The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (5th ed.) The Human Impact Reader: Readings and Case Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review: The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (5th ed.) Review: The Human Impact Reader: Readings and Case Studies By Andrew Goudie Reviewed by Thomas Fletcher Bishop’s University, Canada Goudie, Andrew. The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 511 pp. ISBN 0-262-57138-2 (paperback). US$29.95 Goudie, Andrew (Ed.). The Human Impact Reader: Readings and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. 472 pp. ISBN 0-631-19981 (paperback). US$33.95 Andrew Goudie's acclaimed geography textbook, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, now in its fifth edition, is as relevant as ever to social and scientific aspects of ecology. It is best read in conjunction with his edited volume of articles reprinted from scientific journals, The Human Impact Reader. Both are aimed at upper-level undergraduates and informed readers who want to enrich their knowledge of physical geography as modified by human action, to borrow a phrase from George Perkins Marsh (1864) whose legacy Goudie draws on extensively. The textbook begins with an historical account of how cultural adaptations to technological changes have influenced, and generally intensified, environmental impacts (i.e., I=PAT). It proceeds with separate chapters on human effects on vegetation, animals, soil, water, geomorphology, climate, and atmosphere. The reader follows roughly the same organization in its sections, each of which begins with an introduction to relevant literature. Goudie's textbook has changed little since its first publication in 1981, but he has updated it periodically to reflect recent literature and current issues. The fifth edition is particularly welcome in this regard given the rapid pace of recent research, especially on climate change. Since Rio and Kyoto, it has mushroomed along with public interest and funding, and Goudie does an excellent job documenting and explaining this. Both books demonstrate, somewhat ironically, that the problem of scientific uncertainty is ever present, particularly on this issue: No completely acceptable explanation of climatic change has ever been presented, and no one process acting alone can explain all scales of climate change. The complexity of possibly causative factors is daunting (Goudie
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.014 |
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".