Environmental risk and policy development in the British Columbia salmon farming industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two competing perspectives of society's relationship to nature have risen to prominence, both in environmental social theory, and, in modified form, in current political discourse. Risk society theory proposes that society is shifting from one organized around the distribution of wealth to one organized around the distribution of risk, and that our current industrial society is unsustainable as currently structured. Ecological modernization theory proposes that as environmental issues increase in importance, ecological criteria will be incorporated into industrial production through a continuous process of adaptation and re-integration of nature. Ecological modernization, then, is offered as an alternative to a descent into a risk society, as described by Ulrich Beck. While there has been much debate between ecological modernization and risk society theorists as to industrial society's potential for ecological reform, few empirical studies exist that test the strength of ecological modernization theory in practice. Salmon farming in British Columbia has been subject to rigorous environmental debate in its short history. This thesis investigates the development of salmon farming policy in B. C. as a test case for the propositions of ecological modernization theory. Through an examination of theoretical literature, indicators of ecological modernization and risk society processes were derived. Salmon farming policy developments were analyzed for evidence of ecological reform and for the processes that accompanied these reforms. The results of the analysis revealed increasing evidence of certain ecological modernization processes, primarily ones associated with scientific and technological developments. Other indicators were consistently absent. Still others, such as stakeholder incorporation processes, were found to be in evidence in fact but not in spirit. The ecological modernization process described by theorists was not occurring in whole, but in part. However, economic interests persisted in dominating ecological ones. Counter interpretations found institutional and interest group factors, as well as changes in background conditions, to be highly influential on ecological reforms. The greatest weakness of ecological modernization as an explanatory theory was found to be its inability to incorporate issues of power and inequality into its framework. This, and ecological modernization theory's assumptions of consensus towards its goals, are the greatest impediments to its translation from a social theory into a political program.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".