Governments, Governance, and the “Lunatic Fringe”: The Resources for Tomorrow Conference and the Evolution of Environmentalism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have long played an important role in the evolution of environmentalism and environmental governance in Canada. Using the groundbreaking 1961 Resources for Tomorrow Conference as its entry point, this article explores the contributions made by such organizations to this federally initiated conference in light of their work during previous decades; their relationship to the Canadian state and to the evolution of its environmental institutions; and the ways in which the conference became a conduit for frustrations that further galvanized the NGO community, leading to the formation of some of the most influential environmental organizations in Canada today. In doing so, the article challenges current historiographic and theoretical frameworks that distinguish a unique “modern” or second-wave environmental movement associated with Rachel Carson, the baby boom generation, and the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and 1970s from an earlier period of conservation-oriented activity ending roughly in 1920 and that make light of the period between. As such, it makes the case for a considerable degree of continuity within the movement over the long term, for the importance of collaborative efforts between the state and the NGO sector, and for the centrality in NGO circles not of radicalism but of relatively conventional attitudes, practices, and social movement strategies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".