CONSISTENT APPLICATION OF TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN CANADIAN ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The government of Canada is mandated under the Constitution of Canada to consult and engage in meaningful conversation with Indigenous groups on decisions that would directly or indirectly impact their lands (Canada, 1982).Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is used by Indigenous Peoples to provide information on the lands that modern science cannot gather.Unfortunately, TEK is often disregarded as not accurate and untrustworthy in comparison to modern science in environmental assessments.This paper will analyze the use of TEK in four major Canadian environmental assessments over the past 50 years using a thematic analysis combined with a literature review comprised of three domains: environmental assessment process, traditional ecological knowledge, and the governmental duty to consult.The four assessments analyzed are: 1)The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, 2) The Trans Mountain Pipeline, 3) Star-Orian Diamond Mine, 4) New Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine.The results compared common themes involving TEK within the assessments including but not limited to: cultural significance, water, land use/deforestation, wildlife habitat and migration.The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline assessment remains the standard for Indigenous consultation with Berger utilizing TEK as much as possible to supplement and improve modern science making it an overall success.The Star-Orian assessment was mainly successful while it did not merge both sources of information, it did not put them in conflict with one another and trusted in TEK to question proponent information.New Prosperity's assessment demonstrated the ability of the proponent and panel to discredit TEK wherever possible in order to further the assessment while Trans Mountain's decision-making body utilized their position to organize the significant components of the assessment to undermine the TEK being provided.Overall, this paper concludes that more work needs to be done in ensuring different decision making bodies apply TEK appropriately and that TEK is more likely to be disproven and disregarded in place of modern science when it does not support the approval of a project.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.029 | 0.037 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".