Survival Science: Crisis Disciplines and the Shock of the Environment in the 1970s1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1970s mark a critical departure point in the history of science. The rise of the environmental crisis prompted not just new avenues of scientific inquiry but also the integration of scientific expertise into complex interactions with politics and society. This paper investigates the history of the new ‘crisis disciplines’ that emerged in response to explicit fears that the world was on the verge of ecological collapse. Crisis disciplines – a term coined by the conservation biologist Michael Soulé – engage in the urgent and reactionary pursuit of solutions to pressing environmental problems and the evidence scientists bring to bear on their work. Crisis disciplines involve acting ‘before knowing all the facts’, and therefore constitute ‘a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information’. Combined, diverse crisis disciplines constitute a new kind of ‘survival science’, which emerged in the 1970s.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".