MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2157293099 · doi:10.1177/1086026609333421

Why Barry Commoner Matters

2009· article· en· W2157293099 on OpenAlex
Michael Egan

Why this work is in the frame

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

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueOrganization & Environment · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAmerican Environmental and Regional History
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCommonerPoliticsEnvironmentalismConvictionContext (archaeology)CornerstoneDemocracyEnvironmental ethicsSociologySocial scienceHistoryLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The biologist Barry Commoner has been instrumental in shaping American environmentalism over the past fifty years. The breadth of Commoner's activism—against nuclear fallout and the synthetic productions of the petrochemical industry—marked a new direction for American environmental activism that sought to raise awareness about the kinds of technological decisions that were giving rise to an environmental crisis. Similarly, his concerns over air pollution, energy production, and waste management demonstrate that Commoner considered not just individual problems but also the larger systems that spawned them. Just as significantly, however, Commoner's activism introduced a new praxis that stressed the importance of an informed citizenry and a new relationship between experts and the public. Commoner invented the science information movement, a method of disseminating accessible scientific facts to the public so that they could participate in decision making. This essay seeks to situate his historical significance within the broader context of American environmental history. I outline Commoner's contributions in three related avenues: science, democracy, and environment. Commoner saw these three pillars of his activity not as independent aspects of his political sensibilities but as part of a single, intrinsic whole. That science, democracy, and environment should be so related is indicative of Commoner's deep-seated conviction that human societies, their politics and economies, and their physical environments functioned in larger, holistic systems. The intersections between science, society, and the environment that serve as the cornerstone of Commoner's career and work are not simply historical points of interest but remain vitally relevant to contemporary debates and struggles to address toxic contaminants, energy productions crises, and global climate change.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.186
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0270.006

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.

Opus teacher head0.003
GPT teacher head0.156
Teacher spread0.152 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it