The Eco-Frontier Paradigm: Rethinking the Links between Space, Nature and Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a gap in the geographical/geopolitical literature about the process that motivates humans to conquer a boundless, timeless and invaluable wilderness in the name of plural ecologies to serve their own political interests in control and territory building by means of ‘green gerrymandering’. The ecological frontier (or eco-frontier), a neologism produced by a contemporary greened civil society, can be considered a new paradigm that embraces the mental representations and spatial constructions of eco-conquest without restricting its temporal dimension to the present time. Indeed, the eco-frontier is a genealogical paradigm where new dynamics always revisit old processes. The creation and use of the eco-frontier can illuminate the history of the global territorialisation of nature in the last three centuries. From a spatial point of view, two main understandings of the eco-frontier exist. The first characterises virtual and mental imageries of natural spaces of eco-conquest that are strongly associated with Westernised representations of nature. The second considers eco-frontiers as geographical processes to understand the green dynamics of territorial appropriation and re-conquest. As a genealogical paradigm, the eco-frontier has a specific temporal dynamic that integrates the different historical contexts and political ideologies of nature. Three generations of eco-frontiers (Empire, Geopolitical and Global generations) began at different times and co-exist today, with superposition and percolation. This empirical study shows how contemporary environmentalists and green stakeholders produce specific discourses and representations on global eco-frontiers. The paper focuses on the current territorial domination carried out by contemporary eco-conquerors creating possible new geopolitics.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".