Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transfers in economic values are shadowed in complex ways by real material-ecological flows that transform ecological relations between city and country, and between the core and periphery. Directing material flows is a vital part of intercapitalist competition. Ecological imperialism creates asymmetries in the exploitation of the environment, unequal exchange, and a global metabolic rift. The 19th-century guano/nitrates trade illustrates the emergence of a global metabolic rift, as guano and nitrates were transferred from Peru and Chile to enrich the soils of Britain and other imperial countries. This global metabolic rift entailed the decline of soil fertility in Britain, importation of Chinese labor to Peru, mass export of natural fertilizer, degradation of the Peruvian/Chilean environment, war over possession of nitrates, and creation of debt-laden economies. It allowed Britain and other imperial countries to maintain an `environmental overdraft' in their own countries, imperialistically drawing on the natural resources of the periphery. The social metabolic order of capitalism is inseparable from such ecological imperialism, which is as basic to the system as the search for profits itself.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".