Bounding Nature: Conservation and Sovereignty in the Canadian and Russian Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, conservation efforts of Arctic states reflect a state-based approach. This contrasts with international conservation efforts in the post-Cold War period, which were grounded in perceiving the region as a global commons. In this article, I examine the ways in which Canada and Russia use natural conservation areas as instruments to express sovereign rights. I compare Canada's proposed Lancaster Sound National Marine Conservation Area at the eastern mouth of the Northwest Passage and Russia's recently expanded Natural System (zapovednik) of Wrangel Island Reserve at the eastern entrance to the Northern Sea Route. These two case studies allow for an examination of the domestic politics of zoning, exclusion, and access alongside Arctic geopolitics and foreign policy discourse. Both parks are complex products of domestic and foreign policy, making them densely layered spaces of contested and contingent sovereignty. Moreover, Canada and Russia draw on regimes such as UNCLOS and UNESCO's World Heritage Committee to defend their sovereignty in contested waterways. Whereas around the world, states have historically created national parks in areas without significant economic value, the conservation areas in and around Lancaster Sound and Wrangel Island lie in waters valuable for their geostrategic position and shipping potential. Yet importantly, the conservation areas are situated so as not to coincide with hydrocarbon interests. Ultimately, Russia and Canada's establishment of these two conservation areas suggests ulterior motives of sovereignty and economic interests at work, suggesting that we should be carefully attuned to scrutinizing the intentions behind environmental measures taken in the Arctic.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".