Softwood Lumber and the Golden Spruce: Two Perspectives on the Material and Discursive Construction of British Columbian Forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers how forests as hybrid natural-cultural “things” enter public debates in the province of British Columbia through the juxtaposition of two examples: first, the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute, and second, the felling of a single tree in Haida Gwaii as depicted in John Vaillant’s 2005 nonfiction bestseller, The Golden Spruce. The processes through which people come to know, value and represent nature in each of these examples are placed in the foreground. I argue that the framing of “the forest” as an external object for trade or conservation limits public debate by prematurely accepting the modern precept of natural and cultural separation. This argument calls for a move away from the lamentations/self-congratulatory awe of “modern” subjects faced with an external, debilitated, instrumentalized “nature,” and toward political engagement with multiple “natures,” human and non, that are not only inseparable but coconstitutive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".