Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 2 | Opponent: Whitman DL | Judge: Geoff Lundeen

1AC

Story Time

A not so long time ago, in a galaxy that was quite similar to ours, there existed a world full of trash. A world filled with garbage that doesn’t get talked about, and a world where life was built and constituted by a thing so fundamental to the smooth functioning of society that it was entirely excluded from social orders: People see it everywhere, they’re constantly bombarded with it from all sides—individuals become disillusioned with it; they build lives on SHIT and WASTE, on the LEFTOVERS of someone else’s enjoyment. Such is the life of Nick, a paranoid conspiratorial theorist who exists in the book "Underworld."

Modern politics situate us in a similar place. Landfills hoard our waste out of sight and out of mind. They are talked about only in so far as to not talk about them later. They operate as a constant reminder that our lives of filthy richness produce what society views as a dirty excesses.

Huang 08 — Cory Han-yu Huang ~[assistant professor at the Department of English, Tamkang University~] "The Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse" May 23 and 24, 2008  
Waste and Culture of Excess  It is already a commonplace interpretation that waste is the
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(285), or paranoid-conspiratorial theorist of waste  in the novel:  
~[C~]ities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through
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Civilization is built,  history is driven . . . . (287)  
Waste in its various figurations is not a static, passive object. It traverses
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something that sustains our life but can never really be claimed as ours?

Oh the urbanity%21 Our shit burbs%21 In these overlooked spaces our leftover food, tires, and baby diapers decompose in landfills, producing methane and other gasses. These excess gasses are of course the very thing we use to power our glowing cities and trash producing homes.  This symptom of the modern world can be and is being used to produce electricity.

Wogan ’12 , By David Wogan ~[formerly of the  White House Council on Environmental Quality, M.S.M.E., M.P.Aff @ The University of Texas at Austin~] "Short film dives into landfill gas" Plugged In (Scientific American blog you should be cutting about the topic) February 15, 2012, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/02/15/short-film-dives-into-landfill-gas/-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/02/15/short-film-dives-into-landfill-gas/
I want to share a short video by documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit and director Jessica
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of electricity, which has a nice way of bringing things full circle. 

Of course, the high costs associated with this frolicking in the energy of our waste means that only the biggest of our societies many waste holes power us

AP ’10 Jason Dearen, "California garbage trucks fueled by ... garbage," Associated Press, 1/7/2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Living-Green/2010/0107/California-garbage-trucks-fueled-by-garbage
But to many who may want to use the technology, the cost of purifying
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the thought is that as the technology becomes cheaper, that will change."

Part 1—No Color In Kansas

This year’s resolution calls for us to change our relationship to energy production. Most people will do it to help "Nature." But there is a larger question that first must be answered: What is nature?

NATURE DOES NOT EXIST—Fantasies of a perfect sphere of nature perverted and destroyed by human’s overconsumption is NOT an authentic description of the world; engaging with waste as a site of the Real allows for us to engage with the world in a meaningful way which revels in the condition of postmodern destruction

Huang 2009 (Han-Yu, Asst. Prof. English, National Taiwan Normal University, "Trauma, Paranoia, and Ecological Fantasy in Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Toward a Psychoanalytic Ethics of Waste," Literary and Cultural Studies, 35.1 March 2009: 109-130) CJQ
As the recognition of the non-existence of the Other―namely, there
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carried to their deadlocks and be ready for the worst. Are we? 

Power relations around nature precondition our understanding of it, revisiting the construction of natures is the axis of true social change.

Swyngedouw 2006 (Erik, Dept. Geography and Development at Manchester, "Impossible
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political space) organised process of socio-environmental (re)-construction. 

And, modern Aesthetics are so overused that we consider all things beautiful as garbage. We see them all the time, and they have lost all meaning—this preconditions our relationship to ALL impact scenarios; instead of continuing the aesthetics of obsolescence, elevate waste into the Sacred Space of art; failure makes nuclear and ecological catastrophes inevitable.

Zizek 00
(Zizek)
~[Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000. Print.~] AMB

And the task of historical materialist analysis here is to locate these all too formal
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lose the sense of tragedy, you perceive progress as derisive.2/¶ 

Part 2—the Man Behind the Curtain

In contemporary ideology "nature" has come to stand in as the Big Other; the source of the symbolic structure that gives us meaning.  As such "nature" is not reducible to its contents.  Like the stick figure over a bathroom door turning the materiality of a room with a sink into a gendered "men’s room," the idea of "nature" asserts normative force over our lives

Morton 11 – Tim Morten ~[blogger…and chaired professor at Rice~] Without Nature = ?, MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011, http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/06/without-nature.html-http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/06/without-nature.html
A commenter writes: i keep on wondering if your position that "there is
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against Nature must be an argument against certain forms of onto-theology.

And, these ideological beliefs in the big Other forestalls any meaningful policy response to catastrophes like global warming. This our response to ALL political problems and makes global ecocide and nuclear annihilation inevitable. We emerge as the psychotic patient who thinks she are a piece of grain and believe there is a chicken that’s about to eat us. Instead of realizing that we are not grain, ask the profoundly dumb question: Does the chicken know that we are not grain?

Zizek 8 – Slavoj Zizek, Censorship Today: Violence, or  ........ Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses part 2, 2008, http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm
So, back to the prospect of ecological catastrophe, why do we not act
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background-coordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger.

Thus the plan: The United States federal government should provide Energy Savings Performance Contracts to convert 1200 federal facilities to capture landfill gas energy. We’ll try and clarify.

Part 3—Melting

Costs prohibit smaller landfills from adopting conversion tech now—EPA incentives are insufficient

Schlauch ’9 Brendan Schlauch, "Methane from Landfills," Governing, 8/31/2009, http://www.governing.com/topics/energy-env/Methane-from-Landfills.html
Smaller municipal landfills don’t fall under the federal rules. And the cost of capturing
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doesn’t provide direct financial incentives to landfills that move forward with these projects.

by using ESPC landfills can work with the federal government to finance electrical generation.

FEMP 04
(FEMP is the Federal Energy Management Program that finds and promotes energy efficiency and use of renewable energy resources at federal sites, and helps to lead energy production because the USfg is the largest energy consumer and has a big intrest in energy production.)
~[Federal Energy Management Program, Super ESPC Program Factsheet, Biomass and Alternative Methane Fuels~] AMB
Landfill gas (LFG) was first collected and used  as a fuel in the
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offers financing and private sector expertise specifically geared to  using renewable BAMF resources.

And, the Symbolic Order is capable of being restructured at any given time—radical transgression prompts its collapse.

EDKINS 03– SR. LECTURER, INT’L POLITICS @ UNIV. OF WALES-ABERYSTWYTH –Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pg. 11-14
¶ In the psychoanalytic account the subject is formed around a lack, and in
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the non-existence of any complete, closed social order.¶ ¶ ¶ 

And, this is the Symbolic Suicide: Our act of legally affirming the landfill plays regulation as a call for the disavowed symptom beyond the laws text.  It is precisely the utopianisms of the government doing the right thing with our trash that allows us to transform libidinal attachments to be radically wonderful rather than radically violent.

Jodi Dean, Department of Political Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2004, Law and Critique, Vol. 15, p. 22-24
Nevertheless, these acts provide a momentary suspension of meaning that opens up another space
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belief in the founding dream rather than through the enjoyment of founding violence. 

Waste also has radical transgressive potential; it operates as the zero-space of modern social relations: Its political power comes from its inability to be neatly organized.  Garbage operates as a constant reminder that our actions have consequences.

Moore 2011 (Sarah A., Asst. Prof. Latin American Studies and Geography, "Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste," Progress in Human Geographies, 2011) CJQ
Rather than being about waste, per se, disposal is about placing and is
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the usual practices of distancing it from particular places (Moore, 2008). 

Waste is the "dirty little secret" of modern society: we always implicitly affirm "us" in relation to the "it" of our waste—we are clean, it is dirty; we are pure, it is filthy. This forces us to encounter the outer limits of hierarchies of control.

Moore 2011 (Sarah A., Asst. Prof. Latin American Studies and Geography, "Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste," Progress in Human Geographies, 2011) CJQ
The third concept in quadrant 4, waste as abject, is also concerned with
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Moore, 2008) where the public secret of waste is fully exposed.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

1AC 1

Contention 1 is Nature

This year’s resolution calls for us to change our relationship to energy production. Most people will do it to help something called "Nature." But there is a larger question that first must be answered: What is this Nature we talk about, and what do we mean when we say we want to preserve it?

NATURE DOES NOT EXIST PRIOR TO HUMAN CONCEPTION—Fantasies of harmony and Edenic nature are not natural; nature fails to exist external to human understanding and particular power relations.

Huang 2009 (Han-Yu, Asst. Prof. English, National Taiwan Normal University, "Trauma, Paranoia, and Ecological Fantasy in Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Toward a Psychoanalytic Ethics of Waste," Literary and Cultural Studies, 35.1 March 2009: 109-130) CJQ
As the recognition of the non-existence of the Other―namely, there
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carried to their deadlocks and be ready for the worst. Are we? 

But conceiving nature as an objective truth creates a social order that disavows nonhuman actors, creates scientific censorship, and is a discursive feedback loop that reaffies our relationship to nature—Precluding any policy response.

Wainwright %26 Barnes 09
(Wainwright Graduate professor at Ohio State University. Barnes is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography at the University of British Columbia-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_British_Columbia.)
~Wainwright, Joel, and Trevor J. Barnes. "Nature, Economy, and the Space – place Distinction." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.0 (2009): 966-86. Print.~

One of the more animated contemporary debates in human geography concerns the critique of the
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mere external materiality, accessible to us in some unmediated or prediscursive form.

This is particularly problematic in the context of ecological catastrophe. The discourses predicting environmental apocalypse ignore that the environment is simply one series of apocalypses after another: Extinctions, pollution, toxification, and urbanization are processes of nature and denying them their everyday quality serves to rally societies together and prevent them from questioning the System in which they live. At the heart of this beautiful thing we call nature, in which we speak of violence and order, is founded upon mass extinction and continuous death of unfortunate species—This condition at the heart of natural processes goes ignored by modern society.

Valdivielso 2009 (Joacquin, Prof. Moral Philosophy at Universidat de Illes Balears, New School University, School for Social Research, Political Theory Seminar, Dec. 8 2009, "Discourses of Global Environmental Justice") CJQ
The second phenomenon I want to refer to is the role of panic as a
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. I will call this the panic effect of pro-climate politics.

And so we encounter the problem of the metaphysics of space and place.

Problematizing nature is the epitome of the space/place dichotomy. Nature exists simultaneously as an object, a space that we inhabit, the site of a collective subjectivity, but also as a place, that object space over to the corner, that creek over the mountain. Since Hegel and Schelling Western metaphysics have relied on this ecological division without confronting its most central confusion.

The impact is a total inability to comprehend Nature as either a space or a place, this thing we see and that thing we think about. This binary metaphysics of presence obscures that objectivity is unknowable, and occludes the subjectivity of particular things in space.

Wainwright %26 Barnes 09
(Wainwright Graduate professor at Ohio State University. Barnes is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography at the University of British Columbia-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_British_Columbia.)
~Wainwright, Joel, and Trevor J. Barnes. "Nature, Economy, and the Space – place Distinction." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.0 (2009): 966-86. Print.~

It is not our aim to parse this debate here. Rather, our intention
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conception of space as the natural, infinite totality within which we exist.

Prioritizing the subjectivity of each place fails to recognize the way the space influences and changes the particularities of the place.

Wainwright %26 Barnes 09
(Wainwright Graduate professor at Ohio State University. Barnes is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography at the University of British Columbia-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_British_Columbia.)
~Wainwright, Joel, and Trevor J. Barnes. "Nature, Economy, and the Space – place Distinction." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.0 (2009): 966-86. Print.~

Many geographers and political ecologists have examined the ways that conceptions of place and nature
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endless expanse of space—unless place is defended¶ by subaltern groups.

It is within this history of space and place that we encounter nature—Deconstructing the distinction between subject and object offers us the chance to rethink the meaning of ecology itself. Because nature is at once a space and a place, it exposes the momentary breakdown in Western metaphysics itself—Escaping totalization, we encounter a site for ethical responsibility.

Wainwright %26 Barnes 09
(Wainwright Graduate professor at Ohio State University. Barnes is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography at the University of British Columbia-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_British_Columbia.)
~Wainwright, Joel, and Trevor J. Barnes. "Nature, Economy, and the Space – place Distinction." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.0 (2009): 966-86. Print.~

Braun’s specific impetus for these claims is to spark a new conception of British¶
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joined in difference, and frame our experience¶ of nature and existence.

Our task as ethical subjects is to challenge what we perceive as possible in the status quo to forge an impossible nature-to-come.  This ethical spirit within the 1AC is indeterminately more important than the particular decision we choose to make—Ecology is a call from the other, and we are compelled to give a response. Only this offers the chance for political agency and action.

Thomson ’5 Alex Thomson, lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, Deconstruction and Democracy, 2005, p. 201-202
Deconstruction, I have argued, is an attempt to describe this economy, the
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to the impossibility of patience, and the possibility of a productive impatience.

1AC 2

Contention 2 is the City-Space/Place

Contemporary society takes this metaphysical construction of nature as beautiful and harmonious, and then abstracts that into a totalizing otherness—Nature is presented as quote "the space without the city, that place where trash does not belong." This gives waste the radical potential to deconstruct metaphysical commitments.

Moore 2011 (Sarah A., Asst. Prof. Latin American Studies and Geography, "Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste," Progress in Human Geographies, 2011) CJQ
Rather than being about waste, per se, disposal is about placing and is
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the usual practices of distancing it from particular places (Moore, 2008). 

Our deconstructive ethic of openness breaks down ideologies of divison and sameness: In the course of urban life, cities become something larger than merely the sum of their parts, taking on a life of their own: They are their own beings, inclusive of all their parts—The radical otherization of waste encountered within the late neoliberal consensus of recycling forces an artificial division between nature and the urban space.

Strefansecu 11
~Strefanescu, Dimitrie A. "Relinquishing Control: Reactions to Emergence." (n.d.): n. pag. Print.~
We can now state that cities – furthermore, we can extrapolate to the whole
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which does not ¶ oppose nature, but is inherently part of it.

Waste is the "dirty little secret" of modern society—Everything is founded upon the production of infinite piles of waste, left to rot and burn beneath the sun. As such, it remains a record of ethical atrocities—Where we place it, who consumed it—And accordingly, it is imbued with massive ethical potential.

Moore 2011 (Sarah A., Asst. Prof. Latin American Studies and Geography, "Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste," Progress in Human Geographies, 2011) CJQ
The third concept in quadrant 4, waste as abject, is also concerned with
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Moore, 2008) where the public secret of waste is fully exposed.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

1AC Work

1AC Equality Advantage

Advantage One is Equality

Wind production discourse elevates technical expertise above other forms of knowledge. This is not a neutral epistemology: Unquestioned expertise casts other forms of knowing as Other, silencing unheard voices in policy discussion.

Aitken 9 (Mhairi, Research Fellow at U. Edinburgh and PhD from Robert Gordon University. "Wind Power Planning Controversies and the Construction of Expert and Lay Knowledges" Science as Culture 18:1, March 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682-http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682) will
Wynne (1996) has criticised a large section of the STS literature in saying
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around the topic of onshore wind power¶ and public responses to it.

Expertism is decidedly antidemocratic, favoring academic knowledge over dissenting voices. This pushes aside egalitarianism in favor of scientific hegemony.

Aitken 9 (Mhairi, Research Fellow at U. Edinburgh and PhD from Robert Gordon University. "Wind Power Planning Controversies and the Construction of Expert and Lay Knowledges" Science as Culture 18:1, March 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682-http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682) will
As will be highlighted below, objections from members of the public are depicted as
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’presupposed by democratic accountability’ (Turner, 2001, p. 123).

The status quo is not democracy. A truly democratic politics must be based upon the identification with The People which cannot speak. The exclusion of voices from the political sphere creates a police order of inequality.

Ranciere 2001 (Jacques, Prof. Phil @ European Graduate School, "Ten Theses on Politics," Theory and Event 5:3 Muse Online)CJQ
The ’people’ that is the subject of democracy — and thus the principal subject of
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social (ac)counts and an exception to all logics of domination.

A democratic ethos of equality makes new political practices possible: Expertism reduces politics to policymaking, which is no politics at all.

Ranciere 2006 (Jacques, Prof. Philosophy @ European Graduate School, "Hatred of Democracy," Pp. 45-46)CJQ
For, supposing that the titles to govern cannot be contested, the problem is
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who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed.

The police order of inequality is not benign: It metamorphoses into a retreat from political debate, unleashing a capitalist Leviathan predicated upon inequality.

Ranciere 2001 (Jacques, Prof. Phil @ European Graduate School, "Ten Theses on Politics," Theory and Event 5:3 Muse Online)CJQ
The ’end of politics’ and the ’return of politics’ are two complementary ways of canceling
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of ’political philosophy’ so as to interpret the consensualist practice of annihilating politics.

Neoliberalism kills value to life and makes extinction inevitable

Santos 2003 (Boaventura de Souza Santos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, Collective Suicide?, http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php 2003
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it
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, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. 

These police logics make it impossible to see gaps in the logic of equality—Because inequality is ontologically masked by the police, it becomes impossible to identify without an ASSUMPTION of radical equality.

May 2008 (Todd May, Prof. Phil Clemson University, "The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciere," Pp. 48-49)CJQ
We have already seen this exclusion at work. In distributive theories of justice,
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After all, if one is invisible, what character can one have?

Rethinking environmental policy through the aesthetic framework of "Who is equal and who is uncounted" is critical to generating affective mobility for effective ’large scale’ activism—authentic politics must locate itself in re-partitioning the sensible

Yusoff ’12 Kathryn Yusoff, "Aesthetics of loss: biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 37, Issue 4, pages 578–592, October 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00486.x
At the launch of the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2010 for the UN Year of
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forms of attention that are not predicated on reciprocity and modes of exchange.

This has a direct impact on global climate change: The manner in which things are made present determines the course of warming by revealing who we do and do not count as living beings.

Yusoff ’10 Kathryn Yusoff, "Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change," Theory Culture Society 27: 73, 2010, Sage
One crucial sphere in the politics of climate change is that of the decisions around
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, the politics of which demand that we notice both multiplicity and subtraction.

Solvency

Thus Austin and I affirm an increase in financial incentives for energy production of wind power in the United States.

Advantage 2 is solvency

Scientific expertism is totalizing – it forces non-experts to police their own forms of knowledge production. Injecting responsibility at the local level is key to break this vicious cycle

Aitken 9 (Mhairi, Research Fellow at U. Edinburgh and PhD from Robert Gordon University. "Wind Power Planning Controversies and the Construction of Expert and Lay Knowledges" Science as Culture 18:1, March 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682-http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802385682) will

Given that this dichotomy was upheld by individuals representing all sides of the¶ argument
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makers, but also more fundamentally on the part of lay people themselves.

The plan’s injection of a radical equality into the political sphere breaks down the harmonious functioning of the police order, troubling current ecological ways of thinking.

May 2008 (Todd May, Prof. Phil Clemson University, "The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciere," Pp. 42-43)CJQ
Policing, as Rancière defines it, is deeply embedded in Western political philosophy.
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philosophy, is that of suppressing or keeping at bay a democratic politics.

Top-down framings of scale and power devastate political agency— local intervention is key to remapping methods and possibilities of transformation

Massey ’4 Doreen Massey, "Geographies of responsibility," Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, Volume 86, Issue 1, pages 5–18, March 2004, DOI: 10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00150.x
There is one other thread which is crucial to the argument (i.e
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I shall argue below, that there is also something else at issue.

Discussions surrounding energy production are a unique instance to challenge the aesthetic enframing of the status quo.

Bell et al 5 (Derek Bell, Reader in Environmental Political Theory at the University of Newcastle, Tim Gray, Professor of Geography at Newcastle,  and Claire Haggett, professor of sociology at University of Edinburgh. "The ’Social Gap’ in Wind Farm Siting Decisions: Explanations and Policy Responses" Environmental Politics 14:5 2005 DOI:10.1080/09644010500175833)

Second, information will always be ’negotiated’ by the public (Bush et al
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need to look much more broadly at energy policy and the energy system.

Only a politics based around a fundamental assumption of the equality of each subject can inject affective relations into political action.

Aitken 12 (Mhairi, Research Fellow at U. Edinburgh and PhD from Robert Gordon University. "Changing climate, changing democracy: a¶ cautionary tale, Environmental Politics," 21:2, 211-229
Overlooking social and political factors within climate science presents an¶ unrealistic picture of how
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cannot be taken up – within the¶ dominant framing of climate change.

Anthropogenic climate change poses an unmistakable danger to life of all kinds on Earth.  At stake are the very life cycle processes relied upon by humans and nonhumans alike.

Hannah ’12 Lee Hannah, senior researcher in climate change biology at Conservation International, visiting researcher and adjunct professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science %26 Management at UC-Santa Barbara, has a pretty detailed Wikipedia page, "As Threats to Biodiversity Grow, Can We Save World’s Species?" Yale Environment 360, 4/19/2012, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/as_threats_to_biodiversity_grow_can_we_save_worlds_species/2518/
Now, with 7 billion people on the planet — heading to 10 billion —
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timber, ranching, and farming such crops as soybeans and oil palm.