Poor Soils and Rich Folks: Household Metabolisms and Sustainability in Muskoka, 1860-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Citation : Andrew Watson, "Poor Soils and Rich Folks: Household Metabolisms and Sustainability in Muskoka, 1860-1920," ESAC 2011 Annual Conference. Running Time : 15:48 Bio : Andrew Watson is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at York University in Toronto. Abstract : In the second half of the nineteenth century, Eurocanadians resettled the region of the Muskoka Lakes as part of a larger liberal project to further colonize North America. Resettlers who took up free land grants in the 1860s and 1870s discovered thin, acidic soils beneath old growth forests that proved incapable of providing for all of their material needs, and which resulted in a reliance on exogenous inputs from places to the south that continues to this day. By the 1880s, however, tourism had emerged as a vital market for people in Muskoka. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, permanent residents and tourists established interdependent relationships, which formed the foundations for more sustainable social, economic, and ecological arrangements. New social and technological forces, such as consumerism and the internal combustion engine, however, emerged after the turn of the century to reorient household consumption patterns towards a greater proportion of less sustainable exogenously-based inputs. This project applies a societal metabolisms methodology1 to mainly written primary sources in order to study the flows of energy and material in Muskoka households between 1860 and 1920, and premises that nothing was (or is) completely sustainable, only more or less sustainable in relation to time (comparisons between periods) and space (comparisons within periods). Sustainability actually implies instability and change, rather than stasis and continuity, and therefore, demands consideration of both the cultural and environmental forces shaping society. Thus, this study argues that the degree to which life on the Shield can be considered sustainable has changed according to the economic constraints, environmental limitations, and socio-cultural norms and attitudes regarding consumption. Moreover, this study is intended to demonstrate the history is essential to the understanding of sustainability, and that sustainability is a useful analytical category for the study of history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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 teacher head, 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".