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Zero-Sum World

2009· article· en· 373 citations· W1966605003 on OpenAlex· 10.1177/0020715209105141

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian venueIt was published in a Canadian venue.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

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.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.333
Teacher spread
0.302 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems. It traces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of a global environmental `zero-sum game' is essential to recognizing the extent to which cornucopian perceptions of `development' represent an illusion. It identifies five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientific perspectives into bounded categories such as `technology', `economy', and `ecology'. 2) The assumption that the operation of market prices is tantamount to reciprocity. 3) The illusion of machine fetishism, that is, that the technological capacity of a given population is independent of that population's position in a global system of resource flows. 4) The representation of inequalities in societal space as developmental stages in historical time. 5) The conviction that `sustainable development' can be achieved through consensus. The article offers some examples of how the rising global anticipation of socio-ecological contradiction and disaster is being ideologically disarmed by the rhetoric on `sustainability' and `resilience'.

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.

The record

Venue
International Journal of Comparative Sociology
Topic
Sustainability and Ecological Systems Analysis
Field
Environmental Science
Canadian institutions
Funders
Keywords
SociologyPopulationEnvironmental ethicsSustainabilityPolitical economyEconomicsEcology
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes