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WNDI 2008 4
Agenda Politics DA Neg
Global democratic consolidation is essential to prevent many scenarios for war and
extinction.
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, October 1995, “Promoting Democracy in
the 1990’s,” http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/dia95_01.html, accessed on 12/11/99
OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming
years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could
easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime
syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the
institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate.
The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new
and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of
democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS
OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that
govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress
against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not
ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency.
Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to
use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading
partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more
environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal
obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely
because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of
law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and
prosperity can be built.
WNDI 2008 17
Agenda Politics DA Neg
The impact to strengthened human rights outweighs everything—it leads to war, has killed
more than all 20th century wars combined, and leads to genocide and environmental
destruction
John Shattuck, former Assistant Secretary of State, 9-12-1994, Federal News Service
On the disintegration side, we are witnessing ugly and violent racial, ethnic and religious class conflict
in Haiti, in Bosnia, in Central Asia, in Africa, most horribly in Rwanda -- all places where I have traveled in recent months
and witnessed unspeakable suffering and abuses of the most fundamental rights. The new global community has yet to develop an
adequate response to these horrors. We must intensify our search for new ways of holding individuals and
governments accountable for gross human rights violations, for new ways of anticipating and preventing
conflicts before they spiral into uncontrollable violence and reprisal, for new ways of mobilizing the international
community to address an avalanche of humanitarian crises. These are daunting tasks. Why then has the Clinton administration made
protecting human rights and promoting democracy such a major theme in our foreign policy? The answer I think lies not only in our
values, which could be reason enough, but in the strategic benefits to the United States of a policy that emphasizes our values. We know
from historical experience that democracies are more likely than other forms of government to respect human rights, to settle conflicts
peacefully, to observe international and honor agreements, to go to war with each other with great reluctance, to respect rights of
ethnical, racial and religious minorities living within their borders, and to provide the social and political basis for free market
economics. In South Africa, in the Middle East, and now remarkably perhaps even in Northern Ireland, the resolution of conflict and the
broadening of political participation is releasing great economic and social energies that can provide better lives for all the people of
these long-suffering regions. By contrast, the costs to the world of repressive governments are painfully clear. In
the 20th century, the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is
four times the number killed in all of this century's wars combined. Repression pushes refugees across
the borders and triggers wars. Unaccountable governments are heedless of environmental destruction,
as witnessed by Chernobyl and the ecological nightmares of Eastern Europe.
WNDI 2008 18
Agenda Politics DA Neg
Extinction
Lt. Col, Tom Bearden, PhD Nuclear Engineering, April 25, 2000,
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/042500%20-%20modified.htm
Just prior to the terrible collapse of the World economy, with the crumbling well underway and rising, it is inevitable that some of the
[wmd] weapons of mass destruction will be used by one or more nations on others. An interesting result then---as all the old strategic
studies used to show---is that everyone will fire everything as fast as possible against their perceived enemies. The reason is simple:
When the mass destruction weapons are unleashed at all, the only chance a nation has to survive is to desperately try to destroy its
perceived enemies before they destroy it. So there will erupt a spasmodic unleashing of the long range missiles,
nuclear arsenals, and biological warfare arsenals of the nations as they feel the economic collapse,
poverty, death, misery, etc. a bit earlier. The ensuing holocaust is certain to immediately draw in the
major nations also, and literally a hell on earth will result. In short, we will get the great Armageddon
we have been fearing since the advent of the nuclear genie. Right now, my personal estimate is that we have about a 99% chance of that
scenario or some modified version of it, resulting.
WNDI 2008 25
Agenda Politics DA Neg
Palm oil cultivation leads to deforestation, monoculture, warming, and wild fires
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com, 4/25/2006, “Why is oil palm replacing tropical rainforests? Why are biofules
fueling deforestation?” http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0425-oil_palm.html
So, why is oil palm cultivation a concern? For environmentalists the problem with palm oil as a source of
biodiesel lies in the nature of how the crop is produced. In recent years, vast areas of natural forest have
been cleared across tropical Asia for oil palm plantations. This conversion has reduced biodiversity,
increased vulnerability to catastrophic fires, and affected local communities dependent on services and
products provided by forest ecosystems. Beyond the loss of forest ecosystems, the production of palm oil,
as currently practiced, can be quite damaging to the environment. In 2001 Malaysia’s production of 7
million tons of crude palm oil generated 9.9 million tons of solid oil wastes, palm fiber, and shells, and
10 million tons of palm oil mill effluent, a polluted mix of crushed shells, water, and fat residues that has
been shown to have a negative impact on aquatic ecosystems. Further, the liberal use of petroleum-based
pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers ensures that most palm- oil cultivation is not only polluting on a
local level but also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Considering that Malaysia is held to be one
of the most efficient producers, production in other parts of the world may be more polluting. Indonesian
plantations are so damaging that after a 25-year harvest, oil- palm lands are often abandoned for
scrubland. Soils may be so leached of nutrients, especially in acidic environments, that few other plants
will grow, leaving the area essentially devoid of vegetation other than weedy grasses which serve as
tinder for wildfires. For these reasons, the scientific community is deeply concerned by a proposal by the
Indonesian government to turn vast areas of Borneo’s remote and biodiverse rainforests into oil-palm
plantations. The proposed expanse of monoculture threatens to obliterate the region’s legendary biodiversity
—the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says some 361 species of animals have been discovered on the island in
the past decade—while displacing local people, including the Dyaks, native forest dwellers renowned for
their hunting and tracking prowess.