Nature's Past Episode 019: Metropolitanism and Environmental History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1954, Canadian historian James Maurice Stockford Careless published an influential article in the Canadian Historical Review, titled “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History” which offered a new approach for understanding the course of Canadian history and the development of the Canadian nation-state. Instead of adopting the US model of a Frontier Thesis, which saw the expansion and development of the United States connected directly to the extension of a westward settlement frontier, Careless proposed a different model based on a Metropolitan Thesis which understood the development of the Canadian nation-state as a function of the interconnections between metropolitan centres and their regional hinterlands. Under this model for understanding Canadian history, the contours of the country’s expansion were determined not by a continuous line of frontier settlement but instead by the radial expansion of urban influence on rural hinterlands. \n \nCareless’s notion of metropolitanism has since played a significant role in environmental history research, most prominently in the work of William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis and other works in urban environmental history. Borrowing from Careless, this research examines the urban environment in its relationship to rural hinterlands, extending our understanding of the meaning of urban environments beyond the municipal boundaries. The exploitation of natural resources in distant hinterland regions in North America, as far as the northern reaches of the Canada, has in some fashion been influenced by urban consumer demands. Cities consume more resources than their physical footprint can supply and, therefore, they rely upon drawing in resources from an extended hinterland region. \n \nAs such, metropolitanism as an approach to understanding the interconnection between cities and hinterlands has been quite influential in environmental history. On this episode of the podcast, three prominent Canadian environmental history scholars debate the role of metropolitanism in environmental history research.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".