Sustainable Failures: Environmental Policy and Democracy in a Petro-Dependent World By Sherry Cable Temple University Press. 2012. 242 pages. $29.95 paper
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this well-researched and accessible volume on our environmental predicament, Sherry Cable asks: To what extent do environmental policies acknowledge ecological principles and enact principles of fairness and justice? The book primarily focuses on the United States, although there is a chapter on international environmental policymaking as well. The book is rich in empirical detail, with numerous illustrative case studies and comprehensive inventories of the U.S. environmental policy regime. The book begins with a condensed history of modes of human existence and their relationship with the environment, and then goes into greater detail regarding our modern, petro-based industrial society. Employing Schnaiberg's Treadmill of Production Theory, Cable not surprisingly pays particular attention to the role of corporations and complicit states. The litany of environmental horrors associated with petro-dependent industrial societies is then described in detail, aided by Cable's particular expertise in environmental health. The U.S. basket of environmental policies is then inventoried and evaluated in great detail, on the basis of the criteria noted above. Not surprisingly, the U.S. environmental policy apparatus is found wanting, in a chapter identifying numerous examples of violation of ecological principles. This is followed by a chapter devoted to the means by which current policies reinforce inequities in the distribution of environmental ills, and marginalization of citizens in the policy process. Towards the end of the book, Cable narrows in on the most vexing of challenges, climate change, peak oil and overpopulation, followed by the presumed culprit, the transnational corporation and its captive state system. Finally, the book closes with a vision of an alternative future premised on localized social systems in which respect for ecological principles in economic processes is paramount.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.013 |
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".