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1 -Framework - Inclusion
2 -Our primary obligation is to determine what discourses we must deploy to shape our own moral subjectivity and recognize that of others. It is essential that we critique how our discourses humanize or dehumanize ourselves and others.
3 -Butler 2004 - Judith Butler Prof. of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory, UC Berkeley, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge (2004). p. 57-58
4 -I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we can be.1 I am not speaking of power only in a juridical or positive sense, but I am referring to the working of a certain regulatory regime, one that informs the law, and also exceeds the law. When we ask, what are the conditions of intelligibility by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. So I propose to broach the relationship between variable orders of intelligibility and the genesis and knowability of the human. And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility.¶ This is what Foucault describes as the politics of truth, a politics that pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? This is what Foucault describes as “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of … the politics of truth” (“What is Critique?” 39).¶ Another way of putting this is the following: “what, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” This question does not quite broach the question of what it is not to be, or what it is to occupy the place of not-being within the field of being. What it is to live, breathe, attempt to love neither as fully negated nor as fully acknowledged as being. This relationship, between intelligibility and the human is an urgent one; it carries a certain theoretical urgency, precisely at those points where the human is encountered at the limits of intelligibility itself. I would like to suggest that this interrogation has something important to do with justice. Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honored and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or justly, governs the recognizability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.
5 -
6 -And, social institutions must remedy systemic violence.
7 -Young 2009 - Young, Iris Marion Prof. Political Science U. Chicago. "Five faces of oppression." Geographic thought: A praxis perspective (2009): 55-71.
8 -Finally, many groups suffer the oppression of systematic violence. Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person. In American society women, Blacks, Asians, Arabs, gay men, and lesbians live under such threats of violence, and in at least some regions Jews, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and other Spanish-speaking Americans must fear such violence as well. Physical violence against these groups is shockingly frequent. Rape Crisis Center networks estimate that more than one-third of all American women experience an attempted or successful sexual assault in their lifetimes. Manning Marable (1984, pp. 238–41) catalogues a large number of incidents of racist violence and terror against Blacks in the United States between 1980 and 1982. He cites dozens of incidents of the severe beating, killing, or rape of Blacks by police officers on duty, in which the police involved were acquitted of any wrongdoing. In 1981, moreover, there were at least five hundred documented cases of random white teenage violence against Blacks. Violence against gay men and lesbians is not only common, but has been increasing in the last five years. While the frequency of physical attack on members of these and other racially or sexually marked groups is very disturbing, I also include in this category less severe incidents of harrassment, intimidation, or ridicule simply for the purpose of degrading, humiliating, or stigmatizing group members.¶ Given the frequency of such violence in our society, why are theories of justice usually silent about it? I think the reason is that theorists do not typically take such incidents of violence and harrassment as matters of social injustice. No moral theorist would deny that such acts are very wrong. But unless all immoralities are injustices, they might wonder, why should such acts be interpreted as symptoms of social injustice? Acts of violence or petty harrassment are committed by particular individuals, often extremists, deviants, or the mentally unsound. How then can they be said to involve the sorts of institutional issues I have said are properly the subject of justice?¶ What makes violence a face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable. What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character, its existence as a social practice.¶ Violence is systemic because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group. Any woman, for example, has a reason to fear rape. Regardless of what a Black man has done to escape the oppressions of marginality or powerlessness, he lives knowing he is subject to attack or harassment. The oppression of violence consists not only in direct victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group identity. Just living under such a threat of attack on oneself or family or friends deprives the oppressed of freedom and dignity, and needlessly expends their energy.¶ Violence is a social practice. It is a social given that everyone knows happens and will happen again. It is always at the horizon of social imagination, even for those who do not perpetrate it. According to the prevailing social logic, some circumstances make such violence more “called for” than others. The idea of rape will occur to many men who pick up a hitchhiking woman; the idea of hounding or teasing a gay man on their dorm floor will occur to many straight male college students. Often several persons inflict the violence together, especially in all-male groupings. Sometimes violators set out looking for people to beat up, rape, or taunt. This rule-bound, social, and often premeditated character makes violence against groups a social practice.¶ Group violence approaches legitimacy, moreover, in the sense that it is tolerated. Often third parties find it unsurprising because it happens frequently and lies as a constant possibility at the horizon of the social imagination. Even when they are caught, those who perpetrate acts of group-directed violence or harrassment often receive light or no punishment. To that extent society renders their acts acceptable.¶ An important aspect of random, systemic violence is its irrationality. Xenophobic violence differs from the violence of states or ruling-class repression. Repressive violence has a rational, albeit evil, motive: rulers use it as a coercive tool to maintain their power. Many accounts of racist, sexist, or homophobic violence attempt to explain its motivation as a desire to maintain group privilege or domination. I do not doubt that fear of violence often functions to keep oppressed groups subordinate, but I do not think xenophobic violence is rationally motivated in the way that, for example, violence against strikers is.¶ On the contrary, the violation of rape, beating, killing, and harrassment of women, people of color, gays, and other marked groups is motivated by fear or hatred of those groups. Sometimes the motive may be a simple will to power, to victimize those marked as vulnerable by the very social fact that they are subject to violence. If so, this motive is secondary in the sense that it depends on a social practice of group violence. Violence-causing fear or hatred of the other at least partly involves insecurities on the part of the violators; its irrationality suggests that unconscious processes are at work. In my Chapter 5 I discuss the logic that makes some groups frightening or hateful by defining them as ugly and loathsome bodies. I offer a psychoanalytic account of the fear and hatred of some groups as bound up with fears of identity loss. I think such unconscious fears account at least partly for the oppression I have here called violence. It may also partly account for cultural imperialism.¶ Cultural imperialism, moreover, itself intersects with violence. The culturally imperialized may reject the dominant meanings and attempt to assert their own subjectivity, or the fact of their cultural difference may put the lie to the dominant culture’s implicit claim to universality. The dissonance generated by such a challenge to the hegemonic cultural meanings can also be a source of irrational violence.¶ Violence is a form of injustice that a distributive understanding of justice seems ill equipped to capture. This may be why contemporary discussions of justice rarely mention it. I have argued that group-directed violence is institutionalized and systemic. To the degree that institutions and social practices encourage, tolerate, or enable the perpetration of violence against members of specific groups, those institutions and practices are unjust and should be reformed. Such reform may require the redistribution of resources or positions, but in large part can come only through a change in cultural images, stereotypes, and the mundane reproduction of relations of dominance and aversion in the gestures of everyday life. I discuss strategies for such change in my Chapter 5.
9 -
10 -Framework – Environmental Justice
11 -The standard is promoting environmental equity.
12 -First, the distribution of environmental consequences should be a factor in risk analysis. Lazarus 1992
13 -Lazarus, Richard J. “Pursuing ‘Environmental Justice’: The Distributional Effects of Environmental Protection.” 87 NW U. L. Rev 787 (1992). MO
14 -Environmental justice offers two important lessons. The first is that environmental policymakers need to take account of the distributional implications of their decisions. Environmental policymakers' two traditional inquiries - "how much pollution is acceptable," and "what kinds of legal rules would best ensure the accomplishment of that level of pollution" - ignore an essential factor: the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens needs to be an explicit and well-considered element of the environmental policy debate. The current approach, in which distributional concerns are a matter for behind-the-scenes negotiation in the forging of political compromises, has led to unacceptable distributional inequities. Only a few groups possess the substantial resources necessary for entry into those closed for a where environmental decisions are made, and the resulting distributions naturally favor these groups' own economic interests and/or value preferences.
15 -
16 -Second, environmentalism is toothless if it does not consider the relationship between environmental degradation and global inequality. Lazarus 2
17 -Lazarus, Richard J. “Pursuing ‘Environmental Justice’: The Distributional Effects of Environmental Protection.” 87 NW U. L. Rev 787 (1992). MO
18 -Environmentalists also need to apply ecological values closer to home. There is some painful truth to the perception of many minorities that environmentalists overlook the plight of humankind in their rush to protect nature. n312 Indeed, in the end there is something perverse about separating out human welfare - including the poverty suffered by whole nations of persons around the world - from what it means to promote the natural environment. Perhaps the reasons for this tendency lie in the sheer tragedy of that human misery associated with the former; misery that leads many otherwise well-intentioned individuals to shy away from intertwining their own lives with such seemingly intractable and wrenching sadness. ¶ Ecological values must recognize and embrace human welfare as an invaluable part of the natural community. n313 Environmentalists should, therefore, strive to redress the basic human needs of those who are wanting as part of their central mission. Environmental protection should be seen as a legitimate basis for promoting human welfare and opportunity and, in particular, for redistributing environmental amenities (and risks) more fairly among all persons. n314 The alternative, which juxtaposes the environment against humankind, is a flawed and ultimately self-defeating frame of reference for environmentalism.
19 -
20 -
21 -Framework – Dehumanization
22 -
23 -The standard is treating historically marginalized groups with respect.
24 -Moral principles are established only by empirically reflecting on human needs because abstract reflection is detached from human experience and thus cannot guide actual decision-making. Glover 1999 :
25 -If there is no external moral law, morality needs to be humanized: to be rooted in human needs and human values. (These may of course include caring about other species.) Morality interpreted in this way becomes tentative, exploratory and partly empirical. It is exploratory on the model of Socrates. Our deepest values are not just obvious. They are not all on the surface. Questioning and argument needed to discover some of them. But ethics is also exploratory in a different, more empirical, way. It includes seeing the consequences of living by a code or set of values. A human disaster shows the need to think again about those values. With disasters on the scale of some in the twentieth century, any ethical theory which either justifies them or can give no help in avoiding them is inadequate. The thought at Auschwitz and at other places, ‘never again,’ is more compelling than any abstract ethical principle. (There is a parallel with a thought sometimes expressed about another part of philosophy: belief in the existence of the physical world is more compelling than belief in any philosophical theory which purports to disprove it.) If persuaded that an otherwise convincing ethical theory could justify the Nazi genocide, I should without hesitation give up the theory. In reconstructing ethics, revulsion against these things which people have done has a central place. It is necessary to see the size and urgency of the problem. For those of us whose everyday life is in relatively calm and sheltered places, the horrors of Rwanda or Bosnia or Kosovo seem unreal.
26 -To respect human dignity is to treat all people as morally equals, and in turn prevents immoral atrocities. Glover 2 :
27 -Respect for someone's dignity is an affirmation of a fundamental human equality. You may be richer and more powerful than me, and from a different ethnic group or religion. But if you treat me with courtesy and respect, you signal your recognition of my status - that I am as much a person as you are. If, when we meet, you listen as well as talk, you acknowledge that I too have experiences, thoughts and a way of seeing the world, that I too may have something to say worth hearing. Respect for dignity is one of the great barriers against atrocity and cruelty. To acknowledge our shared moral status makes it harder for us to torture or kill each other. The erosion of the protective barrier creates danger. When one group tramples on the dignity of another, it tramples on its own inhibitions, and an Amritsar massacre may not be far.
28 -Constantly fighting the history of race-based dehumanization is key to ending our history of violence. Even seemingly small changes matter. Gilmore 2007
29 -Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Associate Professor of Geography, Director of Program in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. London: University of California Press, 2007. Print. MO. Pp 242-244
30 -If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weigh, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order. Certainly, the political forces that hold governmental power in the United States of the early twenty-first century figured this out and persisted for decades until they won. With persistence, practices and theories circulate, enabling people to see problems and their solutions differently—which then creates the possibility of further, sometimes innovative, action.¶ Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frameworks, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings (the lived ideology, or “taking to heart”) through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it (Williams 1961). Ideology matters along its entire continuum, from common sense (“where people are at”) to philosophies (where people imagine the coherence of their understanding comes from: Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Marx, Malcom X, the market).¶ The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of genocide on a planetary sale, then in order to avoid repeating history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages.¶ In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories. Old races die, through extermination or assimilation, and new races come into being. The process is not biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters that ground contemporary political culture. This culture, in turn, is based in the modern secular state’s dependence on classification, combined with militarism as a means through which classification maintains coherence. A sign of militarism’s ideological embrace is the fact that all kinds of U.S.-based people believe without pause that, in a general way, “the key to safety is aggression” (Bartov 1996; R. W. Gilmore 2002a). Where classification and militarism collide is in the area of identifying an enemy. “The Japanese are an enemy race” wrote a State Department wonk in 1941, at the height of both Jim Crow and universal military conscription, as prelude to the internment of 120,000 people in concentration camps in the South and West.
31 -
32 -Framework – Education
33 -We should decide the question of the resolution based on the discourses each side deploys by prioritizing anti-colonial struggle. That means both considering the discursive implications of the policy action and also holding both debaters accountable for their performance as representatives of a policy position. Prefer because:
34 -First, debate matters because tacit assumptions affect students’ development. Acting on assumptions that support those in power supports those power relations. Darder et al.
35 -Darder, Antonia, Baltodano, Marta, and Torres, Rodolfo. “Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction” in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, edited by Darder, Baltodano, and Torres. Second Edition. New York, Taylor and Francis, 2009. MO. Pg 6-7
36 -This phenomenon can be understood within the context of schooling in the following way. Through the daily implementation of specific norms, expectations, and behaviors, that incidentally conserve the interests of those in power, students are ushered into consensus. Gramsci argued that by cultivating such consensus through personal and institutional rewards, students could be socialized to support the interests of the ruling elite, even when such actions were clearly in contradiction with the students’ own class interests. As such, this reproduction of ideological hegemony within schools functioned to sustain the hegemonic processes that reproduced cultural and economic domination within the society. This process of reproduction was then perpetuated through what Gramsci termed “contradictory consciousness.” However, for Gramsci this was not a clean and neat act of one-dimensional reproduction. Instead, domination existed here as a complex combination of thought and practices, in which could also be found the seeds for resistance.
37 -Second, fiat is illusory. The judge voting for one side or the other does not actually cause the plan to happen, but the ideas that we advocate are real. If you have a chance to impact the real world through the debate round, that should be a prior question to resolving hypotheticals.
38 -
39 -Third, we must resist the dominator culture’s education and instead decolonize our minds to transform education to be a source of liberation.
40 -hooks 10 - bell hooks Distinguished Professor in Residence, Appalachian Studies, Berea College. Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. Routledge, 2010. GK
41 -Since there has not been a radical transformation of education at its roots, education as the practice of freedom is still a pedagogy accepted only by individuals who elect to concentrate their efforts in this direction. We deliberately choose to teach in ways that further the interest of democracy, of justice. Since the radical interventions in education that have helped end many discriminatory practices, thereby creating diverse contexts for unbiased learning, have been severely attacked by dominator culture their impact is diminished. Concurrently, many “radical” thinkers often speak radical theory and then engage in conventional practice sanctioned by dominator culture. Certainly, rewards received by the dominant educational hierarchy diminish efforts to resist and transform education. Understanding that liberation is an ongoing process, we must pursue all opportunities to decolonize our minds and the minds of our students. Despite severe setbacks, there have been and will continue to be constructive radical shifts in the way we teach and learn as minds “stayed on freedom” teach to transgress and transform.
42 -Fourth, constantly fighting the history of race-based dehumanization is key to ending our history of violence. Even seemingly small changes matter. Gilmore 07
43 -Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Associate Professor of Geography, Director of Program in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. London: University of California Press, 2007. Print. MO. Pp 242-244
44 -If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weigh, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order. Certainly, the political forces that hold governmental power in the United States of the early twenty-first century figured this out and persisted for decades until they won. With persistence, practices and theories circulate, enabling people to see problems and their solutions differently—which then creates the possibility of further, sometimes innovative, action.¶ Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frameworks, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings (the lived ideology, or “taking to heart”) through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it (Williams 1961). Ideology matters along its entire continuum, from common sense (“where people are at”) to philosophies (where people imagine the coherence of their understanding comes from: Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Marx, Malcom X, the market).¶ The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of genocide on a planetary sale, then in order to avoid repeating history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages.¶ In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories. Old races die, through extermination or assimilation, and new races come into being. The process is not biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters that ground contemporary political culture. This culture, in turn, is based in the modern secular state’s dependence on classification, combined with militarism as a means through which classification maintains coherence. A sign of militarism’s ideological embrace is the fact that all kinds of U.S.-based people believe without pause that, in a general way, “the key to safety is aggression” (Bartov 1996; R. W. Gilmore 2002a). Where classification and militarism collide is in the area of identifying an enemy. “The Japanese are an enemy race” wrote a State Department wonk in 1941, at the height of both Jim Crow and universal military conscription, as prelude to the internment of 120,000 people in concentration camps in the South and West.
45 -Fifth, don’t let them hide behind alarmist consequentialist claims that nuclear energy is necessary to save the world. Nuclear colonialism deploys discourses that justify the sacrifice of native peoples and land in the name of national security and the national interest.
46 -Endres 09 - Endres, Danielle. "The rhetoric of nuclear colonialism: Rhetorical exclusion of American Indian arguments in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60. MC
47 -Resistance to nuclearism comes in many forms, one of which is the body of scholarship called nuclear communication criticism. Within this corpus, Bryan Taylor and William Kinsella advocate the study of ‘‘nuclear legacies’’ of the nuclear production process.39 The material legacies of the nuclear production process include the deaths of Navajo uranium miners, the left-over uranium tailings on Navajo land, and Western Shoshone downwinders. However, nuclear waste is in need of more examination; as Taylor writes, ‘‘nuclear waste represents one of the most complex and highly charged controversies created by the postwar society. Perhaps daunted by its technical, legal and political complexities, communication scholars have not widely engaged this topic.’’40 One of the reasons that nuclear waste is such a complex controversy is its connection with nuclear colonialism. Nuclear communication criticism has focused on examination of the ‘‘practices and processes of communication’’ related to the nuclear production process and the legacies of this process.41 At least two themes in nuclear discourse are relevant to nuclear colonialism: 1) invocation of national interest; and 2) constraints to public debate. First, nuclear discourse is married to the professed national interest, calling for the sacrifices among the communities affected by the legacies of the nuclear production process.42 According to Kuletz, the American West has been constructed as a ‘‘national sacrifice zone’’ because of its connection to the nuclear production process.43 Nuclearism is tautological in its basic assumption that nuclear production serves the national interest and national security and its use of national security and national interest to justify nuclearism. The federal government justifies nuclear production, which disproportionately takes place on American Indian land, as serving the national security. This justification works with the strategy of colonialism that defines American Indian people as part of the nation and not as separate, inherently sovereign entities whose national interest may not include storing nuclear waste on their land.
48 -I contend that the United States ought to ban the production of land-based nuclear electricity.
49 -
50 -The thesis of the affirmative is simple: After five hundred years of the destruction of native communities, enough is enough. We can no longer afford to deprioritize it. While the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has drawn support from tribes across the country to protest the construction of an oil pipeline on their land, our energy policy continues to wreck far worse consequences on tribes across the Southwest. The Dakota Access pipeline is just the surface of a deep, uranium-filled barrel.
51 -Nuclear power is inextricable from the exploitation of native cultures. As much as we would like to believe that the centuries-old systematic genocide against Native Americans is over, it is not. Nuclear uranium mining happens primarily on Native American lands. It perpetuates the subjugation of native peoples and is once again on the rise.
52 -Endres 2 - Endres, Danielle. "From wasteland to waste site: the role of discourse in nuclear power's environmental injustices." Local Environment 14.10 (2009): 917-937. MC
53 -All nuclear power production must begin with Uranium mining, which is inextricably linked with indigenous peoples globally (Yih et al. 1995). Within the USA, approximately 66 of the known Uranium deposits are on reservation lands, as much as 80 are on treaty- guaranteed land and up to 90 of Uranium mining and milling occurs on or adjacent to Native American land (Kuletz 1998). Uranium is mined for both commercial nuclear power plants and for military purposes. Makhijani and Hu (1995) argue that it is difficult to separate civilian and military nuclear production because of overlap and lack of information. However, Hoffman (2001) notes that although the earliest Uranium mining in the USA was used for nuclear weapons, the 1954 Atoms for Peace programme resulted in Uranium mining for commercial nuclear power plant development. Although Uranium mining lessened in the USA in the 1980s, renewed interest in expanding nuclear power production has resulted in industrial interest in re-opening shuttered mines or opening new mines (Gaynor 2007, Barringer 2008, Saiyid and Harrison 2008, Yurth 2009). Several Native American nations are currently resisting Uranium mining on their lands (Navajo Nation 2005, Capriccioso 2009, Lakota Country Times 2009). Even if nuclear power in the USA draws from foreign sources of Uranium, Yih et al. (1995, p. 105) report that “indigenous, colonised, and other dominated people have been disproportionately affected by Uranium mining worldwide”.
54 -
55 -70 of the world’s uranium comes from Native Communities, and thus its disposal and mining will affect these communities the most.
56 -Endres 3 - Endres, Danielle. "The rhetoric of nuclear colonialism: Rhetorical exclusion of American Indian arguments in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60. MC
57 -From an indigenous perspective, the material consequences of nuclear colonialism have affected the vitality of indigenous peoples. This can be seen clearly in both uranium mining and nuclear testing. Uranium mining is inextricably linked with indigenous peoples. According to LaDuke, ‘‘some 70 percent of the world’s uranium originates from Native Communities.’’5 Within the US, approximately 66 percent of the known uranium deposits are on reservation land, as much as 80 percent are on treaty-guaranteed land, and up to 90 percent of uranium mining and milling occurs on or adjacent to American Indian land.6 To support the federal government’s desire for nuclear weapons and power production, the Bureau of Indians Affairs (BIA) has worked in collusion with the Atomic Energy Commission and corporations such as Kerr-McGee and United Nuclear to negotiate leases with Navajo, Lakota and other nations for uranium mining and milling on their land between the 1950s to the present.7 BIA-negotiated leases are supported by the complex body of Indian Law, which I will demonstrate enables federal intrusion into American Indian lands and governmental affairs. These leases are heavily tilted in favor of the corporations so that American Indian nations received only about 3.4 percent of the market value of the uranium and low paid jobs.8 Uranium mining has also resulted in severe health and environmental legacies for affected American Indian people and their lands. From uranium mining on Navajo land, there have been at least 450 reported cancer deaths among Navajo mining employees.9 Even now, the legacy of over 1000 abandoned mines and uranium tailing piles is radioactive dust that continues to put people living near tailing piles at a high risk for lung cancer.10
58 -
59 -Second, we lure native communities, already impoverished due to centuries of violence, with the promise of prosperity through uranium. Then, when uranium mining destroys their communities and health, the federal government actively lies about the dangers. Nuclear energy requires genocide, plain and simple. Grinde ‘95
60 -Donald A. Grinde Prof. of American Studies and History, U. of Buffalo and Bruce E. Johansen Prof. of Communication, U. of Nebraska, Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples. Sante Fe: Clear Light Publishers. pp. 206-218 (1995). AT
61 -About half the recoverable uranium within the United States lies in New Mexico – and about half of that is on the Navajo Reservation. As the Indian tribes have in South Dakota, many Navajos have come to oppose mining, joining forces with non-Indians who regard nuclear power plants and arms proliferation as a twofold menace.¶ Uranium has been mined on Navajo land since the late 1940s; the Indians dug the ore that started the United States’ stockpile of nuclear weapons. For thirty years after the first atomic explosions in New Mexico, uranium was mined much like any other mineral. More than 99 percent of the product of the mines was waste, cast aside as tailings near mine sites after the uranium had been extracted. One of the mesa-like waste piles grew to be a mile long and seventy feet high. On windy days, dust from the tailings blew into local communities, filling the air and settling on the water supplies. The Atomic Energy Commission assured worried local residents that the dust was harmless.¶ In February 1978, however, the Department of Energy released a Nuclear Waste Management Task Force report that said that people living near the tailings ran twice the risk of lung cancer than the general population. The Navajo Times carried reports of a Public Health Service study asserting that one in six uranium miners had died, or would die prematurely, of lung cancer. For some, the news came too late. Esther Keeswood, a member of the Coalition for Navajo Liberation from Shiprock, New Mexico, a reservation city near tailings piles, said in 1978 that the Coalition for Navajo Liberation had documented the deaths of at least fifty residents (including uranium miners) from lung cancer and related diseases.2¶ The Kerr-McGee Company, the first corporation to the mine uranium on Navajo Nation lands (beginning in 1948) found the reservation location extremely lucrative - there were no taxes at the time, and labor was cheap. There were no health, safety, or pollution regulations, and few other jobs for the many Navajos recently home from service in World War II. The first uranium miners in the area, almost all of them Navajos, remember being sent into shallow tunnels within minutes after blasting. They loaded the radioactive ore into wheelbarrows and emerged from the mines spitting black mucus from the dust and coughing so hard it gave many of them headaches, according to Tom Barry, energy writer for the Navajo Times, who interviewed the miners. Such mining practices exposed the Navajos who worked for Kerr-McGee to between one hundred and one thousand times the limit later considered safe for exposure to radon gas. Officials for the Public Health Service have estimated these levels of exposure; no one was monitoring the Navajo miners’ health in the late 1940s. ¶ Thirty years after mining began, an increasing number of deaths from lung cancer made evident the fact that Kerr-McGee had considered miners’ lives as cheaply as their labor. As Navajo miners continued to die, children who played in water that had flowed over or through abandoned mines and tailing piles came home with burning sores.¶ Even if the tailings were to be buried – a staggering task – radioactive pollution could leak into the surrounding water table. A 1976 Environmental Protection Agency report found radioactive contamination of drinking water on the Navajo reservation in the Grants, New Mexico, area near a uranium mining and milling facility. Doris Bunting of Citizens Against Nuclear Threats, a predominately white group that joined with The Coalition for Navajo Liberation (CNL) and the National Indian Youth Council to oppose uranium mining, supplied data indicating that radium-bearing sediments had spread into the Colorado River basin, from which water is drawn for much of the Southwest. Through the opposition to uranium mining in the area, among Indians and non-Indians alike, runs a deep concern for the long-term poisoning of land, air, and water by low-level radiation. It has produced demands from Indian and white groups for a moratorium on all uranium mining, exploration, and milling until the issues of untreated radioactive tailings and other waste-disposal problems are faced and solved.¶ The threat of death which haunted the Navajos came at what company public-relations specialists might have deemed an inappropriate time; the same rush for uranium that had filled the Black hills with speculators was coming to the Southwest, as arms stockpiling and the anticipated needs of nuclear power plants drove up demand, and the price, for the mineral. By late 1978, more than 700,000 acres of Indian land were under lease for uranium exploration and development in an area centering on Shiprock and on Crownpoint, New Mexico, both on the Navajo Reservation. Atlantic Richfield, Continental Oil, Exxon, Humble Oil, Homestake Mining, Kerr-McGee, Mobile Oil, Pioneer Nuclear, and United Nuclear were among the companies exploring, planning to mine, or already extracting ore.3 During the 1980s the mining frenzy subsided somewhat as recession and a slowing of the nuclear arms race reduced demand. Some ore was still being mined, but most of it lay in the ground, waiting for the next upward spike in the market.¶ As a results of mining for uranium and other materials, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that the water table at Crownpoint would drop a thousand feet and that it would return to present levels thirty to fifty years after the mining ceased. Much of what water remained could be polluted by uranium residue, the report indicated.4¶ Local residents rose in anger and found themselves neatly ambushed by the white man’s law. The Indians owned the surface rights; the mineral rights in the area are owned by private companies such as the Santa Fe Railroad. “If the water supply is depleted, then this Crownpoint will become a ghost town,” said Joe Gmusea, a Navajo attorney. “The only people left will be the ones who come to work in the mines.”5 John Redhouse, associate director of the Albuquerque-based National Indian Youth Council, said that the uranium boom is “an issue of spiritual and physical genocide.”6 “We are not isolated in our struggle against uranium development,” Redhouse said. “Many Indian people are now supporting the struggles of the Australian Aborigines and the Black indigenous peoples of Namibia Southwest Africa against similar uranium developments. We have recognized that we are facing the same international beast.”7¶ The uranium boom has put the residents of Crownpoint in a position not unlike that faced by their ancestors who were driven up the sides of Canyon de Chelly not far away, as cavalry troops circled below. The choice offered the Indians then, as now, was to assimilate – accommodate the white man’s wishes – or starve. The Indian opposition to uranium mining is an attempt to get off this modern-day mesa – and to do it by reaching out to others who are concerned more with the needs of future generations than with the immediate price tags of the international supermarket.¶ With the growing energy development in the Rocky Mountains area (uranium included) has spread a recognition that parts of the region, including areas other than Indian reservations, are slated for devastation to provide power to the energy consumers of the East and West coasts, and profits to the companies that stoke that demand for energy. Again as a century ago, people who stand to lose their livelihoods to invaders are “painting their faces black.” The historic twist is that, while a century ago Custer had Indian scouts, this time the Indians’ allies are white. Winona La Duke, of the International Indian Treaty Council, may have been speaking for more people than Indians when, at an antinuclear demonstration near Grants, New Mexico, she said: “Indian people refuse to become the silent martyrs of the nuclear industry. We stand fighting in our homelands for a future free of the threat of genocide for our children.”8¶ The Largest Nuclear Accident in the United States¶ Thanks to its location between the nation’s media capital, New York City, and its political capital, Washington, D.C., as well as the timing of the opening of the movie The China Syndrome, Three Mile Island was America’s best-publicized nuclear accident. However, it was not the largest such accident.¶ The biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the United States occurred on July 16, 1978, at 5 a.m. on the Navajo Reservation, less than twelve hours after President Carter had proposed plans to use more nuclear power and fossil fuels. On that morning, more than 1100 tons of uranium mining wastes – tailings – gushed through a mud-packed dam near Church Rock, New Mexico. With the tailings, 100 million gallons of radioactive water gushed through the dam before the crack was repaired.¶ By 8 a.m., radioactivity was monitored in Gallup, New Mexico, nearly fifty miles away. The contaminated river, the Rio Puerco, showed 6,000 times the allowable standard of radioactivity below the broken dam shortly after the breach was repaired, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The few newspaper stories about the spill outside of the immediate area noted that the region was “sparsely populated” and that the spill “poses no immediate health hazard.”9¶ While no one in New York or Washington, D.C., had much to worry about, the Navajo and white residents of the area did. The area is high desert, and the Rio Puerco is a major source of water.¶ The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter, Sandra Blakeslee, to the area a month after the spill occurred. By that time, United Nuclear Corporation, which owns the dam, had cleaned up only 50 of the 1,100 tons of spilled waste. Workers were using pails and shovels because heavy machinery could not negotiate the steep terrain around the Rio Puerco.¶ Along the River, officials used press releases telling people not to drink the water, but they had a few problems: many of the Navajo residents could not read English and had no electricity to power television sets and radios while other consumes of the water – cattle – don’t read.¶ This enormous spill of nuclear waste into the area’s water supply was but one incident in a distinctly nuclear way of life on Navajo lands. The nuclear mining legacy of thirty years blows through the outlying districts of Shiprock, New Mexico, the Navajos’ largest city, on windy days. The hot, dry winds shave radioactive dust from the tops and sides of large tailings piles around the city. One of them is seventy feet high and a mile long. Until the mid-1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission assured the Navajos of Shiprock that the tailings were harmless.¶ In early 1978, however, the Department of Energy released a Nuclear Waste Management Task Force report which said that persons living near the tailings piles had twice the expected rate of lung cancer. By 1978, the Navajos were beginning to trace the roots of a lung cancer epidemic which had perplexed many of them, since the disease was very rare among Navajos before World War II. In addition to exposure from the tailings piles, many of the miners who started America’s nuclear stockpile had died of lung cancer.¶ Although health and safety measures have improved in the mines since the 1950s, due to governmental and popular pressure, the present practices still expose workers to unhealthy amounts of radon. As for Kerr-McGee, in whose mines many of the Navajos worked, a company statement maintained as late as mid-1979 that uranium-related deaths among miners were mere allegations.¶ Lung cancer is believed to result from inhalation of radon gas, a by-product of uranium’s decay into radium. Tom Barry, in an investigative series for the Navajo Times, found documentation that miners who worked for Kerr-McGee during the 1940s were exposed to between one hundred and one thousand times the dosage of radon now considered safe by the federal government. Harris Charley, who worked in the mines for fifteen years, told a U. S. Senate hearing in 1979, “We were treated like dogs. There was no ventilation in the mines.” Pear Nakai, daughter of a deceased miner, told the same hearing that “No one ever told us about the dangers of uranium.”11 The Senate hearings were convened by Sen. Pete Domenici, New Mexico Republican, who is seeking compensation for disabled uranium miners and for the families of the deceased. “The miners who extracted uranium from the Colorado Plateau are paying the price today for the inadequate health and safety standards that were then in force,” Domenici told the hearing, held at a Holiday Inn near the uranium boomtown of Grants, New Mexico.¶ The 1979 Senate hearings were part of a proposal to compensate the miners for what investigators called deliberate negligence. Radioactivity in uranium mines was linked to lung cancer by tests in Europe by 1930. Scientific evidence linking radon gas to radioactive illness existed after 1949, but measures to ventilate the Navajo mines were never taken, as the government pressured Kerr-McGee and other producers to increase the amount of uranium they were mining. The Public Health Service (PHS) recommended ventilation in 1952, but the Atomic Energy Commission said it bore no responsibility for the mines, despite the fact that it bought more than 3 million pounds of uranium from them in 1954 alone.12 The PHS monitored the health of more than 4,000 miners between 1954 and 1960 without telling them of the threat to their health.¶ Dr. Joseph Wagoner, a special assistant for occupational carcinogens at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency, said that of the 3,500 persons who mined uranium in New Mexico, about 200 had died of cancer by the late 1970s. In an average population of 3,500 people, 40 such deaths could be expected. The 160 extra deaths were not the measure of ignorance, he said. Published data regarding the dangers of radon was widely available to scientists in the 1950s, according to Wagoner. But health and safety precautions in the mines were not cost-effective for the companies, he said. “Thirty years from now we’ll have the hidden legacy of the whole thing,” Wagoner told molly Ivins of the New York Times.¶ Bills that would compensate the miners were introduced, discussed, and died in Congress for a dozen years. By 1990, the death toll among former miners ahd risen to 450 and was still rising.13 Relatives of the dead recalled how the miners had eaten their lunches in the mines, washing them down with radioactive water, never having been told that is was dangerous. Many of the men did not even speak English. And the Navajo language contains no indigenous word for “radioactivity.”¶ In 1990, after years of failed attempts, the U.S. Congress passed a compensation for Navajo uranium minors. By the early 1990s, about 1,100 Navajo miners or members of their families had applied for compensation related to uranium exposure. The bureaucracy had approved 328 cases, denied 121, and withheld action on 663, an approval rate which Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, characterized as “significantly lower than in other cases of radiation compensation.”14 Representative Miller said that awards of compensation were being delayed by “a burdensome application system developed by the Department of Justice.”15¶ Miller’s committee was investigating not only the Navajo death toll from radiation poisoning but many other reports that indigenous peoples were willfully and recklessly exposed to radiation during the Cold War. The geographic range of purported radiation poisonings spans half the globe – from the Navajos in the Southwest United States, to Alaskan natives whose lives were endangered when atomic waste products from Nevada were secretly buried near their villages, to residents of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, an area in which the United States tested atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere between 1946 and 1958. As investigations deepened, it appeared that the treatment of Navajos was not the exception but only one example of a deadly pattern of reckless disregard for indigenous life – human and otherwise – in colonized places.
62 -
63 -Finally, adopting the aff’s attitude toward environmental equity solves neg impacts because liberation of the environment and liberation of Native American people go hand in hand.
64 -Grinde and Johansen ’95 - Donald A. Grinde Prof. of American Studies and History, U. of Buffalo and Bruce E. Johansen Prof. of Communication, U. of Nebraska, Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples. Sante Fe: Clear Light Publishers. pp. 278 (1995). AT
65 -More than a century and a half ago Chief Seal’th said, “We may be brothers after all” – at a time when most Euro-Americans looked at the bounty of America as free and nearly endless. Today, the perspective is much different, and there is widespread realization that time is short. More people of all cultures are realizing that the only way out of this dilemma is to think and act to sustain a viable earth. This is one issue that connects us all and on which our common survival has come to depend. Liberating “mother earth’ from totally Eurocentric conceptions of the environment will allow for a wider range of choices and solutions that will hopefully serve a broader group of peoples and cultures in the future. Since most American Indian communities are ecocentric, liberation of the environment involves liberation of Native American people.
66 -(ONLY CAN READ WITH IN, EJ and DEH Framework) And, we have an obligation to resist destructive Western ecologies. Native perspectives are a critical part of the struggle. The destruction of native communities dooms us to environmental ruin because we eliminate the very people who are necessary to help solve the environmental crisis.
67 -Mohawk Nation ’95 - Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, “A Basic Call to Counsciousness,” (1978) in Donald A. Grinde Prof. of American Studies and History, U. of Buffalo and Bruce E. Johansen Prof. of Communication, U. of Nebraska, Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples. Sante Fe: Clear Light Publishers. pp. 267-269 (1995). AJ – brackets in original
68 -In the beginning we were told that the human beings who walk about on the Earth have been provided with all the things necessary for life. We were instructed to carry a love for one another, and to show a great respect for all living beings on this Earth. We were shown that life our life exists with the tree of life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the Vegetable Life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings.¶ The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to express a great respect, an affection and a gratitude toward all spirits which create and support Life. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for all these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.¶ To this day the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and other gifts from the Creation. In these places we still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth.¶ The Indo-European people who have colonized our lands have shown very little respect for the things that create and support Life. We believe that these people ceased their respect for the world a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people of the world believed in the same Way of Life, that of harmony with the Universe. All lived according to the Natural Ways.¶ Today the species of Man is facing a question of it’s very survival. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into new areas of more efficient destruction. ¶ The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing. Our ancient teaching warned us that if Man interfered with the Natural laws, these things would come to be. When the last of the Natural Way of Life is gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with it. And our Way of Life is fast disappearing, a victim of the destructive process.¶ The technologies and social systems which destroyed the animal and plant life are destroying the Native people. We know there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the intent of our message. But our experience has taught us that there are a few who are willing to seek out a method for moving to any real change.¶ The majority of the world does not find its roots in Western culture or tradition. The majority of the world finds it’s roots in the Natural World, and it is the Natural World, and the traditions of the Natural World, which must prevail.¶ We all must consciously and continuously challenge every model, every program, and every process that the West tries to force upon us. The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all things that support life-the air, the waters, the trees- all things which support the sacred web of Life.¶ The Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can contribute to the survival potential of the human species. The majority of our peoples still live in accordance with the traditions which find their roots in Mother Earth. But the Native people have need of a forum in which our voice can be heard. And we need alliances with the other people of the world to assist in our struggle to regain and maintain our ancestral lands and protect the Way of Life we follow.¶ The traditional Native people hold the key to the reversal of the processes of Western Civilization, which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. Our cultures is among the world’s surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. Our culture is among the most ancient continuously existing cultures in the world. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We are here to impart this message.
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1 -1AC Environmental Justice
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1 -Loyola
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1 -Link
2 -Nuclear power will be replaced by coal construction and natural gas.
3 -Biello 2013, David. “How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming,” December 12, 2013.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/. SD
4 -As long as countries like China or the U.S. employ big grids to deliver electricity, there will be a need for generation from nuclear, coal or gas, the kinds of electricity generation that can be available at all times. A rush to phase out nuclear power privileges natural gas—as is planned under Germany's innovative effort, dubbed the Energiewende (energy transition), to increase solar, wind and other renewable power while also eliminating the country's 17 reactors. In fact, Germany hopes to develop technology to store excess electricity from renewable resources as gas to be burned later, a scheme known as “power to gas,” according to economist and former German politician Rainer Baake, now director of an energy transition think tank Agora Energiewende. Even worse, a nuclear stall can lead to the construction of more coal-fired power plants, as happened in the U.S. after the end of the nuclear power plant construction era in the 1980s.∂
5 -
6 -
7 -After a ban on nuclear power, coal consumption would rise dramatically. Nakata 2002
8 -Toshihiko Nakata Professor at Tohoku University, “Analysis of the impacts of nuclear phase-out on energy systems in Japan” April 2002
9 -Fig. 3 illustrates the changes in the electric power generation under the nuclear phase-out case. The total energy consumption and the carbon dioxide emissions for four scenarios in the year 2041 are shown in Table 4. We can see three ways in which the system has adjusted to make up the nuclear boiler after its phasing out: ∂ The use of coal boiler and coal IGCC rise and the total coal consumption rises by four times. The use of gas combined-cycles and gas boiler rise gradually, and the total gas consumption ∂ grows by three times. The renewables are not seen in the electricity market.
10 -
11 -Germany proves that ending the production of nuclear power results in the increased use of coal.
12 -Lindsay Abrams (Staff Writer at Salon on sustainable energy), "Germany’s clean energy plan backfired", Salon, 07/30/2013, www.salon.com/2013/07/30/germanys_clean_energy_plan_backfired/
13 -When a nuclear power plant closes, a coal plant opens. At least, that’s the way things are shaping up in Germany, where the move away from nuclear energy appears to have backfired. For the second consecutive year, according to Bloomberg, the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are set to increase. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made headlines back in 2011 when, in the wake of the reactor meltdown in Tokyo, she announced the impending closure of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors. Up until then, nuclear-generated energy contributed to a full quarter of the nation’s electricity. At the time, the closings were framed as a positive effort to increase the country’s use of clean energy. As an expert then predicted to the New York Times: “If the government goes ahead with what it said it would do, then Germany will be a kind of laboratory for efforts worldwide to end nuclear power in an advanced economy.” But predictably, when nuclear plants began to shut down, as eight immediately did, something else had to take its place. And coal, which according to Bloomberg is favored by the market, did just that. In the absence of a strong government plan to push natural gas and renewable forms of energy, the share of electricity generated from coal rose from 43 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in the first half of this year, according to the World Nuclear Association.
14 -
15 -Impact
16 -
17 -The use of coal leads to detrimental health issues and is largely responsible for global warming. Keating 2001.
18 -Martha Keating (Policy Advisor at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), “Cradle to Grave: the Environmental Impacts from Coal”, Clean Air Task Force, June, 2001 SD
19 -The electric power industry is the largest toxic polluter in the country, and coal, which is used to generate over half of
the electricity produced in the
U.S., is the dirtiest of all fuels.1
From mining to coal cleaning,
from transportation to electricity
generation to disposal, coal
releases numerous toxic pollut-
ants into our air, our waters and onto our lands.2 Nation- ally, the cumulative impact of all of these effects is magnified by the enormous quantities of coal burned each year – nearly 900 million tons. Promoting more coal use without also providing additional environmental safe- guards will only increase this toxic abuse of our health and ecosystems. ∂ The trace elements contained in coal (and others formed during combustion) are a large group of diverse pollutants with a number of health and environmental effects.3 They are a public health concern because at sufficient exposure levels they adversely affect human health. Some are known to cause cancer, others impair reproduc- tion and the normal development of children, and still others damage the nervous and immune systems. Many are also respira- tory irritants that can worsen respiratory conditions such as asthma. They are an environmen- tal concern because they damage ecosystems. Power plants also emit large quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), the “greenhouse gas” 2 largely responsible for climate change.

20 -
21 -
22 -The presence of coalmines in an area detrimentally affects the communities there, who are extremely poor minorities. Keating 2001.
23 -Martha Keating (Policy Advisor at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), “Cradle to Grave: the Environmental Impacts from Coal”, Clean Air Task Force, June, 2001
24 -Children living in the vicinity of power plants have the highest health risks. Adults are also at risk from contami- nated groundwater and from inhaling dust from the facility. The poverty rate of people living within one mile of power plant waste facilities is twice as high as the national average and the percentage of non-white populations within one mile is 30 percent higher than the national average.51 ∂ Consequently, there may be other factors that make these people more vulnerable to health risks from these facilities. These include age (both young and old), nutritional status and access to health care. Also, these people are exposed to numerous other air pollutants emitted from the power plant smokestacks and possibly to air pollution from other nearby industrial facilities or lead paint in the home. Similar high poverty rates are found in 118 of the 120 coal-producing counties in America where power plant combustion wastes are increasingly being disposed of in unlined, under-regulated coal mine pits often directly into groundwater. ∂ Mineworkers and their families also often reside in the communities where the coal is being mined. Some of the additional health risks and dangers to residents of ∂ coal mining communities include injuries and fatalities related to the collapse of highwalls, roads and homes adjacent to or above coal seams being mined; the blasting of flyrock offsite onto a homeowner’s land or public roadway; injury and/ or suffocation at abandoned mine sites; and the inhalation of airborne fine dust particles off-site.
25 -
26 -
27 -
28 -Global warming leads to the extinction of people and animals. Urban 2015
29 -Mark C. Urban “Accelerating extinction risk from climate change” Science 01 May 2015:
30 -Overall, 7.9 of species are predicted to become extinct from climate change; (95 CIs, 6.2 and 9.8) (Fig. 1). Results were robust to model type, weighting scheme, statistical method, potential publication bias, and missing studies (fig. S1 and table S2) (6). This proportion supports an estimate from a 5-year synthesis of studies (7). Its divergence from individual studies (1–4) can be explained by their specific assumptions and taxonomic and geographic foci. These differences provide the opportunity to understand how divergent factors and assumptions influence extinction risk from climate change.∂ The factor that best explained variation in extinction risk was the level of future climate change. The future global extinction risk from climate change is predicted not only to increase but to accelerate as global temperatures rise (regression coefficient = 0.53; CIs, 0.46 and 0.61) (Fig. 2). Global extinction risks increase from 2.8 at present to 5.2 at the international policy target of a 2°C post-industrial rise, which most experts believe is no longer achievable (8). If the Earth warms to 3°C, the extinction risk rises to 8.5. If we follow our current, business-as-usual trajectory representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5; 4.3°C rise, climate change threatens one in six species (16). Results were robust to alternative data transformations and were bracketed by models with liberal and conservative extinction thresholds (figs. S2 and S3 and table S3).∂ Regions also differed significantly in extinction risk (ΔDIC = 12.6) (Fig. 3 and table S4). North America and Europe were characterized by the lowest risks (5 and 6, respectively), and South America (23) and Australia and New Zealand (14) were characterized by the highest risks. These latter regions face no-analog climates (9) and harbor diverse assemblages of endemic species with small ranges. Extinction risks in Australia and New Zealand are further exacerbated by small land masses that limit shifts to new habitat (10). Poorly studied regions might face higher risks, but insights are limited without more research (for example, only four studies in Asian ). Currently, most predictions (60) center on North America and Europe, suggesting a need to refocus efforts toward less studied and more threatened regions.
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