Review: Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review: Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse By Dean Bavington Bavington, Dean. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 186pp. ISBN 9780774817486. US $35.95, paper, acid-free. Dean Bavington's Managed Annihilation is a cautionary tale for our times. Western style management, mediated by state bureaucracies and economic rationality, may administer natural resources into oblivion. Bavington argues that this is precisely what happened with the Newfoundland cod fisheries collapse, made official in 1992. The basic problems were these: fisheries managers did not understand the behavior of fish, they did not understand the behavior of humans, and they did not understand the relationships between fish and humans. Yet they continued to manage as if they did. Bavington traces part of the history of cod fishing in Newfoundland and describes the shifts from subsistence fishing to small scale mercantilism to market-based fishing economies and large scale exploitation. Over a 400 year period of small scale fishing, fishermen caught about 50 million ton of cod. Over a 90 year period of industrial fishing leading up to the collapse of the fishery, fishermen harvested the same tonnage. Unlike subsistence fishermen, however, industrial harvesters fished year round and targeted all cod, including spawning and pre-spawning fish, as well as cod's prey such as squid and capelin. Between 1960 and 1992, 99.9 percent of the cod's spawning biomass had been eliminated. It is difficult to imagine a starker instance of managerial failure. The primary focus of Managed Annihilation is on the conceptual and practical inconsistencies of modern industrial fishing, which was ushered into being with the help of fisheries science, new politically expedient management regimes, and emerging global economies. Fisheries science gave us the idea maximum sustainable yield, based on population estimates and models of population structure that were, simply, wrong. These estimates and models, however, provided managers with the illusion that they could manage cod population fluctuations and harvest sustainably. Economics gave us the idea of maximum economic yield, based on the assumption that industrial fishermen were rational economic actors intent on maximizing profits, but not to the extent of catching all of the available fish and thereby undermining their own industry. This idea was also wrong. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".