Sustainability: Steeped in Values, Animated by Process, and Structured (but Not Dictated) by Experts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How should we as a society understand and pursue environmental sustainability? This question has long occupied environmental scholars, activists, and practitioners, and despite multiple decades of intellectual debate, the idea of sustainability remains fraught. What is it that should be sustained: Economic welfare? Ecological resilience? Or something else? In Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change, philosopher Bryan Norton provides a thoughtful account of the issues currently vexing sustainability, refracting them through the lens of environmental values and then drawing together these insights into a practical program of action. His book argues that no single theory of environmental value can tell us what to sustain and that instead, values need to be described and transformed through the processes of actual place-based decisionmaking. The book provides a philosophical primer for environmental scholars and practitioners, establishing the philosophical and ethical foundations that can both frame and guide the pursuit of adaptive ecosystem management. This book serves as a culmination of Bryan Norton's 30-plus-year career in environmental ethics and policy. Now a distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy and public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Norton has built up a coherent and powerful body of work through his career, making valuable contributions to pragmatic philosophy, environmental ethics, and ecological economics. Although Bryan's core arguments and concerns have developed over time, they remain firmly linked to the ideals of philosophical pragmatism and political pluralism, themes that are crystallized clearly in the present volume.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".