Dead Mirrors: Nature, Ideology, and the Intellectual Intuition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his essay “Constructing the Natural: The Darker Side of the Environmental Movement” (1985), cultural ecologist Neil Evernden questioned what he described as the use and abuse of ecology. The growth of a popular or vulgar environmental movement—from which the first signs of a bourgeoning neoliberal environmentalism emerged—was proof enough: the conceptual organon of ecology and its associated natures could be used to serve a wide variety of ends, few of which had anything to do with social and ecological justice. The ecological turn could not be relied upon to provide a principle capable of securing and maintaining the ideological intent of a left-leaning academic holism. Ecology was just as equally a means of rebranding the status quo. Ecology was both the “mask” and “blunt instrument” for certain kinds of societies, a kind of “institutional shaman that [could] be induced to pronounce natural anything we wish to espouse.” Indeed, and in retrospect, Evernden’s critique exposed a tendency within environmentalism, as many of the Deep Ecologists surrounding him started openly expressing misanthropic tendencies that allied them with radicalizing forms of neoconservatism. As it turned out—as the legacy of Deep Ecology should teach us—creating an environmental movement capable of critiquing the failures of the neoliberal project while remaining free of crypto-fascist tendencies was harder than it first seemed. In Evernden’s words, our recourse to ecology and nature “justifies nothing, or anything.”3 All ecology was ideology—all ecology was an ecologism.
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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".