What's Left? Canadian Biosphere Reserves as Sustainability-in-Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, the authors consider whether sustainability-in-practice might be one way to replace the culture of nature in the common terrain of interdisciplinary Canadian and environmental studies. The authors first describe debates focussed on wilderness preservation, drawing attention to key conceptual, practical, and ethical challenges that preservation rhetoric can pose. In particular, wilderness preservation campaigns lack consideration of social and economic dimensions now deemed critical to long-term sustainability. The authors consider whether sustainability as practised by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) biosphere reserves in Canada might offer a means to address those challenges. Using evidence from UNESCO documents, interviews with Canadian biosphere reserve founders, and a survey of present-day practitioners, the authors provide a short history of biosphere reserves, drawing attention to changes over time in their concept, practices, and ethics. The authors then discuss the priorities and effectiveness of present biosphere reserve managers and consider how they match up with the three imperatives of sustainability (economic, environmental, social). Their findings suggest that biosphere reserves face challenges similar to those of nature protection movements, particularly over the social dimension of sustainability. The authors conclude that there is much to be learned: studying sustainability-in-practice offers fertile ground for environmental and Canadian studies scholars to meet beyond the culture of nature.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| 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".