Old Problem, New Solution: Protection of Environments Critical to Indigenous Cultures through International Human Rights Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The extraction of the so-called ‘tar sands’ of Alberta, Canada, to obtain crude oil have not only displaced the indigenous peoples of the province, decimating their constitutionally protected tribal lands, but have also threatened the continued existence of their culture. Environmental damage wrought by the extraction of bitumen, later refined into crude oil, has destroyed the unique habitat of fauna inextricably linked to the way of life of the indigenous communities of the province as a means of sustenance, livelihood, and cultural expression. Similarly, water consumption by such projects has the potential to reduce fish stocks of the province’s waterways below sustainable levels removing another traditional source of sustenance for the indigenous community. Much of the land exploited is made unviable for future recovery and reuse owing to its occupation by vast pools made up of the by-products of the extraction and refining processes. These take great lengths of time to become inert and reusable and have leaked into the natural water basins of the province. Despite attempts at reclamation of the land, current methods have succeeded only in restoring a radically different ecosystem to that which once occupied the land, and is therefore no longer appropriate for the established expressions of culture by indigenous peoples connected to those ecosystems. The piece will contend that irreparable damage to this unique environment, inextricably linked to the equally distinct and irreplaceable culture of the indigenous peoples of the region, constitutes a breach of their human rights to express that culture. Thus, whereas previous attempts to protect the environment through human rights provisions have focused on the rights to life and family, this case presents the potential to form a new basis, in Canada and globally, for environmental protection rooted in alternate established legal provisions at domestic, regional and international levels.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".