Robert Lawrence France. Waymarking Italy’s Influence on the American Environmental Imagination While on Pilgrimage to Assisi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How has Italy shaped the American environmental imagination?To approach this question, landscape ecologist Robert Lawrence France considers sixteen American environmental writers and scientists whose time travelling in Italy, he argues, influenced their work.He couches this inquiry within a first-hand account of the walking pilgrimage on which he embarked in the spring of 2008 along the Franciscan Way.The dual structure of each chapter, in which France's chronicle of a leg of his journey through Tuscany and Umbria is followed by reflection on the work of one of the environmentalists, is meant to perform the ecocritical tradition of narrative scholarship.As Scott Slavic and other ecocritics have practised it, this mode of academic writing involves scholars visiting the landscapes in which cultural materials originated in order to investigate connections between text and place.The author is impressively well-read, and the introduction and final chapter offer overviews of foundational works of Italian environmental history and recent ecocriticism that could serve as annotated bibliographies for students new to the field.Within this framing, two motifs animate France's journey.First is the difference between American and Italian understandings of the nature-culture binary.France emphasizes the long history on the Italian peninsula of the idea that civilization was meant to improve the "barren waste" of "raw nature" (48)-an idea that originated in ancient Roman agriculture, drove Mussolini's reclamation campaign, and is still evident in contemporary attitudes about land management.Such emphasis is a helpful reminder to American environmental writers not to impose American ideas about wilderness on the Italian case.France's journey is additionally driven by interest in the legends of St. Francis, and the most ecocritical moments of the book are those in which the author connects particular landscapes to il Poverello's life.His reflections about how the mountainous geology of La Verna shaped Francis's spirituality (109-11) and his suggestion, upon visiting the woods where the saint prayed, that there Francis would have felt "that he was standing on the ground floor of creation" (118) gesture to the way physical landscapes give rise to religious text and experience.Unfortunately, the insights generated by these motifs are fleeting and mostly lost in a project that lacks focus and scholarly rigour.The author does not
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.006 |
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".