Nature's improvement : wildlife, conservation, and conflict in Quebec, 1850-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation presents a new perspective on the history of conservation in North America. In contrast to historiography that locates conservation-oriented approaches to the North American environment as the product of late-nineteenth-century concerns within Canada and the United States, this study links wildlife conservation in Quebec directly to longstanding European land tenure, estate management, and associational strategies. Through a range of materials including state documents, associational records and personal and family papers, I show how advocates of fish and game protection in the province drew heavily on Old World customs and traditions, particularly those of British landowners, who displayed in their varied social, economic, and political commitments an ongoing engagement with improvement. These 'patrician sensibilities,' I argue, formed the basis of the regulatory system that developed in Quebec during the period 1850-1914, first on the remote salmon rivers of the north shore and Gaspe peninsula, and by the First World War on the bulk of the province's best and most easily accessible hunting and fishing territories. In addition to the regulatory strategies that developed during this period, the dissertation deals with forms and limits of resistance on the part of aboriginal and non-aboriginal subsistence, commercial, and sport hunters and fishers. The dissertation's major contribution lies in its demonstration of the longstanding patterns that underpinned the development of conservation strategies in North America. Class and gender are central to the project, and it also has important implications for our understanding of civil society and state formation.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".