SECOND PRIZE: Throwing a Wrench Into Things: The Strategy of Radical Environmentalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing sense of urgency within the environmental movement has caused many activists to radicalize, and adopt more violent forms of protest, resorting to acts of sabotage and property destruction such as tree-spiking, ‘monkey-wrenching’ heavy equipment, or fire-bombings. This paper defines actions which seek to cause material damage as acts of ecotage. Ecotage is appealing to many radical environmentalists, in as much as it is perceived as being effective. Through an analysis of the strategic reasons why ecotage is employed, this paper will examine the ways in which ecotage is perceived as effective. Ecotage is adopted by environmentalists for three primary reasons. First, ecotage produces powerful images (mind-bombs) that garner media attention and in so doing generate public awareness and sympathy for a particular issue. Secondly, ecotage is employed in order to cause enough property damage to drive up the costs of doing business to the point where the profitability of environmental degradation is so high that companies are forced to halt operations. And thirdly, organizations who engage in ecotage expand the environmental activist spectrum, resulting in other, more conventional organizations being considered as moderates. The ultimate goal of radical organizations that practice ecotage is the same as that of most conventional environmentalists; they seek to protect the environment, yet through their more violent tactics it is clear that they have adopted a divergent strategy. Ecotage is but one tool available to environmentalists, but if, through an application of its strategy, it can be seen as an effective tool, it is one which environmentalists are likely to reach for more often, and in so doing become a greater threat.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".