly valuable, in and by itself, it does not qualify as scientific methodology. Science requires a higher degree of methodological awareness. For this reason, I am not interested here in pragma-tism as unspoken commonsense, or as a pretext for doing empirical researchunencumbered by theoretical and methodological considerations. Nor am I con-cerned with pragmatism as an excuse for staging yet another epistemological debate. Instead, I am interested in pragmatism as an instrument to go about research with an appropriate degree of epistemological and methodologicalawareness. Taking this criterion as my yardstick, the following three varieties of pragmatist methodology in recent IR scholarship are worth mentioning: theory synthesis, analytic eclecticism (AE), and abduction.Theory synthesis is proposed by Andrew Moravcsik (2003), who claims that theories can be combined as long as they are compatible at some unspecifiedfundamental level, and that data will help to identify the right combination of theories. He does not explicitly invoke pragmatism but vests his pleading in apositivist cloak by using the language of theory testing. When looking closer,however, it becomes apparent that his theoretical and methodological noncha-lance is far more pragmatic than what his positivist rhetoric suggests. Moravcsiksees himself in good company, dropping the following names: Robert Keohane,Stephen Walt, Jack Snyder, Stephen Van Evera, Bary Buzan, Bruce Russett, John O’Neal, Martha Finnemore, and Kathryn Sikkink. With the partial excep-tion of Finnemore, however, none of these scholars explicitly links his or herscholarship to pragmatism. They employ pragmatic commonsense in theirresearch, but devoutly ignore pragmatism as a philosophical and methodologicalposition. As a result, it is fair to say that theory synthesis is only on a slightly higher level of intellectual awareness than Rosenau’s statement quoted above. Analytic eclecticism, as advertized by Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, links acommonsensical approach to empirical research with a more explicit commit-ment to pragmatism (Sil and Katzenstein 2005; Katzenstein and Sil 2008).The 7 Even the dean of critical rationalism, Karl Popper, is ‘‘guilty’’ of lapses into pragmatism, for example when hestates that scientists, like hungry animals, classify objects according to needs and interests, although with the impor-tant difference that they are guided in their quest for finding regularities not so much by the stomach but ratherby empirical problems and epistemic interests (Popper 1963:61–62). 646 Pragmatism and International Relations idea is to combine existing research traditions in a pragmatic fashion and thusto enable the formulation and exploration of novel and more complex sets of problems. The constituent elements of different research traditions are trans-lated into mutually compatible vocabularies and then recombined in novel ways.This implies that most scholars must continue the laborious process of formulat-ing parochial research traditions so that a few cosmopolitan colleagues will beenabled to draw upon their work and construct syncretistic collages. 8 In additionto themselves, Katzenstein and Sil cite a number of like-minded scholars such asCharles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, Paul Pierson, and Robert Jervis. 9 The ascription isprobably correct given the highly analytical and eclectic approach of these schol-ars. Nevertheless, apart from Katzenstein and Sil themselves none of these schol-ars has explicitly avowed himself to AE.My preferred research strategy is abduction, which is epistemologically asself-aware as AE but minimizes the dependence on existing research traditions.The typical situation for abduction is when we, both in everyday life and as socialscientists, become aware of a certain class of phenomena that interests us for somereason, but for which we lack applicable theories. We simply trust, although we donot know for certain, that the observed class of phenomena is not random. Wetherefore start collecting pertinent observations and, at the same time, applyingconcepts from existing fields of our knowledge. Instead of trying to impose anabstract theoretical template (deduction) or ‘‘simply’’ inferring propositions fromfacts (induction), we start reasoning at an intermediate level (abduction). Abduction follows the predicament that science is, or should be, above all amore conscious and systematic version of the way by which humans have learnedto solve problems and generate knowledge in their everyday lives. As it iscurrently practiced, science is often a poor emulator of what we are able toachieve in practice. This is unfortunate because human practice is the ultimatemiracle. In our own practice, most of us manage to deal with many challenging situations. The way we accomplish this is completely different from, and far moreefficient than, the way knowledge is generated according to standard scientific methods. If it is true that in our own practice we proceed not so much by induction or deduction but rather by abduction, then science would do well tomimic this at least in some respects. 10 Abduction has been invoked by numerous scholars, including Alexander Wendt, John Ruggie, Jeffrey Checkel, Martin Shapiro, Alec Stone Sweet, andMartha Finnemore. While they all use the term abduction, none has ever thor-oughly specified its meaning. To make up for this omission, I have developedabduction into an explicit methodology and applied it in my own research oninternational police cooperation (Friedrichs 2008). Unfortunately, it is impossi-ble to go into further detail here. Readers interested in abduction as a way toadvance international research and methodology can also be referred to my recent article with Fritz Kratochwil (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009).On a final note, we should be careful not to erect pragmatism as the ultimateepistemological fantasy to caress the vanity of Nietzschean knowers unknown tothemselves, namely that they are ingeniously ‘‘sorting out’’ problematic situa-tions. Scientific inquiry is not simply an intimate encounter between a researchproblem and a problem solver. It is a social activity taking place in communitiesof practice (Wenger 1998). Pragmatism must be neither reduced to the utility of results regardless of their social presuppositions and meaning, nor to the 8 Pace Rudra Sil (this forum), the whole point about eclecticism is that you rely on existing traditions to blendthem into something new. There is no eclecticism without something to be eclectic about. 9 One may further expand the list by including the international society approach of the English school (Ma-kinda 2000), as well as the early Kenneth Waltz (1959). 10 Precisely for this reason, abduction understood as ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’ plays a crucial role inthe field of Artificial Intelligence. 647 The Forum fabrication of consensus among scientists. Pragmatism as the practice of dis-cursive communities and pragmatism as a device for the generation of useful knowledge are two sides of the same coin

A2: Value to Life

Value to life is subjective and always exists

Coontz’1 Phyllis D. Coontz, PhD Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh, et al, Journal of Community Health Nursing, 2001, 18(4), 235-246 – J-Stor
In the 1950s, psychiatrist and theorist Viktor Frankl (1963) described an existential theory of purpose and meaning in life. Frankl, a long-time prisoner in a concentration camp, re- lated several instances of transcendent states that he experienced in the midst of that terri- ble suffering using his own experiences and observations. He believed that these experi- ences allowed him and others to maintain their sense of dignity and self-worth. Frankl (1969) claimed that transcendence occurs by giving to others, being open to others and the environment, and coming to accept the reality that some situations are un- changeable. He hypothesized that life always has meaning for the individual; a person can always decide how to face adversity. Therefore, self-transcendence provides mean- ing and enables the discovery of meaning for a person (Frankl, 1963). Expanding Frankl's work, Reed (1991b) linked self-transcendence with mental health. Through a developmental process individuals gain an increasing understanding of who they are and are able to move out beyond themselves despite the fact that they are ex- periencing physical and mental pain. This expansion beyond the self occurs through in- trospection, concern about others and their well-being, and integration of the past and fu- ture to strengthen one's present life (Reed, 1991b).

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