Tournament: ToC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood JP | Judge: Christian Tarsney
First are the Links:

Despite the attempts of the 1AC to prioritize the environmental protection over resource extraction the 1AC is just a continuation of existing anthropocentric mindsets because the act of valuing nature for the benefit of humans merely further entrenches the domination. It makes the environment and its inhabitants instrumentally valuable, instead of recognizing nature as valuable in itself.  The absence of nature is in itself anthropocentric.  Yeuk-Sze explains,

Suppose that putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And What is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? It is often said to be morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge proportion of the planet's natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future) human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its nonhuman components. In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (meaning “non-instrumental value”) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter being is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, the it is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O'Neil 1992 and Jameson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value). Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered as in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle (Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man” and that the value of nonhuman things in nature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment the of nonhuman animals, except to the extent that it such treatment may lead to bad consequences for humans beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards nonhuman animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment (see Passmore 1974, Bookchin 1990, Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, and Maple (eds.) 1995). When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings and to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its nonhuman contents. It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth's environment and remedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the nonhuman environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996).  

?
Second are the Impacts:

A. Anthropocentrism is epistemically suspect – including other perspectives and points of reference is uniquely key to forming a cogent basis for our knowledge.  This implies that the critique comes prior to aff framework since we need a stable epistemology to form normative truths and discern between right and wrong.  Das explains,

Parallax describes the apparent change in the direction of a moving object caused by alteration in the observer's position. In the graphic work of M.C. Escher, human faculties are similarly deceived and an impossible reality made plausible. While not strictly a scientific theorem, anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective, is deeply embedded in science and culture. Improving knowledge requires abandoning anthropocentricity or, at least, acknowledging its existence. Anthropocentrism's limits derive from the physical constraints of human cognition and specific psychological attitudes. Being human entails specific faculties, intrinsic attitudes, values and belief systems that shape enquiry and understanding. The human mind has evolved a specific physical structure and bio-chemistry that shapes thought processes. The human cognitive system determines our reasoning and therefore our knowledge. Language, logic, mathematics, abstract thought, cultural beliefs, history and memories create a specific human frame of reference, which may restrict what we can know or understand. There may be other forms of life and intelligence. The ocean has revealed creatures that live from chemo-synthesis in ecosystems around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, without access to sunlight. Life forms based on materials other than carbon may also be feasible. An entirely radical set of cognitive frameworks and alternative knowledge cannot be discounted. Like a train that can only run on tracks that determine direction and destination, human knowledge may ultimately be constrained by what evolution has made us. Knowledge was originally driven by the need to master the natural environment to meet basic biological needs—survival and genetic propagation. It was also needed to deal with the unknown and forces beyond human control. Superstition, religion, science and other belief systems evolved to meets these human needs. In the eighteenth century, medieval systems of aristocratic and religious authority were supplanted by a new model of scientific method, rational discourse, personal liberty and individual responsibility. But this did not change the basic underlying drivers. Knowledge is also influenced by human factors—fear and greed, ambition, submission and tribal collusion, altruism and jealousy, as well as complex power relationships and inter-personal group dynamics. Behavioural science illustrates the inherent biases in human thought. Announcing a boycott of certain "luxury" scientific journals, 2013 Nobel laureate Dr. Randy Schekman argued that to preserve their pre-eminence they acted like "fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits…knowing scarcity stokes demand". He argued that science is being distorted by perverse incentives whereby scientists who publish in important journals with a high "impact factor" can expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Understanding operates within these biological and attitudinal constraints. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "every philosophy hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is a mask". Understanding of fundamental issues remains limited. The cosmological nature and origins of the universe are contested. The physical source and nature of matter and energy are debated. The origins and evolution of biological life remain unresolved. Resistance to new ideas frequently restricts the development of knowledge. The history of science is a succession of controversies—a non geo-centric universe, continental drift, theory of evolution, quantum mechanics and climate change. Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. Experimental methodology and testing is flawed. Model predictions are often unsatisfactory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed: "You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations … there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Challenging anthropocentrism does not mean abandoning science or rational thought. It does not mean reversion to primitive religious dogma, messianic phantasms or obscure mysticism. Transcending anthropocentricity may allow new frames of reference expanding the boundary of human knowledge. It may allow human beings to think more clearly, consider different perspectives and encourage possibilities outside the normal range of experience and thought. It may also allow a greater understanding of our existential place within nature and in the order of things. As William Shakespeare's Hamlet cautioned a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But fundamental biology may not allow the required change of reference framework. While periodically humbled by the universe, human beings remain enamoured, for the most part, with the proposition that they are the apogee of development. But as Mark Twain observed in Letters from Earth: "He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly." Writing in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the late English author Douglas Adams speculated that the earth was a powerful computer and human beings were its biological components designed by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to answer the ultimate questions about the universe and life. To date, science has not produced a conclusive refutation of this whimsical proposition. Whether or not we can go beyond anthropocentrism, it is a reminder of our limits. As Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal, noted:  "Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."  

B. Anthropocentrism is the original and foundational hierarchy that structures all other forms of oppression. Without the domination of animal’s humans would have never developed the technologies to oppress all life considered to be lesser than human – it is the controlling impact. Best explains,

Hierarchy emerged when with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animals slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.  Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. 

C. Anthropocentrism results in both the extinction of life on Earth, but also our ontological death – it corrupts and bankrupts our relationships with the natural world while also making ecocide inevitable.  The kritik holds the internal link to aff solvency, as it’s impossible to protect the environment with an anthropocentric mindset. Gottlieb explains,

Here I will at least begin in agreement with Levinas. As he rejects an ethics proceeding on the basis of self-interest, so I believe the anthropocentric perspectives of conservation or liberal environmentalism cannot take us far enough. Our relations with nonhuman nature are poisoned and not just because we have set up feedback loops that already lead to mass starvations, skyrocketing environmental disease rates, and devastation of natural resources. The problem with ecocide is not just that it hurts human beings. Our uncaring violence also violates the very ground of our being, our natural body, our home. Such violence is done not simply to the other – as if the rainforest, the river, the atmosphere, the species made extinct are totally different from ourselves. Rather, we have crucified ourselves-in-relation-to-the-other, fracturing a mode of being in which self and other can no more be conceived as fully in isolation from each other than can a mother and a nursing child. We are that child, and nonhuman nature is that mother. If this image seems too maudlin, let us remember that other lactating women can feed an infant, but we have only one earth mother. What moral stance will be shaped by our personal sense that we are poisoning ourselves, our environment, and so many kindred spirits of the air, water, and forests? To begin, we may see this tragic situation as setting the limits to Levinas's perspective. The other which is nonhuman nature is not simply known by a "trace," nor is it something of which all knowledge is necessarily instrumental. This other is inside us as well as outside us. We prove it with every breath we take, every bit of food we eat, every glass of water we drink. We do not have to find shadowy traces on or in the faces of trees or lakes, topsoil or air: we are made from them. Levinas denies this sense of connection with nature. Our "natural" side represents for him a threat of simple consumption or use of the other, a spontaneous response which must be obliterated by the power of ethics in general (and, for him in particular, Jewish religious law(23) ). A "natural" response lacks discipline; without the capacity to heed the call of the other, unable to sublate the self's egoism. Worship of nature would ultimately result in an "everything-is-permitted" mentality, a close relative of Nazism itself. For Levinas, to think of people as "natural" beings is to assimilate them to a totality, a category or species which makes no room for the kind of individuality required by ethics.(24) He refers to the "elemental" or the "there is" as unmanaged, unaltered, "natural" conditions or forces that are essentially alien to the categories and conditions of moral life.(25) One can only lament that Levinas has read nature -- as to some extent (despite his intentions) he has read selfhood -- through the lens of masculine culture. It is precisely our sense of belonging to nature as system, as interaction, as interdependence, which can provide the basis for an ethics appropriate to the trauma of ecocide. As cultural feminism sought to expand our sense of personal identity to a sense of inter-identification with the human other, so this ecological ethics would expand our personal and species sense of identity into an inter-identification with the natural world. Such a realization can lead us to an ethics appropriate to our time, a dimension of which has come to be known as "deep ecology."(26) For this ethics, we do not begin from the uniqueness of our human selfhood, existing against a taken-for-granted background of earth and sky. Nor is our body somehow irrelevant to ethical relations, with knowledge of it reduced always to tactics of domination. Our knowledge does not assimilate the other to the same, but reveals and furthers the continuing dance of interdependence. And our ethical motivation is neither rationalist system nor individualistic self-interest, but a sense of connection to all of life. The deep ecology sense of self-realization goes beyond the modern Western sense of "self" as an isolated ego striving for hedonistic gratification. . . . . Self, in this sense, is experienced as integrated with the whole of nature.(27) Having gained distance and sophistication of perception from the development of science and political freedoms we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. . . . we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way.(28) Ecological ways of knowing nature are necessarily participatory. This knowledge is ecological and plural, reflecting both the diversity of natural ecosystems and the diversity in cultures that nature-based living gives rise to. The recovery of the feminine principle is based on inclusiveness. It is a recovery in nature, woman and man of creative forms of being and perceiving. In nature it implies seeing nature as a live organism. In woman it implies seeing women as productive and active. Finally, in men the recovery of the feminine principle implies a relocation of action and activity to create life-enhancing, not life-reducing and life-threatening societies.(29) In this context, the knowing ego is not set against a world it seeks to control, but one of which it is a part. To continue the feminist perspective, the mother knows or seeks to know the child's needs. Does it make sense to think of her answering the call of the child in abstraction from such knowledge? Is such knowledge necessarily domination? Or is it essential to a project of care, respect and love, precisely because the knower has an intimate, emotional connection with the known?(30) Our ecological vision locates us in such close relation with our natural home that knowledge of it is knowledge of ourselves. And this is not, contrary to Levinas's fear, reducing the other to the same, but a celebration of a larger, more inclusive, and still complex and articulated self.(31) The noble and terrible burden of Levinas's individuated responsibility for sheer existence gives way to a different dream, a different prayer: Being rock, being gas, being mist, being Mind, Being the mesons traveling among the galaxies with the speed of light, You have come here, my beloved one. . . . You have manifested yourself as trees, as grass, as butterflies, as single-celled beings, and as chrysanthemums; but the eyes with which you looked at me this morning tell me you have never died.(32) In this prayer, we are, quite simply, all in it together. And, although this new ecological Holocaust -- this creation of planet Auschwitz – is under way, it is not yet final. We have time to step back from the brink, to repair our world. But only if we see that world not as an other across an irreducible gap of loneliness and unchosen obligation, but as a part of ourselves as we are part of it, to be redeemed not out of duty, but out of love; neither for our selves nor for the other, but for us all.  

Ontological death outweighs aff impacts because it symbolizes the destruction the basis for our very being and thusly, our moral agency.  By killing nature we mine as well be killing ourselves because we fail to recognize that humanity is not distinct from nature, but rather, interdependent with it.  

?
Third is the Alternative:

The alternative is to embrace a form of deep ecology that proscribes a radical break away from the humanist mindsets by developing countries that justify anthropocentrism.  Only the radical suicide of ecological distinctions between the human and non-human solves.  Nash explains,

Karl Marx, of course, had studied this last form of hierarchy and proposed a revolutionary remedy. Bookchin began where Marx stopped. He recommended Discarding ecological as well as economic class distinctions along with the governments that sanctioned and sustained them. This meant revolution and, here again, Bookchin transcended Marx. The nineteenth-century revolutionary called for a government of and by the working class; Bookchin wanted no government at all. His objective was not to seize power for one group or another but to dissolve  it entirely as an apparatus by which people related to each other and, as a species, to nature. As early as 1965 Bookchin linked anarchism and ecology. Both. perspectives, he believed, stressed the equal value of every part of the community and the necessitatesy of maximizing individual freedom so that every component could fulfill its potential. "I submit," Bookchin wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1965), "that an anarchist the community would approximate a normal ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and harmonious." 6 The means to this end, he explained in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), was through an "ethics of complementarity" derived from an "ecological vision of nature." Bookchin's utopia was not only based on ecological models; it included the ecosystem. He sought in a "new and lasting equilibrium with nature" just as he did with other humans. Bookchin was under no illusion about the fact that his ecoanarchism necessitated the wholesale replacement of his civilization's "institutional and ethical framework.” He also knew that this was another word for revolution. "I would like to ask," he wrote in 1974, "if the environmental crisis has does not have its roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed.., do not require a fundamental, indeed revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines?" 9 It was from this perspective that Bookchin, like the deep ecologists whom he anticipated, criticized most manifestations of American conservation and even large parts of modern environmentalism. As one of the first of the radical environmentalists, and as an avowed revolutionary, Book-chin remained profoundly suspicious of those who would save the world by banning aerosol cans or staging Earth-Day cleanups. He regretted that by 1980 "ecology is now fashionable, indeed faddish--and with this sleazy popularity has emerged a new type of environmentalist hype' campaigns but did not challenge the mental pollution that Bookchin regarded as the root of the problem. Dismissing charges that environmentalist demands were too radical, he argued "they are not radical enough." Specifically, Bookchin continued, "'environmentalism' does not bring into question the underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate nature; it seeks to facilitates domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination.” The only meaningful, long-term solution: was to replace the modern world's "odious morality" with a holistic, environmental ethic that had as its basis respect for all people and all nature. Armed with new definitions of right and wrong will, ecoanarchists could tear down the old order and erect the new. 

The permutation always fails; half-hearted measures to reject anthropocentrism are nonsensical since they require one to still allow for a human-centric mindset, which is in itself a manifestation of the ideology. Only by having a radical revolution against anthropocentric mindsets solves – my evidence is comparative.  Best 2 explains,

Revolutionary environmentalism is based on the realization that Politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore. We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The defense of the earth requires immediate and decisive: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and cages need to be emptied. But these are defensive actions, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built from the perspective total liberation. A new revolutionary politics will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human standpoints in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and its omnicidal grow-or-die logic. Radical politics must reverse the growing power of the state, mass media, and corporations to promote egalitarianism and participatory democratization at all levels of society – political, cultural, and economic. It must dismantle all asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy, including that of humans over animals and the earth. Radical politics is impossible without the revitalization of citizenship and the re-politicization of life, which begins with forms of education, communication, culture, and art that anger, awaken, inspire, and empower people toward action and change.

Tournament: ToC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Idk
The affirmative’s view of the other is flawed – something to be mapped yet radically unknowable – one that is dangerous but also alluring.  Their call for the ballot is frightening – it transforms the ballot into a symbol of a prize of Otherness while erasing the subaltern.  They view the subaltern through a critical lens while sitting comfortably in this air conditions simulacrum we call the debate round.  This form of knowledge production is a façade of neutrality – it is instead the lynchpin of the Western intellectual subject.  Any type of the argument the affirmative makes that claims the subaltern would be on board with their project relies on the same logic that reinforces conceptions of the inferior other.  Spivak  explains,

SOME OF THE most Radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary — not only by ideological and scienti?c production, but also by the institution of the law. . . . In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intel- lectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the ?nal determinant or the transcendental signi?ed. The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, fareflung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the rede?nition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular rede?nition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged pans ofa vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narra- tive of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disquali?ed as inadequate to their task or insuf?- ciently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scienti?city‘ (Foucault I980: 82). This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one. . . .  Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak? . . . 

?
The subaltern is subsequently reduced to a fungible object, a passive object for the consumption as well as commodification of the debate community – the affirmative absorbs the power of alterity only to toss its carcass back into the dust; voting aff doesn’t actually solve the Other’s problems.  It just reinforces the fact that the West is still controlling the solutions to the problems of the subaltern – turns case.  Chow  explains,  

In the “cultural studies” of the American academy in the 1990s. The Maoist is reproducing with prowess. We see this in The way terms such as “oppression,” “victimization,” and “subalternity” are now being used. Contrary to the Orientalist disdain for the contemporary native cultures in the non-West, the Maoist turns the precisely disdained other into the object of his/her study and, in some cases identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralist, the Maoist sometimes turns all people from non-Western cultures into a generalized “subaltern” that is then used to flog an equally generalized “West.” Because the representation of “the other” as such ignores (1) the class and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate as those in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations structuring the Maoist’s mode of inquiry and valorization, it produces a way of talking in which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting the speaker’s own sense of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably wealthy white American intellectual I know claimed that he was a “third world intellectual” citing as one of his credentials his marriage to a Western European woman of part-Jewish heritage; a professor of English complained about being “victimized” by the structured time at an Ivy League Institution, meaning that she needed to be on time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the world’s poorest countries told his American friends that he was of poor peasant stock in order to authenticate his identity as a radical “third worlder representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently say they were “raped” when they report experiences of professional frustration and conflict. Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all take the route of self-sub-alternization, which has increasingly become the assured means to authority and power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twice - the first time of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is no longer distinguishable from those who have had our consciousnesses “raised.”

?
The judge should vote negative to engage in academic exile – rather than examining structures external to this round, we should question our privilege to speak in the first place – our rejection of the academy is a precondition for any semblance of solvency – only the alternative solves.  Biwas  explains,

Said has written extensively and poignantly about his own exilic conditions as a Palestinian schooled in the Western literary canon and living in the heart of US empire.27 But more importantly, he has also articulated exile as a ‘style of thought and habitation’ which makes possible certain kinds of ontological and epistemological openings. Speaking of exile as a ‘metaphorical condition’,28 Said describes it as ‘the state of never being fully adjusted’, of ‘always feeling outside’, of ‘restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others’, of ‘a kind of curmudgeonly disagreeableness’. Exile, he says, ‘is the condition that characterizes the intellectual as someone who is a marginal figure outside the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-homeness’.29 Not just ‘foreigners’ but ‘lifelong members of a society’, can be such ‘outsiders’, so that ‘(e)ven if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and comfortable’.30 What Said privileges here is an intellectual orientation, rather than any identarian claims to knowledge; there is much to learn in that for IR scholars. In making a case for the exilic orientation, it is the powerful hold of the nation-state upon intellectual thinking that Said most bemoans.31 The nation-state of course has a particular pride of place in the study of global politics. The state-centricity of International Relations has not just circumscribed the ability of scholars to understand a vast ensemble of globally oriented movements, exchanges and practices not reducible to the state, but also inhibited a critical intellectual orientation to the world outside the national borders within which scholarship is produced. Said acknowledges the fact that all intellectual work occurs in a (national) context which imposes upon one’s intellect certain linguistic boundaries, particular (nationally framed) issues and, most invidiously, certain domestic political constraints and pressures, but he cautions against the dangers of such restrictions upon the intellectual imagination.32 Comparing the development of IR in two different national contexts – the French and the German ones – Gerard Holden has argued that different intellectual influences, different historical resonances of different issues, different domestic exigencies shape the discipline in different contexts.33 While this is to be expected to an extent, there is good reason to be cautious about how scholarly sympathies are expressed and circumscribed when the reach of one’s work (issues covered, people affected) so obviously extends beyond the national context. For scholars of the global, the (often unconscious) hold of the nation-state can be especially pernicious in the ways that it limits the scope and range of the intellectual imagination. Said argues that the hold of the nation is such that even intellectuals progressive on domestic issues become collaborators of empire when it comes to state actions abroad.34 Specifically, he critiques nationalistically based systems of education and the tendency in much of political commentary to frame analysis in terms of ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ - particularly evident in coverage of the war on terrorism - which automatically sets up a series of (often hostile) oppositions to ‘others’. He points in this context to the rather common intellectual tendency to be alert to the abuses of others while remaining blind to those of one’s own.35 It is fair to say that the jostling and unsettling of the nation-state that critical International Relations scholars have contributed to has still done little to dislodge the centrality of the nation-state in much of International Relations and Foreign Policy analyses. Raising questions about the state-centricity of intellectual works becomes even more urgent in the contemporary context in which the hyperpatriotic surge following the events of 11 September 2001 has made considerable inroads into the US academy. The attempt to make the academy a place for the renewal of the nation-state project is troubling in itself; for IR scholars in the US, such attempts can only limit the reach of a global sensibility precisely at a time when such globality is even more urgently needed. Said warns against the inward pull of patriotism in times of emergency and crisis, and argues that even for an intellectual who speaks for a particular cause, the task is to ‘universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others’.36 He is adamant that this is the case even for beleaguered groups such as the Palestinians whose very survival is dependent on formulating their demands in a nationalist idiom.37 American intellectuals, as members of a superpower with enormous global reach and where dissension in the public realm is noticeably absent, carry special responsibility in this regard.38 What the exilic orientation makes possible is this ability to universalise by enabling first, ‘a double perspective that never sees things in isolation’ so that from the juxtaposition of ideas and experiences ‘one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another’,39 and second, an ability to see things ‘not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way’, as contingent ‘historical choices made by men and women’ that are changeable.40 The second of these abilities displaces the ontological givenness of the nation-state in the study of global politics; for the intellectual who feels pulled by the demands of loyalty and patriotism, Said suggests, ‘never solidarity before criticism’, arguing that it is the intellectual’s task to show how the nation ‘is not a natural or god-given entity but is a constructed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object, with a history of struggle and conquest behind it’.41 The first of these abilities interjects a comparativist approach as critical to the study of global politics, locating one’s work in a temporal and spatial plane that is always larger than one’s immediate (national) context and in the process historicising and politicising what may appear naturalised in any particular (national) context. The now famous passage from Hugo of St Victor, cited by Auerbach, appears in Said’s writings on at least four different occasions: The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

Tournament: ToC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any
I will post things as I break them, but my NC strat is different than anything I have broken on this topic, and is dependent on the round.  The following are positions I have:

Anthropocentrism K

Chow K

Taoism K

Foucault Power NC

Interpretation: the aff must allow the neg debater to negate by avenue other than proving that resource extraction should be prioritized over environmental protection.